30 Days Wild - day 21

We have bravely ventured out on a night expedition to bring you this species of spider, as it only comes out after dark, the walnut orb weaver.

I find this spider oddly mesmerizing and quite beautiful, it is a spider that is capable of biting people. This one is living in one of our insect hotels and the one below is living on the chicken coop.

It is probably not well known due to the fact it only comes out after dark, so it is much harder to see and may go unnoticed by many people. Hopefully now you may notice this after dark hunter next time you are out late.

30 Days Wild - day 15

We are half way through our wild challenge and it has been a very exciting adventure. We have been waiting for our cinnabar moth caterpillars to hatch and I think it's going to be any day now as this close up photograph shows something visible inside the eggs.

We noticed a lot of ants farming aphids in the wild flower garden, in fact they seem to be all over the plants.

Bees are everywhere, each bee seems to have favourite flowers. This one likes the foxgloves, long hairs can be seen inside the flower like a tickle chamber.

Finally I'll leave you with our friend from yesterday eating his dinner again.

30 Days Wild - day 14

It has been a grey and windy day today so we have spent our wild time watching different types of spiders hunting.

This garden spider was sitting still eating an ant for quite some time in it's web, beautifully coloured. Excuse the blurry photos but it was quite windy.

The web was right across the flower garden so we were able to get all around the spider for some really good views.

This crab spider was hunting on the oxeye daisies using camouflage, these spiders can change colour to blend in with the flower they are hunting on, usually a shade of white or yellow... Fascinating.

Very Large Cobweb

With Halloween / Samhain approaching fast the children have been decorating the house to give it a spooky feel and a few new crafty things were needed. A couple of years ago we made small woven cobwebs with conker spiders ( see here) but they didn't survive this year so we decided to make some more on a much bigger scale.

My husband had been pruning back a couple of trees recently, so we collected some straight sticks that he had put aside to use as bean canes next year. They were laid out to give the best shape for a web, we used four sticks and fixed them together in the middle.

We have used wire for this but any kind of string or wool would do as long as it was fixed quite firmly.

As you can see in the photograph above my daughter tested them for sturdiness. We then chose some old wispy wool from the craft cupboard to make the web.

We wound the wool around in a web style pattern trying to leave equal gaps all the way to the edge of the sticks. To help the wool stay in place it has been wrapped around the stick a couple of times and we have taken advantage of little buds and the natural pieces that stick out.

Here is the end result... a very large cobweb. The size is only limited by the length of the sticks you have available.

 Complete with spider ready to scare people.

Spider webs for Halloween

 Halloween / Samhain is one of my favourite holidays, I love how spooky the house looks with broomsticks propped up by the front door and witches hats hanging on the hat pegs in the hallway. All cobwebs in the house get a reprieve for a few days and the smell of pumpkin lanterns wafts through every room.

    The children have been really busy crafting scary things for Halloween, we have had to find crafts suitable for a 2 year old to join in because she absolutely loves everything crafty the messier the better. Yesterday we made cobwebs with great, big hairy spiders in them. Do you think they look spooky or just rather cute?

    We have used conkers to hold the wooden skewers in place as we have many hanging around thanks to our Autumn collecting, but you could also use large crafting polystyrene balls, clay or indeed anything round you can find. Then the conker was covered in glue and rolled in wool that has been cut up very small so that it was all fuzzy. Pipe cleaner legs were added and googly eyes. The web part was very simple to make as you can see, it is easy to wind wool around the skewers. This does tend to slip a bit if played with too much, so some discrete dots of glue would hold this in place if you choose to.

 They are now ready to hang up on the wall to scare people for Halloween. My husband also helped our son to make a PVA glue cobweb. He drew out the web shape in glue on a laminate sheet and left it to dry overnight. Once dry it could be peeled off the laminate sheet, and stuck on a window. The thinner you can get the web the better here as it tends to spread out a little, but it looks very effective.