Wishing you all a wonderful time over the festive season, and all the best for the New Year.
As promised, a few pictures of the decoupaged baubles on the tree. It’s only a small tree, but it’s amazing how many decorations are needed on even the three sides here - I’m thinking of doing some more baubles like this for next year, as the darker decs don’t show up very well against a dark tree.
I also need to get a larger decoration for the top of the tree - my little angel has always been fine on mini, table-top trees but looks a bit lost here! 😀
See you next year! xx
I’m not lost in Spain somewhere! We came home at the end of October, and whilst the weather had been good here for most of the month (our housesitter got to enjoy the pool for most of her time here), it changed as soon as we got home. I hate November with a vengeance, so after ploughing through the holiday laundry and emptying the Moho, I decided to get stuck into something that I would enjoy so as not to get the winter blues. So I headed down to the basement guest room and painted the wardrobe the same as I’d done the chest of drawers next to it a couple of years ago.
Obviously it hasn’t taken me all of this time 😄 but there’s a lot to do with two coats of paint, two coats of clear wax, dark wax in the nooks and crannies, and buffing in between. I then decided to paint the inside of the doors and do something interesting for when you open the doors. So that meant most of those coats again!
Here’s a reminder of what they originally looked like. I hate wooden drawer knobs like that!
Ok, time for the reveal……
Here’s what I did with the interior (and ignore all the stuff in there, I have to find space for Moho things during winter). This isn’t an interiors blog, so I don’t have to ‘stage’ perfectly. 😁😁😁
It’s Annie Sloan’s ‘Meadow Flowers’ stencil, which fits this space perfectly. I’ve been waiting to use it on something for a while now!
Then I came across decoupaged baubles, coincidentally in two different places at about the same time, Pinterest and a blog I follow. We have some old red baubles which I never use, as red is not a colour I like as a Xmas decoration - it’s all blue and gold here to go with my decor. So I was interested to have a bash, though it’s taken longer than I thought as painting then decoupaging on brittle round things is jolly hard - I have to do half or a third then wait for it to dry before carrying on.
I am now running out of time before my brother comes on Monday, as I’m having a week full of medical/dental appointments, plus we went out birding on Tues afternoon (Black-shouldered Kites! I’ll tell you about them after Christmas). I need to finish cleaning the guest room and then get the decs up. Then baking next week! Anyhow, this year we bought a real tree for a change, so I’m looking forward to seeing these baubles on the tree along with the other ones. I’ll post a photo when the tree is done.
Here’s the baubles just needing a final coat of glossy varnish:
I’ll get back to butterflies and birds from our travels this year during the new year, and catch up with your posts too. When I’m not in the mood for blogging, I tend to forget about looking at other peoples’ blogs too. Receiving them in my inbox is an easier way to follow them, to be honest.
Hola from Spain!
We are at the beginning of a three week trip to Extremadura and Andalusia, mixing birding with Moorish architecture and Roman ruins and anything else we find of interest. So I will probably be rather quiet where posts are concerned.
In the meantime, as I don’t have hundreds of photos to go through as we are just en route at the moment, I thought I’d do a quick post from my iPad showing you the egg sacs I found. I had been hoping to find some, but I hadn’t looked up what they look like, which helps. I was amazed - they are a real work of art. A Greek urn, is how I’ve seen them described. And they are big! I think the description of hen egg size might be a bit misleading but they are certainly a good 2cm - 2.5cms.
I was very interested to see what the Galbe valley would be like later in the summer, and K didn't need much persuading, so we set off up to the mountains on the 9th August. There are a lot of photos in this post so you'd better get yourself a nice cup of something hot or a glass of something cold, and sit down to scroll through!
We had been hoping there would be some Apollo butterflies around, but it was not to be. Never mind, it was still as exciting up here as it had been seven weeks earlier.
The first thing we noticed were all the people around! I really hadn't expected that many, but by the time we got to the car park (down a long unpaved road from the hamlet where we engaged 4 wheel drive - it reminded me of driving in Fiji!) and started out on the walk, other people became a bit more sparse and didn't stop me from taking photos of butterflies etc, thank goodness!
Despite having dried out somewhat, there were still plenty of different wildflowers about. In the sun the vast majority were Knapweed and Scabious - always good for attracting butterflies and pollinators.
Below on the left is a really attractive Pink - Dianthus hyssopifolius or the Montpelier Pink. In the other pictures are Knapweed and Achillea, but with a pink variety as well as the white, which was rather pretty.
The patch above was a little field that hadn't been cut for hay, and was alive not just with the wildflowers but also Skippers. I saw Small Skippers and Essex Skippers, and even this mating pair on a Knapweed stem, which I think were Essex Skippers (Thymelicus lineola) but it is hard to tell.
In this picture I believe the top photo is a Small Skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) (red tip to antennae) and the images below is of an Essex Skipper (black on underneath of tip of antennae and a bit more black around the outside of the upper wings).
However I have no clue what this interesting moth is! I saw a couple of them, buried into flowers.
Despite some of the grass having been grazed, there were still plenty of wildflowers and Fritillaries galore flying about. The one below I think is a Knapweed Fritillary (Melitaea phoebe).
This was the best picture I could get of this Queen of Spain Fritillary (Issoria lathonia).
Sometimes you just can't help getting an annoying blade of grass in the way; where butterflies are concerned you just have to put up with it in many instances if you don't want them to fly away! This is a Dark Green Fritillary (Speyeria aglaja) which I have only seen once before in the Eyne Valley, which is not too far away from here.
And this is a lifer! The High Brown Fritillary (Fabriciana adippe). Now what was I saying about annoying blades of grass - or stems - in the way?! 😀
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A lot of butterflies were flitting through the village but mostly too fast to ID them, until we came to a Buddleia growing in an overgrown garden which was alive with butterflies! Below is another Dark Green Fritillary, and there were also lots of Silver Washed Fritillaries which I hadn't seen in the valley of Galbe (though seen plenty of them before). Too fast for photos though! I also saw a Jersey Tiger Moth.
The highlight though was this Crag Martin (Ptyonoprogne rupestris - what??? how the hell do you pronounce that!!!) taking a break on a windowsill! I expect K got some nice photos with his camera and fancy lens, but I am more than happy with my own photo, as it was pretty close!
On the way back home we stopped beside the area where we had seen the Red Backed Shrike in June as the stony banks looked interesting with wildflowers and some butterflies flitting. These Pinks appealed to me as they were such a splash of pink here and there as we were driving past. They are Dianthus balbisii and grow in hot and dry places. Although I didn't get any more decent photos I saw here Meadow Brown, Clouded Yellow, Marbled White and a Glanville Fritillary, taking my Fritillary tally for the day to six, which is not bad!
All in all just as interesting here in summer as spring.
On our last day, after seeing the Marmots, we set off into the hills, towards the village of Railleu. On the way, we stopped beside some valleys to look at the wildflowers and also to check for Red-backed Shrikes, which had been spotted here before. I don't have any photos as it was distant, but we did get to see one through a scope!
Whilst the birders were finding birds for us, those of us who were interested in other things had a good look around.
Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia).
I'm pretty sure this is an Adonis Blue (Polyommatus bellargus).
This is a tiny broom growing out of a rock bank, called the Winged Broom (Genista sagittalis).
We stopped for a wander around the village of Railleu, a pretty little place perched on a rocky hillside. When a group had been here the year before (later on in June) on a butterfly trip, they had seen dozens of butterflies of about 20 different species, but not so when we were there! It was a nice place to wander around anyway, admiring both the wildflowers and the little gardens beside the pretty stone houses and church.
Houseleeks (Sempervivum) growing on the rocks, the host plant of the Apollo butterfly.
We ate our picnic lunch at Railleu and then our group split up as it was the end of our trip. Keith and I weren't ready to go home though; as we were already up in the mountains it would have been crazy not to take advantage of it!
So after lunch we headed off to Lac de Bouillouses which is a large lake at 2,000m altitude. It was busy though - hardly any room left to park and people everywhere! It came as a bit of a shock after our quiet couple of days. In the summer they run a shuttle bus up here from a large car park about 10km away which is very sensible.
There were lots of horses wandering around too, including a number of cute foals. We also bumped into Niall beside the lake, who had had the same idea as us!
A rather alpine looking hotel, with lots of yellow broom in the foreground.
These heavy horses look very much like Bretons to me!
As we were walking around the path, some Citril Finches (Carduelis citrinella) came to land on the grass right near us. I took photos zooming in as I clicked, but most annoyingly some people walked around the corner and scared them off. Grrrr!
Here we were able to see the Alpenrose (Rhododendron ferrugineum) close up.
As the track beside the lake turned rather rocky we decided to give it a miss and stopped at a few places downstream of the River Tet, which isn't much of a river at this point as it is regulated by the barrage at the Lac de Bouillouses, though it becomes one of the major rivers in the Pyrenees Orientales dept when it gets down to the plain near Perpignan. We once stayed at a campsite beside this stream in an environment just like this. I think it was one of our most favourite campsites. It was a shame that the grass had all been grazed here too so there were hardly any wild flowers.
