A belated Happy Solstice to any who celebrate!

(Dueling spiders next post, swear.)

I took the day off from work and spent it mostly out in the woods at Tyler Park, then at Churchville Nature Center, where I ran into someone else photographing bugs! This was very exciting. While I know there are other folks out in the world who photograph insects (most of them using nicer cameras than mine), I had never met another insect photographer in person.

Some selections from the day:











Today was spent mostly making a dress; I bought the fabric last fall. It looked considerably darker and warmer in the store's lighting than it did once I got it home, much to my disappointment. I'm not really a fan of pink. But, I had it laying around, and that was annoying me, so I made a rather spur-of-the-moment, experimental dress. The dart up the back (not illustrated here, sorry) was only a partial success; it made the dress fall as I wanted it to, but it puckers a bit. The darts at the hips, though, I love. Will definitely be making other things with those.(Yes, I really am that pale. No, I am not dead, undead, or any variation thereof.)

And then I went outside (in the dress, as you can see), and picked some strawberries and took a couple not-really-worth-posting bug pictures, and found a milkweed borer! In my yard! I was excited - until it fell off the plant and lay there on the ground looking sorta half-dead. I picked it up and generally fussed at it and eventually it stopped playing dead and walked around on my hand for a little, but it seemed to be having genuine troubles - fell from fingertip to palm once, and had to try repeatedly to get its wings open and take off. I don't know if it was merely weak, maybe from traveling from wherever-it-came-from to my yard, or whether it stopped on the way and sampled something chemically treated. I hope not the latter.

. . and something is eating my brussel sprouts, and not hanging around to be photographed. If an insect is going to chew on my edibles, it should at least do me the courtesy of posing nicely. I'm not amused by things that eat my stuff and then hide, leaving me with neither pictures nor dinner. I want one or the other.

(I'm not pondering the possibility that the milkweed borer was clumsy because it was so stuffed after gorging itself on my brussel sprouts. It was too cute to be so rude.)