DIY Decorative Garden Balls

Gazing balls and garden balls have become quite popular as a way to add beauty to a yard, and there are some amazing ideas on this subject that you can make yourself. There’s certainly no need to buy ready-made when you can make unique, one-of-a kind pieces.

Here you’ll see several ideas for making and decorating balls for your garden. You can start with bowling balls or glass globes, like the type used for overhead lighting fixtures. If you use glass glass globes, look for used ones at thrift or second-hand stores that may be older and made of thick glass, not thin glass so many are made of today.

Melissa J. Will of Empress of Dirt has made a few different types of garden balls including balls made with flat glass marbles, decoupage, stenciling, painting, and mosaic balls using mosaic tiles. Here is a link to her gallery of garden ball ideas.

This ball by Karen Weigert Enos is my favorite of all the ones Melissa shows. One, because it’s pink, and two, because Karen used different sizes of flat marbles and filled in some of the space with small floral bits (glass or plastic), which you can find at craft stores in the floral design section.

Melissa has a tutorial on how to make balls with flat-bottom marbles on her site, Empress of Dirt.