Weekend of Art, Nature and Foraging

 going down to the forest

We've had a lovely weekend, hot and humid ending a hot week of Autumn sunshine!

On Saturday I took Imogen to the local Art Gallery for a monthly Art club which was great fun. The theme was Autumn even if it could have been Summer at the beach. She made an Autumn crown with gathered leaves and other nature bits and some cut out leaves from recycled papers, etc.

Autumn leaf printing

She also did some printing with the Autumn leaves and some autumnal inks and patterns.

Clay leaf and nature

The other thing she made was an autumn clay leaf using a real leaf as the template and for detail and adding a robin, a dormouse and two caterpillars. It is now drying and she thinks she may paint it afterwards.

 Collected conkers, some very large, in our leafy wooden bowl

In the city parks on the way to art club we gathered a rather large number of conkers (Horse Chestnuts) so I can see some crafting in the near future with these, adding to others we've collected recently. In the garden when we returned home we were amazed at how busy the spiders have been lately, and found this grasshopper which Imogen named speedy although he seemed in no rush to fly away.

spider webs in the sky with lots of little flies caught

and a wasp below we saw being wrapped in thread

 

 Speedy the grasshopper

This morning we all spent our time out in the garden cutting the lawn, trimming some hedging and gathering up the fallen leaves into black bags ready to make some lovely leaf mulch - 12 big black bagfuls.

crossed Oak trees

We then spent the afternoon at a local nature reserve we'd not been to before, have driven past it several times but decided to pop there today. A lovely wild area and the shade from the trees was wonderful. We came across the above crossed oak trees which have grown into each other. It was also wonderful to spot a Greater Spotted Woodpecker up in the trees, and evidence of Badgers.

 foraging a feast

 

ready for roasting

Our other delightful find were some really good sized sweet chestnuts which we foraged, handy that I usually carry a cloth bag with me just in case! We came home with some excellent chestnuts some of which we roasted and ate and some we roasted and added to a frittata with some mushrooms which was lovely. We weigh them and had collected 800g - not bad for a nature walk.

Hope you've all had a lovely weekend.