Monday, September 5, 2011

Sometimes, it all works out!

Well, hello there! I don't have a whole bunch of awesome projects to post about, I do have a few things in my mind I''d like get made this week though. I found a cute tutorial for a pencil pouch and then I'd like to make an owl pillow and of course my purple shirt. That is not a lot to get done, right? But here is what I did get done.
A framed female Tiger Swallowtail butterfly
I found this butterfly like 2 weeks ago in the street while I was on a walk. I like me some butterflies so I lovingly carried it home. I decided that I needed to do something with it, and I wondered if I could frame it somehow. Google to the rescue! It was kind of dried out so I tried to hydrate it by putting it in a jar with a wet paper towel. That was kind of a waste of time. I used my handy serger tweezers to spread out it's wings and then I used strips of paper and pinned it down to keep the wings down, then I just left it. I needed a frame that was sort of a shadow box type. I found this one at Micheal's. You can kinda see from the picture that is has a double matte. It was on sale and a I had a bonus coupon. It was $9.99 and then it was on sale for $5.99, the bonus was an additional 25% off. It ended up costing me $4.38. The white part back there is just a piece of Warm and Natural batting, and then behind that is just a regular piece of batting to squish the butterfly up against the glass. That's it. The only hard part was getting the wings spread out, I was afraid I would break them off, but I didn't. It took me about 10 minutes to get it all situated in the frame. Then I hung it on the wall in my room. Looks pretty good. I have one other frame up that I wanted to do tonight but had some shows to watch on TV, so I'll do up that one in the morning.
This year I have seem so many butterflies, and different kinds of them. I saw 3 different kinds today! We also had caterpillars. My Mom discovered them on her carrots. Turns out that the Black Swallow tail caterpillar enjoys carrot tops, who knew! This is what they look like. If I would of been thinking I would have put them in a jar so I could watch them make their cocoons.
Seems like it's turning into the "Craft Bug" with all the bug pictures. The sad part is that I have a bunch more pictures of bugs, frogs, deer, and turkeys that I could post.. but won't. I'll get started on that quilt eventually. Hope you enjoyed the bug show :)  

4 comments:

The Sunflower Patch said...

Pretty butterfly and it looks very nice in the shadow box.
Green is my favorite color! Great picture of the caterpillar.

Karen said...

The butterfly framed up well! That was pretty tricky to do. I love looking at wildlife pictures, so post away. LOL

SewHappyGeek said...

Wow, you did a fantastic job on the butterfly! I assumed when I saw the pic that it had been professionally done! You rock dude :)

Anonymous said...

Oh wow! It has been so long since I've seen a butterfly... we just don't have a lot here. That is beautiful.