bugs and butterflies

I'm good at being side tracked.

My task for today was to get my little girl to make a birthday card for a little boy. Quite hard since anything she does has to be pink and princessy. I scanned some pictures of bugs and butterflies from old advertising cuts, printed them and gave her a box of watercolours, thinking she'd paint all of the butterflies but hopefully enough creepy crawlies to stick on the card. That did indeed work and the necessary card was created, but I was off on my own tangent.

The effect of watercolour on these images reminded me of a story I loved and was intrigued by as a girl. That of the Cottingley Fairies, where two young girls managed to convince Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others that photographs that they had taken of fairies were real. Many years later they confessed that they had faked most of the photographs by painting fairies and placing them on hat pins.

I spent hours as a child creating my own fake fairies and today, before I knew, it I had painted my own sheet of bugs and butterflies, got out the florist's wire and made a colony of insects to live in the lavender bush outside our front door. I was really chuffed with the whimsical result and my little girl was thrilled.

I wonder if the Postman was fooled!