Four Seasons Exchange-Summer

 Recently, our family participated in our first seasonal nature table swap through Four Seasons Exchange. The directions were to send three to five items for a summer nature table made from natural materials with at least one of them being homemade.  Now that I know our items have been received by Jennifer and her lovely family of Syrendell, I am ready to share what we made and collected and sent here.

When I first signed up for the exchange, one of the first things I thought of was to make these Schernscnitte bugs of summer which I talked about before.  I also knew I wanted to put them in a stand of some sort.  When we were at the beach I found a lovely long flat piece of drift wood.  It was still dampish when we got it home so I dried it out in a low oven and using my hand saw, I cut a slot down in it for the cards to stand up in.  I then sanded the slot and polished the whole thing with beeswax polish.

The next thing we sent was  this little beehive and needle felted bees.  The hive was made by weaving yarn and twigs from our neighborhood that we soaked in water together, bending everything as I wove it to make a hive shape.  I then stuffed it with wool batting and needle felted on a base and a little door.
 

 We also sent them this needle felted rainbow.  W and I were inspired to make something that represented the beautiful big rainbow we saw a couple weeks ago.  It was such a beautiful arc going across the whole sky after an afternoon storm.  I decided to make this one out of wool.  W loves it and I think I'm going to have to make him one too sometime in the near future.

The last item we sent was this sand candle in a dish made from sand clay with some of the shells we collected at the beach.  We made two sets like this.  One to send out as a part of the exchange and one to keep for our midsummer celebration.

Jennifer tells me I should be receiving a package from her family this week.  We are very much looking forward to it!  This has been such a fun chance to develop some creative summer projects to share with another family and to see what others make for summer nature tables.  I really look forward to participating in more of these swaps in the future!