A Delco garden welded in the family workshop

In mid-November, Sandra Webberking’s garden is still colorful with bright yellow marigolds, purple salvia, ruby cockscomb, and giant gold-toned sunflowers.

The sunflowers are not some unusual late-blooming hybrid. They are metal sculptures with glass marble centers fabricated by Webberking, an artist and welder.

The faux flowers were crafted in Webberking’s workshop in Springfield, Delaware County, where she lives in a home her grandfather built.

Next door to the workshop, she converted the former garage into a showroom displaying more sunflowers, silver sea horses, and fanciful fish suitable for holiday ornaments, as well as larger fish and Christmas trees made from hand saws. Aqua, purple, and clear glass insulators, once used atop telephone poles, have been repurposed as candleholders. Webberking finds the various-sized insulators at flea markets and antique stores.

On a wall in the showroom, flower-filled glass bottles dangle from metal brackets. The ceiling is festooned with large snowflakes the artist made with folded paper, scissors, and glue. Rectangular birdbaths on display were carved from bluestone by Webberking’s boyfriend, Dana Collins, a general contractor who she says, “can make anything.”

The couple plans to replace the garage doors with barn doors more suitable for a showroom.

Outside, vines that climbed up metal obelisks over the summer have died down and so have the showy canna lilies. Red roses still bloom on a bush Webberking has surrounded with metal “stems” topped with blue bottles.

An ash tree and maple tree shade the side yard garden, which this summer won first place in the intermediate category in the Penn State Master Gardens of Delaware Valley competition.

In front of the workshop, Webberking’s welding equipment is concealed by a pierced metal screen flanked by flower-filled planters. The planters were made from recycled propane tanks, which she also used to create firepits and as petals and leaves for several of her sunflowers.

Most of her sculptures are made from sheet metal. She cuts out as many as 28 metal petals for her large sunflowers. To achieve the gold hue, she treats the pewter-colored metal with acid and peroxide.

Webberking, who grew up in Glen Mills, started out studying jewelry design at Moore College of Art and Design, but quickly fell in love with welding sculptures. After graduating in 1997, she and her mother, Pat, sold her creations at arts and crafts shows.

“She was my biggest booster,” Webberking said of her mother. When Pat died of breast cancer in 2000, Webberking planted a garden bed decorated with meadow moth sculptures in her memory.

By then, the artist had inherited the two-story home with the large stone fireplace, which her grandfather, Dudley Webberking, built in the 1940s. He had studied architecture but ran out of funds while pursuing that career, his granddaughter said. Instead he worked an assortment of jobs, including installing awnings and driving a truck. He also grew vegetables on his three-acre property and sold the produce at the end of the driveway. Two acres were later sold.

Dudley designed a turret on the side of the house constructed from stone and glass blocks. Inside the turret he built a curved bench for a breakfast nook. Webberking said the curve made it a challenge when she and Collins reupholstered the bench in tan leather. They still use the original electric kitchen stove — its temperature is off by 25 degrees, but they’ve adapted to it.

In the winter Webberking works in a studio in the basement. The house, garage, and showroom are painted a cheerful coral and pale yellow.

Dudley’s son, Larry, like his father and daughter, was also clever with his hands, becoming a master auto mechanic. At 15, he helped his father build the workshop so Larry could work on his hot rods.

Larry gave his daughter a machine he used to bend exhaust pipes. She uses it to bend metal pipes for her sculptures.

Webberking, who sells most of her work online, will be opening her studio and showroom to the public on Friday, Nov. 29, and Saturday, Nov. 30.

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