- Snapshot(s)

Retrospective (9/14)

Patch #243 Rain chain

Original post 

When I posted a picture of how much the front view of our house had changed in the past 6 years, I decided to take a new round of garden photos. The fact that we've had so much rain helped, too,

So, no patch yet (travel will cause me to go back to my retrospective strategy), but lots of pictures ...

Front porch ...

weathered flatware rain chain ...

complete with rain drops ...

my stitching window ...

and the view from there ...

the side garden ...

up close ...

the back garden ...

by the driveway ...

and the breezeway ...

Many of the plantings were here when we moved in, but they have grown and Don has added all the rock work plus many new plants. Well worth remembering and very much appreciated by our neighbors ...

- Rock On: Gardening in the Hill Country

When we first looked at our soon-to-be new home in 2010, the owners had amazing container plants on the front porch, but the ground in front was just grass. Of course, they took their plants with them, so we pondered how best to add visual interest to the front yard using what we had at hand.

What we had in abundance, especially on the floodplain at the back of the property, was rock ... lots and lots of rock. The soil profile for our land is called Rumple-Comfort, which is dominated by clay, brown cobbles of chert, and grey limestone. Don proceeded to create a ground cover of brown stone (after laying down landscaping cloth), finishing the first leg of the project late in 2011.

Realizing that we needed a way to walk from the front to the back of the yard without cutting across the porch, Don started moving around the brown stones, adding large limestone rocks for height, then creating a path with a "Texas Mix" of smaller stones from Gardenville ... one five-gallon bag at a time. Visual interest was provided by driftwood found on the nature trail that runs behind our property. A funky bench, some copper buckets, and a copper bird bath rounded out the second stage of the project in 2012.

The most recent (but certainly not the the last) phase involved putting in plants. Most are agaves and Spanish daggers grown from pups harvested from other parts of the yard, but this year's live Christmas tree also made the cut. In spite of my assurances that they looked fine, Don restained the cedar columns on the front porch ... a subtle but significant improvement.

Note the rain chain to the right ... now weathered to a brown patina.

The path has been extended around the west side of the house, winding past a small rock cairn and the HVAC system to the back of the house, where it now connects to the limestone rock garden, but that's a post for another day ... once the wildflowers are in bloom.

The reddish grass clumps are Little Blue Stem, a successful part of our effort to return much of the
property to prairie grass cover. The green clumps are sedges, which do particularly well under the live oaks.

- Rain chain (revised)

Note: This post was moved to a new URL on August 26, 2015
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I fell in love with a copper rain chain that I saw at an ceramic artist's house, but the price was too dear.  So I started looking at all the silverplate flatware we've inherited over the years and decided to repurpose it (after checking to be sure I wasn't ruining something valuable).  The end result has been more decorative than functional, but then again, it doesn't rain all that much in our neck of the Texas Hill Country.

Addendum (March 9, 2014): 
With apologies for not responding sooner, here's how the rain chain was made. After doing some Googling for ideas on how to bend silver, I used pliers while holding the silverware in chamois cloth in order to twist the fork tines into interesting shapes ... it would have been much easier with sterling silver, but there's no way I would use sterling for this project.

Then I bent the handles of the forks and spoons, once again using heavy pliers for leverage and the chamois to protect the silver (I wore gloves, too) ... this definitely took some experimenting to figure out the ideal flex points and I broke several pieces. Once I had a pile of bent forks and spoons, I played around with how best to arrange them before putting the whole thing together.

The top of the rain chain is a copper funnel I found at our local antique store (By the Bridge in Wimberley, Texas). I punched a couple of holes in the funnel with a hammer and nail, then ran a crab pick through the holes (with fond memories blue crab picking on the Eastern Seaboard). The first piece of silverware hooked over the crab pick. After that it was a simple matter of hanging one piece of silverware after the other. Gravity is the only thing holding the chain together and except for the bottom piece or two it has yet to come apart, even on the windiest days.

I'm not a metal-smith and had never done a project like this before (or since), so there may be other/better/safer ways of doing it. If you like what you see, I encourage you to experiment, carefully. Please note that the chain has since weathered to the color of dark copper pennies ... there's no practical way to keep it silvery that I can think of. However, since I'm very much into natural patinas, it suits me.