Butterflies

I've been looking after a caterpillar farm over the holidays (as you do) and, yesterday, a butterfly emerged;
a little, female cabbage white.
Here she is, fresh out of her pupa:

(you can tell she's a female by her slightly green colour
and the two spots on each of her top wings)

...and here she is taking her first flight:

Watching her wheeling exuberantly up into the air filled me with delight.

As you can probably tell, I love butterflies,
both the real life varieties and the arty~crafty kind.
These two reside on my fridge door:

The first one was created by one of the children I worked with last year and the second was bought from an art market. By the way, the second butterfly is much, much smaller in real life. They were both made with overhead projector plastic, permanent felt tip markers, thin magnets (the kind you find on the back of junk mail calendars) and a dusting of glitter. One of these days, I'm going to make some myself (and if I had a dollar for every time I've ever said that I would be a very rich woman indeed.)

I try to encourage butterflies into my garden by growing plants that they can breed on. I have milkweed in my back garden for wanderer butterflies and nasturtiums in my front flower beds for the cabbage whites.

Nasturtiums come in such a wonderful array of colours:

As well as admiring butterflies I've been crafting, of course.
I found a sweet crochet lacy scarf and tried to track down the pattern but came to a halt when I reached this blog because it's written in Chinese (I think). So, with the help of Dot Matthew's directions for the Fancy Fans Stole, I worked out the pattern myself.
This is what I've come up with so far:

I think that it's working up prettily but, with warm weather really and truly upon us here in Perth, I won't be wearing it anytime soon.
I'm having fun anyway.

I hope your week's blessed with fun too.
Butterfly kisses to you.

Breaks, Bracelets and Butterflies

Tonight's the last night of the holidays for me.
I've had a wonderful break from work
...it's been a fortnight that's been pretty much free of obligation. Bliss.
I haven't crafted much. I like to think that these periods when I'm not productive are times where I'm still being creative even though it's not apparent ~
I'm just incubating ideas (if that makes sense.)

Still,
I have a few pictures to show.
Here's a memory wire bracelet I made with Indian glass beads for a friend's birthday:

and the beginnings of a pair of Maine Morning Mitts:

(This is the first time I've knitted with double pointed needles. I used a video tutorial from Knitting Help.com to get started.)

Best of all,
the Monarch butterfly, which I wrote about in my last post, emerged,
spent an afternoon flexing its wings in my backgarden before flying away
and was quite happy to pose for photographs:

It's so beautiful.
I hope it comes back to visit!

Have a fabulous week, everybody.

A Pretty Visitor

Look who visited my garden this afternoon:

I'm pretty sure this beautiful creature is a Lesser Wanderer butterfly. (Edited to say that, after consulting the butterfly book I bought from the museum, I think I've made a mistake. It's more like an Australian Painted Lady.) It flitted about these flowers for about half an hour or so and didn't seem to mind having its photo taken at all.

I was thrilled to have it come in. I always get myriads of Cabbage White butterflies, who lay their eggs on my nasturtiums (with my blessing), but hardly any other species. Very occasionally, a small native Skipper butterfly visits. Sadly, I haven't seen any Skippers for a year or more.
I've been doing a little bit of research on butterflies for work and I've found out that some butterflies are losing their habitat because of land clearing around Perth, so I've armed myself with a copy of Bring Back The Butterflies from the WA Museum and I'm going to see if I can grow plants that butterfly larvae like to feed on. Hopefully, I'll be able to encourage a more diverse range of butterflies back into my neighbourhood. Wish me luck!