Fossil Find!

                                   A lot of careful excavating and the stegosaurus begins to appear.

Learning to Dig for Fossils.

This block of coloured plaster has pieces of a plastic stegosaurus buried in it ready for the budding palaeontologist to dig out. A very clever idea, this kept master 4 busy for several hours. Here he has just started his first trench! Note the tea towel cover to keep that pink plaster dust off his clothes.

A Garden Full of Citrus Trees!

                 The grapefruit are almost ready for picking, then we'll have juice and marmalade.

                                                             The lemons are almost ripe too.

 Lime marmalade under way, but unfortunately we didn't grow the limes, our tree succumb to some sort of gall wasp and I had to buy these limes from a market.

  The mandarins have a long way to go and unfortunately in our climate they don't seem to get very big.

                        The oranges are very unripe too, but they will make great juice in a few weeks.

              The tamarillos are doing well and with all the recent rain will be even juicier than ever.

Interesting Shapes.

             I'm not sure what this plant is called, but the flower spikes are fascinating, as are the colours.

Chomped Leaves.

Perhaps I should be making more bite marks in my leaf stamps! These are Eucalypt leaves that I picked up, and obviously they have been very tasty to some insect or other.

On a Roll!

 I wanted to cut some leaf stamps for a class that I will be running soon, so here are the stamps that I made today.

 I also wanted to use the stamps with a butterfly for my own work, so I traced the outline of  very special butterfly to make my stamp. The butterfly lives in a very close relationship with ants, who feed the caterpillar and look after it in return for some food secretions.  The first stamp didn't have enough ink, but the second one will do for a test piece. I'm pretty pleased with my afternoon's work.

More Stamping Fun.

Something New at Last.

I thought that I might try my hand at carving stamp tiles, that when 4 are put together make they make one large tile with the repeating blocks. It is harder than it would seem to make them match up properly! The first one was all right, but I decided to make another and really measure everything properly to make the match-up work. Still not quite right, but better.