You can be very craf-tea and turn an inexpensive cup and saucer into a teacup feeder or planter. I’ve tried a few different way to make these. The first was using some copper pipe and caps. I glued the cap onto the saucer, then glued the cup onto the saucer. This was fastened onto a long wooden dowel or a piece of copper pipe.
You can download and print the poem at this site.
When it rained I discovered a problem with this way. It meant removing the copper pipe from the ground, cleaning the cup and then carefully putting it back into the same hole in the ground. Way to much of a challenge, especially if the ground was hard. So the thinking cap went on and I came up with another idea.
I have glued the bottom of the saucer onto an upside down bud vase. The cup is then glued onto the top of the saucer. The vase can then be slipped onto a piece of dowling that is poked into the ground. You just have to slip off the whole piece to clean out the cup. This makes clean up easier.
For the base of this one I used an old blue bottle which has some flat sided gems added to it. A piece of copper pipe has been pushed firmly into the ground and the neck of the bottle fits perfectly over the top of it. Now when it needs cleaning, I can just slip off the bottle and wash out the cup. The 3 versions of the tea cup feeders are shown in the above photo. But then I discovered that the birds didn’t really use these little feeders very much. So I added a trailing plant into one of them. And then the teacup feeders became teacup planters.
At first I just planted right into the cup, but when it rained the poor little plants were saturated. So I found some small pots, potted them up and sat them inside the teacup.
Now when it rains, I can easily empty all the water from the teacup and the plants are flourishing.
Here are a couple of the teacup planters in the garden. The little pots have stringy stonecrop growing in them. These little teacup feeders are perfect for little trailing plants, hens & chicks, and succulents.
Crafty is craf-tea
