Glass Ball and Wire Cane Tops

Our garden backs onto the countryside with a small river running past, every summer beautiful dragonflies and damselflies fill every available space and when the seasons change we start to miss them. So we came up with the idea of making a small piece of sculpture to brighten the garden during the cold winter months using some of the parts from a broken mobile.

This is the broken mobile... I kept the parts as we have a passion for recycling and reusing things but the cane tops can just as easily be made with garden wire and glass balls or marbles if you fancy making some yourself.

The first thing we did was make the body of the dragonfly, my husband used a bar with a hole in to hold the wire still, but a cane works just as well. Put the end of the wire into the hole and keep winding the wire round until it starts to resemble a large spring and could fit the required amount of marbles in. We have used six marbles in total.

With the marbles pushed into the spring it automatically starts to look like the body of a dragonfly, you can then use pliers to spiral the wire at the end to finish it off nicely, leaving a little excess wire at the head end to attach to the cane. We have used a larger marble for the head.

We have made the wings with a slightly thinner garden wire because it is so much easier to shape and can be bought very cheaply. Once you have your wing shape twist the wire together to hold it in place remembering to leave enough spare wire on the underside of the wings to fix onto the body of your dragonfly.

A little detail was added using very thin wire and beads, this was wound around the edges of the wings to fix them in place and create a representation of the veining on the dragonflies wings.

Then all that's left to do is fix the wings to the body by wrapping the long piece of wire around the body. A glass bead can be fixed to the insects thorax to cover the knotted wire using hot glue or resin. In the photograph above you can see some of the other things we have made using the glass balls and wire from the broken mobile.

These garden cane tops have been made in a similar way to the dragonfly using a simple spiral to hold the glass balls and adding a few beads as a finishing touch. I have left the bottom end of the wire straight to slide into the end of a bamboo cane but they can also be spiralled to slip over the top of the cane.

Here is the finished dragonfly in the garden, the wire at the front of it's head was straightened and slid into the top of a bamboo cane, which is hidden by the bush. As the body has been made using a spring shape and it is only fixed to the cane at the front it has given the sculpture a subtle movement which has enchanted the children.

These are some of the cane tops which remind us of little moons orbiting planets and definitely liven up a dull looking cane. A small magical touch to add a little cheer to the gardens in the winter.

As there have been a few reports of fires caused by people having glass on sunny window ledges we will be using these to brighten pots in shady corners.

30 Days Wild - day 25

Today we took a stroll around our local nature reserve on the broads and spent some time with the water wildlife.

Three different types of geese came to eat our corn duck food, the Canada goose, many greylag geese and right near the water line there are a couple of Egyptian geese.

My daughter stopped to feed this new mother duck, who seemed very hungry. She had four very young ducklings waiting nearby for her.

A little further along we found the spot on the broad where we often see a pike and luck was on our side today as we could clearly see it in the water.

We think it must have been at least two feet long, I forgot to take the camera filter to allow us to photograph under water through the glare but I think you can see it ok.

My husband even managed a close up of it's head so you can see it's eye and big teeth. We watched for quite a while it really was a huge fish.

This is an emperor dragonfly, it was found beside the road, I think it had been hit by a car but we picked it up and moved it to a safe place in case there was a chance it would recover. This is the largest dragonfly I have ever seen.

The last two photographs are of two different types of leaf gall, we found them all over the same tree.

30 Days Wild - day 7

We went back to the allotment today with the telephoto lens for the camera to see if we could get a better photograph of the kestrel but unfortunately it didn't make an appearance.

Not too disappointed though as a couple of dragonflies turned up instead. My husband took this photograph of a female broad bodied chaser enjoying the sunshine. I managed to get a quick photograph of a male banded demoiselle before it flew off, we see a lot of these in our garden.

Corn dragonflies

Tomorrow is Lughnasadh or Lammas, the first of three pagan Autumn harvest festivals, in many different cultures people celebrate at harvest time. So today we are making corn dragonflies, my children are a little young to weave corn dollies so we have gone for something a little easier.

These are some things we collected from the garden, the corn stalk (or barley) had grown up under one of the bird feeders from dropped seeds and the leaves have come from our willow tree.

This is the layout for our dragonfly before the sticking commences, large googly eyes will be added at the front end to get the dragonfly look. We have also tried to pair up the leaves to match in size, with two larger ones at the front and two smaller ones at the back.

As you may notice in the above photograph, it is possible to slightly lift the individual seeds in rows and glue the leaves underneath. This will give your final dragonfly a much neater look and it also helps to hold the leaves in the correct position until the glue dries.

And there you go... two little corn dragonflies, once the eyes are fixed in place. We added cotton thread so they could be hung in the window. I originally thought that we would hang them from the trees in the garden so that birds could collect the seeds but the children wanted them hung inside for the time being anyway. We also made lavender butterflies in the same way as a pretty and natural way to infuse the house with the smell of lavender.

Here they are hanging with some of the butterflies, we have grouped them all together and tied them to a piece of stick so that it looks like a small mobile, but they look equally nice hanging on their own.  I am thinking of hanging some lavender butterflies in the bathroom window to add a relaxing aroma to the room.

We made the lavender butterflies in the same way except this time we have used lavender flower heads for the body and eucalyptus leaves for the wings. These are a beautiful purple and silver colour and smell fantastic.

This is the layout we used for the butterflies and stuck them together in the same way as before. The children really enjoy
nature crafting in this way and this has the added bonus of smelling wonderful too.