Eric, Yes, I am very familiar with bottle trees. And, yes, I have one in my south side whimsy passage garden, bottles stuck on branch stubs on a large cedar tree. Maro, you should know that this isolated garden in my yard was landscaped to be entirely whimsical. Sorry, I prefer not to post pictures of my creations. But, my little 'play' area sold our house the day it was listed. I prefer to call it high class whimsy done with beautiful wood shapes and topiaries. The realtor told me that the couple looking at the property spent about 30 minutes studying all my whimsy and decided that they had to have it all. And so they shall. To be authentic, only blue bottles should be used for bottle trees. The voodoo/Gullah believe that the color blue keeps away the 'haints'. Bottle trees are displayed in the front yard and house doors, shutters are also painted blue. It must work because I have not seen any spirits floating about. Due to the constant heavy pine needle drop we have here I have never used glass mulch. I remember some interesting ideas Mich posted. Open areas with little leaf litter invite playing with glass. After all, you do not need to mulch everything in your yard with it.

Hi Straw, I agree that you should wait until your cabinets, appliances and floor are installed before you make a backsplash decision. We did that and it was the best thing, because as muscat and igloochic pointed out, the combination of choices you've already made may point toward something completely different and not be obvious until later. I also have a BlueStar with the island backsplash against a wall and soapstone counters. My original idea was to tile about 1 foot below the soapstone with generic tile to provide the firestop insulation BlueStar requires with the island trim. My DH, the engineer-who-always-overdesigns, felt we needed something beefier, so we used a piece of scrap soapstone behind the range. Our "backsplash" for the first couple of months was Reynolds Heavy-Duty aluminum foil. This took the pressure off from making a final decision until we (really just me) were sure of what would look good. We used a 7/8" glass mosaic with inset stainless tiles from costco.com. While not an engineer, I'm just as geeky, and positively obsessed with symmetry, precision, and plumb. I made a paper template of the entire backsplash area and placed the tile so we would not have to cut any. This also gave me a chance to rearrange some of the stainless and other tiles so it would look more random with no visible repeats. You can see the BlueStar backsplash at the link below. The rest of my backsplash is still painted as I haven't finalized my decision. Warning--I chose this particular backsplash because I wanted a dramatic focal point. Drama is not for everyone. I understand the temptation to go with a dark gray stone with the soapstone because that was my first instinct also. Do wait. Do a search on this site for soapstone and backsplashes to get ideas also. Here is a link that might be useful: My kitchen

Yup, I think I used a diamond bit and a sponge for keeping water around the bit when drilling. Haven't tried drilling a microwave plate as of yet, I know that some things are tempered and may explode/break apart when drilled. I was going to also mention that all the glass used on that bird house one, is scrounged old 70's stained glass, that I find at thrift stores/garage sales/for sale by owner websites...so I probably don't spend very much on my projects, I spend money on the marine silicone and outdoor grout and sealer I use as I want it to last(I use thinset when I can)

Wow thats pretty large. Glass and grout adds a lot of weight and might possibly compromise the windows strength. I would want to consult an engineer before I did something that large. Perhaps doing somewhat smaller pieces in frames (like say regular windows) and mounting them on chains to hang in front of the windows is an option. On second thought-are the windows purely that size altogether -one large piece of glass? Or broken up-several windows adding up to that size?