Scherenschitte Bugs of Summer

If my favored artistic medium is wool, my mother's is paper.  Occasionally we like to dabble in each others' preferred mediums.  This past week I have been doing just that.  I am far from great at scherenschitte or paper cutting, but from time to time I do enjoy it.

Scherenschitte reminds me of my college years.  My mother took a class in it and for the entire time I was in college, care packages came with a beautiful piece of cut paper glued to a card or even to a container of goodies.  It was beautiful, but I'm not sure at the time I appreciated just how much work and love she put into these pieces of art she sent.

I've done bits and pieces of this art form over the past few years.  In the foreground of this Easter picture, you can see the Palm Sunday/Easter rooster I cut out last year.

I also used a similar technique to cut out silhouettes of W that I gave as Mother's Day gifts to grandmothers last year.  Somehow, I don't have any pictures or scans of those, but they made a wonderful gift.

Recently, I decided I wanted to do some more paper cutting and sketched and cut out these design patters from white paper.  I scanned these bugs over a sheet of colored paper and scanned them.  I took the image this created and digitally edited it to come up with this banner for the blog.

I think this would make beautiful note cards if I ever decide to get them printed.

Today, I played with these designs some more, re-sketching some all together and created and scanned this template which I scanned and printed out on red, blue, yellow and green card stock.

I then mounted them on small squares of black card stock, scanned them and edited the images together.

I think these would be really nice in some sort of simple wood frames and  placed on a summer nature table.  I'm looking forward to designing some more of these cut paper pieces.

We Have Caterpillars In The Parsley!

This morning W and I stepped out on our balcony to cut some herbs to put into our morning omelet.  While cutting the parsley, I noticed this caterpillar.

I ran back inside to get my camera.  When I returned I photographed not only this caterpillar but also two others!

I think these must have hatched from eggs left by our "flutterby" friend two weeks ago.  This is so so exciting.  I've done a little research and I'm pretty sure this is some sort of swallowtail, possibly a black swallow tail.  If anyone reading this is better at identifying butterflies and caterpillars than I am, please give me you opinion on this!  Also, since these little guys munching on our parsley are a covered in little "horns" I think it is safe to say they are probably first instar and have quite a bit of growing to do before they form their chrysalis.  I hope our balcony will be a hospitable place for them to grow and pupate.  I'm more than willing to share our parsley with these amazing creatures.


I'll be sure to keep gently checking in on them and take more pictures.

Our "Flutterby" Visitor

This afternoon W came running to me saying "Mama!  Flutterby!  Mama!  Flutterby!" and led me to the door of our balcony where we saw this beautiful butterfly checking out each plant in our little container garden.

It first decided to rest in the parsley, but took flight when we went out on the balcony.  It didn't leave the balcony however while we were out there, but it also, understandably did not land on anything either.  It was so beautiful to watch it fly  around though. We sat and watched it and tried to take pictures of it for a while before I ushered W back into the apartment.  The above picture was the only one I was really able to get of the butterfly in flight.

After we came back inside I noticed that the butterfly settled on one of my geraniums for quite a while and I was able to take several pictures first through the glass door and then I cracked the door just slightly open and was able to get some better shots.

In all our visitor stayed on or near our balcony for about half an hour and we really enjoyed watching it!  We used butterflies during Easter as a symbol of resurrection with a caterpillar wrapped in a silk cocoon and then turning into a beautiful butterfly in our Lenten/Easter garden.  I'm not sure how much W understood that but he does know that he still has butterflies on his nature table tree and was very excited to see a real one out on our own balcony.

This first "flutterby" visitor came before our butterfly bush is blooming and when all of our rose bush blossoms had been picked.  I hope as the summer progresses we will have more of these visitors to our little garden.