UK Winter Birds

Wintertime is very difficult for birds, especially the further north that they live because the weather gets considerably colder and harsher. The ground often freezes preventing them form accessing the nutritious worms. The insects are hibernating and most hedgerows and trees are dormant for the cold winter months. Birds can find it difficult to find enough food or even a drink, especially if the winter has brought snow.

Lots of people help the birds by throwing out stale bread for them to eat. Although this does elevate the birds hunger, bread isn't a very nutritious food source.

Most garden bird's staple diet is usually, fruit and berries, nuts and seeds, insects, worms and grubs, Very tasty.

To really help the bird out this winter you could string p some monkey nuts. Buy some peanuts in their shells and thread a sharp wool needle with a length of wool with a knot in the end of it. Push the needle through the middle of the peanut shell and out of the other side, it's a bit like threading beads. Thread on more monkey nuts in this way until the wool is almost full. Unthread the needle, make a loop in the wool that is left and tie a knot to keep the nuts and the loop in place. Use the loop to hang the nuts from the bird-table or tree.

You could also make a tasty bird-cake...
Add to a bowl some chopped up bacon rind, leftover chicken bits from Sunday dinner, a few peanuts, a few raisins and frozen peas, some shelled sunflower seeds if you have any, some diced apple and a couple of heaped table spoons of flour and mix well. Add some water and mix to create dough.

Mould into a ball shape and leave it over night on the kitchen windowsill to dry. By morning it will be hard and ready to leave out on a bird table or lawn for the birds to peck at.

It's just as important the water is left out as well as food. In the winter, water turns to ice and the birds do not have access to drinking water. Leave a dish with fresh water in it out in your garden for the birds, and check it on really cold mornings to make sure it hasn't turned to ice.

Some of the UK's bird population are becoming endangered, this means that their population numbers are falling. Organisations like the RSPB do valuable work to protect and monitor endangered breeds of bird. You could monitor the birds yourself during the winter months, spend an hour each day for a week recording all the birds that visit your garden or bird-table. Bird watching is also known as twitching.

Click Here to see a list of UK winter birds that you may see. Each bird has an illustration to help you to identify which breed it is, and there is some information about each birds preferred habitat. Some birds are residents of the UK, which means they like here all year round, others just visit for the winter.

Some birds on the list are endangered, so some of the birds are rarer than others; but you may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them. Maybe you could tempt them into your garden with a bit of tasty bird-cake.






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Christmas Reindeer Silhouette Clock

Make a Christmas decoration that is both functional and decorative with this festive reindeer clock.

Silhouette art originated in Europe in the early 1700's and became very popular in Britain in the early twentieth century. People would visit a silhouette artist to have their profile drawn. You could do this yourself by taping a piece of paper to the wall and sitting a model in front of the paper (sideways on) and shine a lamp or torch onto the model so that their shadow is cast onto the paper. Draw around the outline of their shadow with a pencil, cut it out and stick it onto a contrasting piece of card. This same technique of crating a profile made many silhouette artists wealthy and famous.

To make a reindeer silhouette clock you wont need any reindeers to model for you, but you will need...

Black paint, gift wrapping paper, thick card or an old grocery box, a length of tinsel, a clock mechanism and clock hands (you will find these at craft shops or Maplin) and a print out of pattern of reindeers and Santa in his sleigh. Click Here for the printable pattern.

Stick the print out onto the back of the gift wrapping paper so that you can still see the reindeers and Father Christmas. Santa has 9 reindeer, but there is only enough room on the clock face for five.

When the glue is dry, cut out the reindeer and the sleigh.

To make the clock face, draw around a large dinner plate or a tea tray onto some card. An old grocery box is great. Cut out two identical circles, and glue them together so that the lines in the cards structure cross, this will give the clock face extra strength.

Once the glue is dry, paint the clock face black or dark blue. Again leave to dry.

Push a pencil through the centre of the clock face ready to attach the clock mechanism. Be very careful and use the old Plasticine trick - Put a ball of Plasticine on the table, put your card on top of it where you need the hole to be, and push the pencil through the card and into the Plasticine.

Arrange the sleigh and reindeer profiles on the clock face t look as if they are in flight and stick them down.

Push the clock spindle through the hole and push on the hands. The mechanism has a hole for hanging the clock on the wall.

Finally stick a length of tinsel around the edge of the clock face. Use pegs to hole the tinsel in place whilst the glue dries, and then remove the pegs.

Put a battery in the clock and then time yourself whilst you name all of Santa's nine reindeer. Click Here for the answer.


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How to make a Christmas Wreath

Christmas wreaths are an old Christmas tradition that is used to decorate the outside of the house, typically on the front door, to give Christmas time visitors a festive greeting.

To make a Christmas wreath you will need a wreath ring, florist wire (you can get these cheaply from our local florist) and some vegetation.

Take a walk around your local park, your garden or in the countryside. Take a bag and some scissors with you and collect interesting vegetation to make a Christmas wreath. Under no circumstances should you pick plants from other people's gardens unless you have their permission to do so.

Collect evergreens, ivy and loral leave are good. Some leaves are a silvery grey; these add a frosty feeling to the wreath. Conifers are popular in people's gardens. Do you have a conifer in your garden? Conifers don't have overly interesting foliage but they make a great base to the wreath.

Also look out for holly or other shrubs that bear berries. Berries add colour to the wreath. Look out for dried seedpods such as poppies, teasels and pinecones. Seedpods can be spray painted silver or gold and used to add interest to the wreath. If you do intend to use spray paint any pieces do this well in advance of the day you intend to make the wreath to give the paint enough time to dry. When using spray paint always closely follow the direction of use printed on the back of the tin.

To make the wreath To attach pieces of foliage to the wreath ring you cut to piece to length and wrap the wire around the lower end of the foliage and then twist the wire around the wreath ring with another piece of wire. Repeat this procedure an inch or two further down the stem.

During the first round of the wreath the foliage will slide around a little bit but the more you put on the more stable it will become. Keep your work flat on a tabletop to prevent movement.

Much of building the wreath is to place your foliage to make something pleasing to the eye, with interest around the whole of the wreath.

However there are some general rules of the thumb.

Use the inner and outer rings as separate 'rounds' filling both rings makes a full plush wreath.

You will find that you can make rounds appear to have a direction. This is when the stems all lay the same way. Wreaths look best if a round follows the same direction. However, the two rings on the wreath ring don't necessarily have to go in the same direction.

The more you add, the better it looks.

Save the 'feature' or fancier pieces until last so that they sit on the top layer of the wreath where they can be seen.

To add pine cones, wrap some wore around the bottom layer of the cone seeds, and twist the two wire stems firmly together and push the wire into the wreath and twist them together at the back of the wreath. You could also wire on Christmas baubles.

When the wreath is finished hang it on your front door for all to see and appreciate.

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Funky Personalised Umbrellas

Rainy days don't have to be gloomy days. Jazz up the winter months with a home-made personalised brolly. Express yourself and shake off those rainy days blues. Add pictures, phrases, names or symbols to your umbrella. You don't need any artistic skills, just a steady hand.

All you need is...
a computer with a printer, an umbrella, fabric paints, a lamp and some selotape.

Choose a plain umbrella to work with. Patterned umbrellas distract from the design and drown it any colour brolly will do, even dark colours such as navy or black.

The umbrella should be made from a nylon plastic and not PVC. The fabric paints used to decorate on the umbrella are not as effective on PVC umbrellas.

Adding a slogan onto the umbrella.
To do this, write a slogan onto a word document on a computer. Make the font as large as possible and chose a font for your slogan. I chose the slogan "It's raining again..." Which I thought was appropriate and would be great for any Madness fan, and I chose font "Goudy Stout" A bold chunky font.

Print out the slogan when you are happy with it. Due to the size of the text the words may get broken up onto different lines, don't worry about this because they can be selotaped together.

Cut out the words leaving a good couple of cm's all around the text. Selotape the words back together as necessary. Balance the 'up' umbrella on the backs of two dining table chairs back to back but parted. Sit a lamp on the floor beneath the umbrella so that it shines up through the brolly like a backlight. This is so that you can see the text through the fabric of the umbrella.

Using the selotape, stick the slogan to the underside of the umbrella ink side up.

Using fabric paint trace around the text, filling in the appropriate parts in paint. Because the text is traced it is neat, all the same size and constant and looks professional.

The same principle can be applied to images. Find a simple bold picture in a Google image search, or photobucket.com. Hello Kitty is a great example. Print out the image and then trim off the excess paper.

Selotape to the under side of an umbrella panel, ink side up. Shine the lamp up through the paper and the brolly and trace the picture with fabric paints.

You could have a whole array of characters in a freeze around your brolly, the sky's the limit. Rainy days will forever be funky vibrant days!

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A free Christmas gift from Mother Nature

Not many flowers grow in the winter, but dried flowers, grasses and seed heads can make attractive bouquets and flower arrangements, but best of all it can all be obtained freely.

Go out for a walk, maybe with your dog or a friend. Go to a park, field or overgrown area, these are the places that you will find lots of dried vegetation. I say vegetation because weed means unwanted plant, and although you are collecting what other people deem as weeds, you in fact want them.

Take a bag with you and a pair of scissors. Some stalks may be too tough to break with just your fingers. You may need gloves too in case some plants have thorns or spikes. Under no circumstances should you pick plants from other peoples gardens, unless you have asked for permission to do so.

You may find grasses of different types. Some with heads like mini fox's tails others may look more like trees.

Look out for unusual seedpods on the plants, you may be lucky enough to find a poppy seed head or a thistle. Pinecones are treasures, use craft wire or glue to attach the cone to a wood kabab skewer and then use as another specimen to add to your collection.

Sometimes flowering plants dry out and leave a structure which, once supported, flowers. These stems can look very dramatic in a dried flower arrangement.

When you get home stand all your stems in a vase. Seeds will probably drop out along it the odd bug. You may want to return these later.

Give some of your findings that frosty Christmas feel by spray painting them silver. Read the back of the tin before you begin and follow the directions for using spray paints. Don't paint all of your stems remember less is more.

Add a splash of colour to the bouquet by introducing Christmas baubles or ribbons. Glue or wire a bauble to a kebab skewer and add to the display.

To make a bow, take a length of wide ribbon and fold it back and forth a couple of times. Scrunch up one end and secure it with wire. Stick the ribbon onto a kabab stick.

To present this gift of nature as a gift, arrange the dried and painted flowers in a vase or form a bouquet secured in place with an elastic band and tie a large ribbon in a bow around the stems covering the elastic band.

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Painted Recycled Glass Gifts

Nowadays everyone is concerned about recycling to save the planet. The 20th century "throw away" society, where everyone threw out their unwanted items with no thought as to what would happen to them is gone. The media clearly shows us what happens to our rubbish, it goes to land fills. Holes in the ground filled with hundreds of tons of rubbish. Our rubbish takes thousands of years to corrode and rot. During this time, the rotting rubbish gives off poisonous gases that are admitted into the atmosphere. This is why our society is changing. The more rubbish we recycle, the greener and more healthier our planet will be. However, recycling doesn't always mean to throw out rubbish in recycling bin, it also means to reuse.

This painted glass gift idea is a recycled gift in that you reuse and revamp an old unwanted item into something new and desirable.

All you will need is...
some spray on paint or some glass frosting, some clear sticky textbook covering and some old glass objects. You may have some old wineglasses or tumbler glasses, an old glass vase, a bottle, anything made of glass that nobody wants. If you don't have anything-suitable visit your local charity shop or car boot sale. Buying second hand glassware is still recycling.

Wash and dry the glass before you begin.

Cut out shapes from the book covering. You could cut out swirls, stars or hearts. Make sure that the shapes fit onto the glass. Bold shapes and patterns stand out more than small fiddly designs.

Peel off the paper from the shapes and stick the book covering to the glass surface. The sticky shapes act as a mask. Whatever they cover will remain the original glass colour.

When you’re happy with your design, spray paint the item. Make sure that you use the spray paint in accordance with the directions on the paint tin. When spraying glasses, be careful not to spray paint the inside of the glass as this will spoil the design.

Leave the item for an hour or so to dry, then carefully pick off the plastic masking, to reveal the design. Leave the glass for 24 hours too completely dry.

Wineglasses make an attractive t-light candleholder. Bottles accommodate tall candles. Tumbler glasses make nice vases for dried flowers and small jam jars and old spice. Jars make lovely containers for Radox bath crystals.

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