One of my current ongoing projects involves a tabletop fountain. I got the inspiration after visiting the Gaylord Texan Hotel & Resort a few months ago with my family. Its basically this huge, octagonal building with a large, eight-story open space in the middle covered by a glass conservatory ceiling. So the inside has all the light of an outdoor space, but is temperature controlled. Which, in Texas, is a very good idea.
Anyways, inside this huge atrium is a huge indoor garden, complete with and fountains and waterfalls. It also had had scaled replicas of some of Texas' most famous landmarks, including the River Walk in San Antonio.
The River Walk part of the gardens were filled with lovely tile and mosaic work, which is what inspired me to build my own little fountain. But I wanted the details of the fountain to be to scale, which meant tiny bricks, and tiny plants.
So I've been working for the last month or so, casting hundreds of little bricks out of plaster using a special resin mold. When I was finished casting, I stained everything using acrylic washes, and then sealed it all with polyurethane varnish.
Now I am in the process of gluing all the little bricks into the various pools that will spill into each other. The fountain also has a small square planter in the center where I plan to put a dwarf mondo grass (or maybe a miniature conifer) to fit in with the scale of the bricks.