Look what I found

Yesterday, I found a stag beetle wandering across the road - the adults are around between late May and are pretty much all dead by August so it was nice to see one this year as I haven't already. The one we found was a female - they are quite a bit smaller than the males and don't have the huge mandibles that give them the name.

Male stag beetle (not one that I found)

Instead they have smaller pincers - they can give you a nip but they don't really use them - they're much more likely to just flip over and pretend to be dead!  You would have thought that the males would be more likely to bite, but they pretty much only use their mandibles for fighting each other - just like stags.

This is the one we found, when we first picked her up, pretending to be dead .  I didn't put her like this - in fact, I tried to turn her back over but she just flipped back onto her back!  She stuck out all her legs and just lay there for a while until she presumably decided we weren't going to eat her - at which point she started scuttling around.

They're not the most elegant of beetles, walking or flying, but they can go quite fast if they want to.  When they fly, the males especially, their bodies hang right down underneath their wings and they make a loud buzzing noise.  They are all over the place when they fly, they look completely astonished that they can move about so much - probably comes from spending the vast proportion of their life as a little blind grub (they live for up to six or seven years underground before emerging for just a few months!)

Stag beetles are really amazing and the largest terrestrial beetle in Europe but their numbers are declining because people are inclined to remove the dead wood that the grubs live in.  There is an old stump near us (completely riddled with holes where other beetles have been over the years) we put her on it and she quickly crawled off into it so she must have needed to lay her eggs.

On an unrelated note, I was in Italy recently with my choir and I saw what I am pretty certain was a hummingbird hawk-moth!  If you don't know what that is, it's amazing! (useful I know) It's a moth which beats it's wings really fast and has a long tongue that looks like a beak.  I was so glad to see it and I only wish I had been fast enough to get a photo.  Unfortunately I was too slow so I will have to make do with one from the internet.  Nevertheless, it was brilliant and now means that I have seen five species of hawk-moth.

Now I really would really like to see (or find caterpillars of) the privet hawk moth which is native to England but which I have only ever seen in photographs.

Slow worms

Slow worms are lovely snake-like creatures and this weekend my cousins and I were lucky enough to be able to hold a couple that we had found.  They were found when searching for grass snakes, curled up in a pile of grass cuttings.  I thought they would be a surprise for my cousins (both younger than me) who like me, live in a city - however, when I asked the youngest if she was afraid of snakes (I was about to reveal that they weren't snakes at all) she replied "But you said they're slow worms. They're not snakes - they're limbless reptiles!"  I was surprised and delighted that she knew this because they are indeed - they even have eyelids which most sets them apart from snakes.

look at it's little tongue!!

So this is just a quick little post with my photos of slow worms because I think they are so beautiful and - I want to make this clear; they are not at all slimy, quite dry, just lovely and smooth and wonderful to hold  (like snakes). My cousin couldn't get enough of stroking them! So don't be fooled by the reflection off their shiny scales

One of them managed to tie itself into a little knot - and just when I thought it couldn't get any more tangled he decided to tuck his head under his tail!

We returned them both to exactly where they were found and they quickly shot back into their big nest of grass clippings never to be seen again - for all that they're called slow worms they move quite fast!

Wheel pendants

I've recently been making these pendants out of wire and beads and so this post is going to be about how to make them.  This as much for myself given that I imagine in a years time I will have to go about making them as if from scratch if I don't record how I have found the best way of making them ;)

So the finished pendant looks like this, and ends up around 3.5cm in diameter with the amount of beads I use.  I imagine it would be fairly easy to scale the whole thing up or down depending upon preference - I was thinking of making some mini ones for earrings (although, the smaller you make this kind of thing, the harder and fiddlier it gets)

OK, so to make these I use three tools: wire cutters, needle nosed pliers and round nosed pliers (see pic).  Strictly speaking you don't need the round nosed pliers because the needle nosed ones can do essentially the same job, it just means that when it comes to making loops they are nice and round, and also, if you need to make jump rings you don't need to hunt around for things to wrap your wire around (if that doesn't make sense now, hopefully it will by the end of this post!)

Left to right: wire cutters, needle nosed pliers and round nosed pliers

For my wire I used 0.4mm copper wire - though I should stress that using copper is not ideal, especially if you are giving these to other people as it bends easily and tarnishes quite fast.  I only really use it because I love the colour, both when tarnished and untarnished.

I recommend a less flexible wire like a silver plated wire if you don't want to worry about it squashing.  When you're choosing your wire make sure that it's not too thick to go through the beads you choose. Using wire that's too thin will make this pendant too flexible so don't choose teeny little beads. You have been warned ;)

For this pendant, I used red, pink and white beads - the white are transparent seed beads and the red and pink are 2mm long smooth, round bugle beads (if that sentence has taken you into uncharted beading territory you can see the type of beads I mean by clicking here)

Figure 4 - I used these pots to curl the wire around to make the pendant

Step 1: making the spokes for the wheel

• Cut off a length of your wire and use the round nosed pliers to curl the end into a loop

• Then straighten it out using the needle nosed pliers to that the loop doesn't bend to the side

• Thread your beads onto the wire to the length that you want them - remember that the loops on either side add and extra 7.5mm to the length of your spoke.

• Next cut off your wire, leaving about 1cm length away from the end of the beads and use the round nosed pliers to bend it into another loop and straighten with the needle nosed pliers and the first spoke is finished!

• For my size of pendant I make 9 spokes of each colour and I generally choose one light colour and one darker of a complementing colour

Step 2: Making the rim of the wheel

• Cut a length of copper wire around 20cm and make a loop at the end (like the first two parts of step 1) using the round nosed pliers and straightening out with the needle nosed pliers
• Thread one of the spokes onto the wire
• Thread three beads: a red, then a white, then another red onto the wire
• Thread another spoke onto the wire (of the other colour)

• Carry on threading until you have used all the spokes - do not thread another three beads onto the end after the last spoke

• Next, cut the wire using the wire cutters, leaving around 1cm after the end of the last spoke

• Using the round nosed pliers curl this end into a loop and straighten using the needle nosed pliers. Make sure that the loop faces sideways as shown in the photo below

• Using something round (I used the bead pots shown in the fourth picture) curl this length of beaded wire into a circle - make sure that there is a gap between each of the loops (i.e. don't curl it too tight), there needs to be a jump ring here to secure the ends together.

Step 3: Making the centre of the circle

• You need to make a large ring for the centre of the circle, if you turn all the spokes inwards you can see roughly how big it needs to be.

• I make the ring by wrapping the wire around a pencil.  You need to make sure the ends of this ring overlap by a little over 5mm.  To do this, wrap the wire around your pencil a few times and then just carefully trim using the wire cutters

• Without bending the wire circle out of shape, separate the edges to that it is open.  Don't open it too much - more than around 2mm because you'll need to be able to close it easily
• Carefully thread this loop through the loops on the end of the spokes - personally, I like them to be quite loose, but if you think it's too rattly, you can thread a small seed bead in between each spoke

• Once this is done, carefully thread the overlapping end of the ring through the spokes and close it up gently using the needle nosed pliers - this is probably the fiddliest part of the whole thing.

Step 4: Joining together

• For this, you need two jump rings, one small (normal sized) around 5mm and the other slightly bigger, around 8mm (this is what you will thread your chain or cord through, so however thick the end of your chain or chord, this larger loop needs to be slightly bigger than that)

 

• To make these, curl the wire around the round nosed pliers - for a larger ring, curl further down the nose (are they called noses? their name suggests that).  Curl round it more than once and then cut straight across the ring using the wire cutters so that the ends line up properly.

• Use the smaller ring to join the two end loops of the rim of the wheel - separate the ring using the needle nosed pliers, thread the loops through and close again, pressing gently together with the needle nosed pliers.
• Loop the larger ring through the first by separating and closing up with the needle nosed pliers

Your pendant is finished - wahay!!! Now all you need is a chain or cord to wear it.  I've made three colours now, a red, yellow and a blue:

The blue is slightly different in that I used only seed beads and none of the longer bugle beads so the number of beads needed for the same sized pendant is slightly different.  On each of the spokes I used 6 beads and between each spoke on the wheel I used 4 beads, but it doesn't make too much difference in the size of the finished pendant.

I hope this is useful to anyone making jewellery out there and if you make one, let me know how it turns out in the comments :)

Summer is here!

Finally, summer is here - although I know technically it has been summer since June 21st but I've been doing things... yes, that's right: THINGS. "What are these things?" I hear you cry. Well, I'm very glad you asked, now that my exams are finally over I've finally been able to do some of the things I've been waiting to do all this time.  I won't bore you with the monstrosity that is my summer list but there is this: Ever since the fist little buds opened up (which was in the middle of my exams) I've been itching to press some flowers and do something with them.  I actually love pressing leaves as much as flowers, they can come out so delicate and beautiful - I think herbs are my favourite because they keep their lovely smell.

So I dug out my lovely dark flower press, a present from my parents a few years ago - I love how big and chunky it is, I didn't realise how difficult it was to get one like it until I was looking for one for someone else!

So off I went - flower presses are laughably simple and a big book works pretty much as well as a press, but as with so many things I manage to over complicate it.  I stack my flowers up in between three different types of paper: first corrugated card - it lets air in and out and keeps everything flat, then comes the stiff card - I'm pretty sure most people don't use this but I've found that the corrugated card leaves lines across the dried flowers and this card is very tough and flat, then the thin tissue paper to absorb the moisture and then the flowers.  After that I add another layer of tissue paper, the stiff card and it's time to repeat.

Anyway, I think it turned out pretty well - I left the flowers in for a few weeks, I think it was three, but I wasn't paying much attention - I just came back to it and found that the screws had become loose (which I took to mean that my flowers had flattened down)

I think that my lemon verbena turned out the best- it's got such a lovely smell and the detail of the top pressed nicely.  If you don't know what lemon verbena smells like, it's heavenly - a bit like lemon ice cream.

I actually ended up using the little blue flowers (they look like forget-me-nots but they're actually called alkanets and the plants are a lot bigger and considerably pricklier than forget-me-nots) in a card for my cousin - I laminated them on a little card as a removable bookmark:

There's been a lot of people saying the weather hasn't decided it's summer yet and to those people I say: when was the last time you went outside?!?! it's been so hot and sunny (well, mostly - we still have the mandatory English randomness when it comes to weather) and I have to say, I think my wildly unkempt garden also disagrees.  I have just gone out and harvested a little bowl of proof that it is indeed summer.

Small and slightly tangy, but my absolute favourite kind of strawberry!

I've also got little red currants, tiny apples which will hopefully be getting bigger and similar little plums so as far as me and my garden are concerned, IT'S SUMMER!!