Tag: lifestyle blog

Raising Small White Butterflies

On By ArtyMissKIn Conservation, Photography, Raising Butterflies2 Comments

Hey friends!

I’ve got a brand new Butterfly Tale for you this week which is always exciting, it actually began last August when I spotted a tiny two leaf wild cabbage growing in my front garden totally at random. I only even really noticed it because a cabbage butterfly was paying it so much attention. When I went out with my watering can to feed my plants I realised that she had laid thirteen eggs on this teeny tiny plantling! I just couldn’t leave it where it was – directly underneath the bird feeder, so I carefully dug up the cabbage and moved it into my butterfly house.

It was only a few days before the eggs hatched and quite quickly they began to eat both leaves of the cabbage, at this point in the year I didn’t even have any other plants to give them so I resorted to buying organic ones from the supermarket! By the middle of September they had grown into these handsome green chaps.

Just to point out my usual butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

Once they were big enough to be identified I worked out that they were actually Small White – I’ve never had a chance to raise these before, usually Large Whites sneak in and take over the garden…I always feel sorry for my neighbours in the summer as I tend to raise and release about 100-150 Large White butterflies every year, but Small White have always eluded me.

FWIW Cabbage butterfly is actually there term we give to several white butterflies Large/Small/Green veined/Wood they all look basically the same as butterflies but the caterpillars are so different.

Small White (Pieris rapae) are a medium sized butterfly and both sexes have a wingspan of 48mm, they are one of our most widespread fluttery friends and can be found in more or less any setting as they are happy to eat a wide variety of host plants from cabbages (even wild ones) to nasturtium, garlic mustard and hoary cress.

They all began to pupate at the end of September, unhelpfully two decided to pupate on the back of the zip to the enclosure which made photographing the pupa really hard! And then they stayed quite happily sleeping through the winter until they emerged. 

Sadly of my lucky 13 pupa one didn’t emerge successfully and wasn’t able to fly so I kept her indoors and fed her on slices of orange and freshly cut flowers. I get far too attached to my butterflies and always name the ones I can’t release (which thankfully doesn’t happen very often) so this is Crumble.

I love ‘cabbage butterflies’ it so nice to be able to give them a safe space to grow, my reward for which is that theres normally 4-5 white butterflies in the garden at any given time during the summer months (which I love!) and this photo is pretty cool because it shows the almost non-existent differences between the Small white on the left and the Large white on the top of the chive.

Its so nice to know that I’ve been given the chance to raise these caterpillars, and been able to keep them safe so that they can now go and roam free in the big wild world and lay more eggs to keep the world pollinated!

Thanks so much for reading this post and I as always wish you a happy and love filled week ahead.

Hello! (A little bit about me!)

On By ArtyMissKIn Photography4 Comments

Hello my friends! 

Welcome back to another edition of ‘What have I been up to!’

I figured I should finally introduce myself, because I think it’s nice to be able to know a little bit about the person behind the pictures. 

I can’t believe I’ve not done this before, although I really don’t like having my picture taken so thats probably got something to do with it! Basically I made these slides for insta and thought why not post them here too!

Ready here goes…

So hey, my name is Katie and I’m a UK based nature nerd, I’m also a book nerd who likes to do embroidery, paint, and is trying to create a little slice of happiness in my garden. I like raising caterpillars and giving them a safe place to complete their life cycle, which I’ve been doing since I was a kid. I use this account to post pictures of bugs I’ve seen, things I’ve painted or created, caterpillars I’m raising and trees (very important!).

I’d really like to give a special thank you to anyone reading this whether you’ve only just started following me or have been here for a while, it really means the world to have found such a kind corner of the internet.

I really hope you’ve enjoy following along on this journey. As always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!

ps. Trying to take selfies with butterflies is really hard, you have to be so quick!

Raising Emperor moths (2026 edition)

On By ArtyMissKIn Conservation, Photography, Raising Butterflies6 Comments

Hey friends! Welcome to my third Butterfly tale of 2026!!

Do you remember last year I wrote about my experience over wintering 3 Emperor moth cocoons I found in the garden? They emerged mated like crazy and flew away, well this year I’m continuing that story…

So my three Emperors from last year were a richly coloured male and two gigantic grey winged females, I really fell in love with them and was thrilled that they survived the winter (I found them on a plant that was damaged during a winter storm) I created them an enclosure with different heathers and a giant meadow sweet plant and they were obviously quite happy as the girls laid like 250-300 eggs!

Sadly Emperor moth eggs need really specific humidity and temperatures to develop and although I was hopeful only a single egg hatched. I was gutted to be honest I kinda thought I was going to be releasing an army of them.

Just to point out my butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

So my very precious caterpillar began to eat her way around the enclosure. These moths have fascinating caterpillar, each time the caterpillar grows or ‘moults’ a stage in life where they rest for a few days and shed their skin causes significant changes in their appearance.

These are the first three stages, getting progressively bigger from left to right. I think stage 2 is very pretty!

The final caterpillar stage is magnificent! She was about three inches long and bright green – my very own hungry caterpillar ate two small heather plants and near enough a third of the meadowsweet plant. We had one or two close calls were I was concerned she might die, but she just kept eating, so I named her Hardy.

I’m well aware you shouldn’t get attached to them, but its really hard not to.

After a few months of almost continuous eating Hardy finally decided to pupate amongst the fallen heather flowers at the bottom of the enclosure and I left her there sleeping for the rest of the year. I didn’t photograph her cocoon but this is what they look like!

Her egg was laid on the 3rd of April 2025 and she finally emerged as a fully grown moth of the 8th of April 2026. I literally spent an entire year caring for a single moth. Obviously I didn’t know she was going to be a girl, isn’t she fluffy! (If you click on either of the photos above it will take you to my insta to see her taking off!)

Mum
Dad
Hardy

She was really pink, which wasn’t expecting! I thought I’d add photos of ‘mum and dad’ to show the variations in colour between the two generations.

The Emperor moth (Saturnia Pavonia) is the UK’s only silk moth and builds an amazing hairy cocoon to pupate inside. The females can have a wingspan of up to around 10cm, while the males are slightly smaller at 6-ish cm. Sadly this family of moths don’t feed in their adult form and only live a few short weeks.

Interestingly the females release pheromones that can attract a males from up to seven miles away!!

I was also able to get a photo of her underwing which isn’t an angle I’ve seen before.

If I’m being honest while release days are always my favourite, I was actually really sad to see her fly away – I genuinely thought she’d be too fat to fly but she took off like a jet and flew over the meadow, hopefully she found mate and laid a ton of eggs!

Anyway I really hope you enjoyed this little slice of mothy goodness!

As always thank you so much for reading this post and have a great week!

Embroidered denim jacket {FINISHED!!!}

On By ArtyMissKIn Art6 Comments

Hello my friends!

Well I’ve done it!!

I’ve finally finished my Wonderland flowers jacket embroidery (happy dance).

It looks so much better than I thought it would now that I’ve finally washed away the stick and stitch paper, I did have a moment were I panicked and got scared of rinsing it incase the printed design underneath ran into the threads and stained the lighter colours – which thankfully it didn’t!

In the end I decided to create an arch of bread-and-butterflies to just ‘finish’ the image. They’re quite funky aren’t they!? I worked all of them at once – all the eyes/all the bodies/all the wings etc.

Now that its finished I literally can’t wait to start wearing it! This jacket has taken a solid nine months of work, I’ve used miles of thread and gone through several needles. But I’m so pleased it’s finally finished and the colours look so much more vibrant now it’s been washed.

Also seeing as I’m going the happiest place on earth this summer I can now take it with me! My brother has even bought me a super cute Wonderland themed pair of ‘Minnie ears’ to wear in the park. As a side note I had no idea about disney ear headbands and I just need them! 

I’ve already got a new project I’m going to start although I’m hoping it won’t take quite as long as this one has!

So that’s a wrap for my denim-jacket-project posts, and a rather labor intensive project complete…I really hope you’ve enjoy following along on this journey. As always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!

Raising Orange Tip Butterflies (2026 edition)

On By ArtyMissKIn Conservation, Photography, Raising Butterflies8 Comments

Hey friends!

I’ve got another brand new Butterfly Tale for you this week which is exciting and has been a whole year in the making. When I planted my Honesty seeds last summer I did so in the hope that Orange tips would come and lay eggs in the garden – in 2024 I only found a single egg and cared for her as much as possible, so I was thrilled to find not one but eleven eggs in the spring of 2025!

They were spread across several plants, Orange tips do this because the caterpillars are cannibalistic when small although I’ve never worked out if that means they eat all caterpillars or just their brethren). I sleeved each egg in a mesh bag to keep them safe from predators and checked on them after about three weeks.

Eight of the eggs had hatched into tiny green caterpillars!

Orange tip butterflies really like to lay their eggs on Lady’s smock which seemed to flower later than normal but thankfully my Honesty plants were massive and I’d grown plenty of them!

Popular belief says they don’t do well on Honesty but they all survived!

They seemed to be small for ages, but once they were almost fully grown I popped them all into a house together to form their pupa as we had bad weather coming and I didn’t want them to die after working so hard to grow this big.

Just to point out my usual butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

In the end they all pupated in the same corner of the house (about three days later) and I was able to carefully move them to a small travel case were they have remained before successfully emerging as beautiful butterflies. 

I have literally been caring for these creatures for a year! When I moved into my house back in 2022 I found three Orange tip pupa when I was clearing the garden (boy did it need work!) which emerged in 2023. That year I found only two caterpillars which didn’t ever emerge, then in 2024 there was only one Orange tip and for 2025 I found these ones.

Orange tip butterflies (Anthocharis cardamines) and are considered a medium sized butterfly with a wing span of up to 5cm. The males have a large orange spot on the forewing while the females look like a Small white.

The big release day came and went and off they flew out into the big wild world.

The weather has a lot to do with the success of these butterflies 2024 in particular was a really wet spring and the pollinators suffered as a result.

I planted more Honesty seeds than normal last summer and already have enough plants for these guys to for forth and hopefully get busy, also the front garden is full of these delicate pink lady’s smock flowers which is their favourite egg host plant! I can’t raise these ones indoors but I can certainly give them extra amounts of plants in the garden.

Thanks so much for reading this post and I as always wish you a happy and love filled week ahead.

Raising Speckled Wood Butterflies

On By ArtyMissKIn Conservation, Photography, Raising Butterflies5 Comments

Hey friends! I’ve got a new Butterfly Tale for you this week!!

This is very much a surprise butterfly tale, last year I decided to weed the grass out of my birds foot trefoil pots and I found three little cream coloured eggs!

I felt really bad about disturbing them and popped the little stems of grass into an enclosure in my butterfly house with (don’t judge me) a new pot of fine stem grass…thats right I actually potted up grass (my brother thought I’d lost my mind).

After really studying the eggs I guessed they were either going to be Speckled wood/Meadow brown/Gate keeper or a type of grass eating moth – I figured that if they were actually going to eat birds foot trefoil then the eggs wouldn’t have been laid on the grass.

They were really very happy with their pot of grass and before I knew had grown into rather handsome green caterpillars.

I was trilled when they turned out to be Speckled wood! I’ve never had a chance to raise this type of butterfly before so having three of them was awesome.

So, Speckled wood grows into a brown medium sized butterfly with a wingspan of 47mm-50mm and they like to visit woodlands, gardens and anywhere with sunny spots.

Just to point out my butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

They formed their short curvy pupa in the autumn and I’ve been checking on them all winter, I literally can’t express how happy it made me to care for these three caterpillars, I genuinely never ever thought something like Speckled wood would ever lay their eggs in my garden.

The lovely green pupa turned black and within 48 hours I had three perfect butterflies! Now I only kept these ones for a few hours as they prefer to feed on honeydew (which is the bottom secretions of aphids!) rather than nectar and as I try not to raise aphids I released the three amigos once their wings had dried out.

But aren’t they such a lovely brown colour.

Although releasing the butterflies I’ve raised is genuinely the best part of caring for these creatures it always makes me a little sad as I become so emotionally invested in them.

Silly really.

Speckled Wood is a clever butterfly as they can survive the winter in either the caterpillar or pupa part of their life cycle and then hibernate over winter before emerging in some time in April as beautiful butterflies. 

So thats it for this week, I really hope you enjoyed this little slice of fluttery goodness! I feel so incredibly privileged to be able to care for these creatures for like seven months or so.

As always thank you so much for reading this post and have a great week!

Embroidered Butterfly #20 & 21 {Meadow Brown & Gatekeeper}

On By ArtyMissKIn Art, Needlework Bugs

Hey friends! 

Firstly, I skipped posting this last week as the building work needed on my house finally happened and it was so super stressful…I packed up a whole bunch of stuff to clear as much room as I could to be out of the way of the builders and managed to tidy away my laptop charger, for the life of me I couldn’t remember where it was!

Still its over now and my heating is finally working properly!! (Yay!).

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of photos comparing the differences between two of our most common (and overlooked) butterflies Meadow Brown and Gatekeeper. I really love these two butterflies and kinda think they’re like the Sparrow of the butterfly world, brown, unexciting and everywhere. Obviously I wanted to create a needlework version of both of these happy chaps. 

I decided to make females of both as there isn’t masses of difference between the sexes.

Meadow Brown
Gatekeeper

So, Meadow Brown – #20 on my embroidered butterfly challenge. Is basically a brown butterfly with orange patches on the upper wing, identified by the one white dot in its eye-spots. With a real life wingspan of 50mm (male) and 55mm (female) it means my needlework version is around 11cm across.

While Gatekeeper – #21 on my embroidered butterfly challenge. Has much more orange within their wing patterns ad is slightly smaller than Meadow Brown with a real life wingspan of 40mm (male) and 47mm (female) giving my twice life-size version a 9.5cm-ish. Gatekeeper is identified by having two white dots in their eye-spots.

I’m so unbelievably pleased with these two!

I have actually made a Gatekeeper before, way back when I was practicing the design process. Boy have I improved the process is so different now (if you wanna check it out the link is at the bottom!).

As usual it has a very thin stainless steel wire concealed in the edge of the wings to help the keep their shape.

That’s a wrap for this week…two more butterflies down only 51 still to go!! Stay tuned for the next instalment on my butterfly creating adventure. Thank you so much for checking out this post!

Hopefully you’ll be back next week!

Ps. If you want to have a look at my other butterflies they’re HERE!

Psps. My first attempt of an embroidered Gatekeeper butterfly from 2022 is HERE!

Psps (again). Also if you want to see my Meadow Brown and Gatekeeper photos they’re HERE!

© ArtyMissK 2026

Floral folklore #3

On By ArtyMissKIn Photography2 Comments

Hello my friends! 

As you know I love discovering the quirky myths, folklore and random stories about the plants I’m growing in my garden (I’m a total plant-nerd) and those that I find on my walking adventures. So seeing as it’s been a while since I posted one of these I thought I’d look at three of my favourite plants to see if there’s any fun stories relating to them!!

I love a thistle (Cirsium vulgare) they are plants in the Asteraceae family (which believe it or not is the daisy family) and are noted for having prickly leaves and purple, pink, or white flower heads. I grow many, many thistles in the garden and even a random one thats (for some unknown reason) growing in amongst the grass that I don’t have the heart to mow over.

Continue reading “Floral folklore #3” →

Meadow Brown vs Gatekeeper!

On By ArtyMissKIn Photography

Hey friends! 

This week I’ve got a two new butterfly photographs to share with you, you’ve probably seen them in your gardens or local parks, small, unassuming little brown and orange butterflies flitting from flower to flower.

These are two of our most abundant butterflies and usually one or the other win the top spot in Save Butterflies summer citizen science experiment the Big Butterfly Count.

These two types of butterfly look more or less identical…

Meadow Brown
Gatekeeper

Meadow Brown (Maniola jurtina) is often the most abundant butterfly in many habitats, from gardens to quarries and is even spotted fluttering about even on overcast days, which is unusual as most butterflies are inactive in dull weather. They are a member of the ‘brown’ family and have a wingspan of up to 55mm.

The Gatekeeper (Pyronia tithonus) also known as the Hedge Brown is most likely to be spotted where clumps of flowers grow near gates or along hedges. Gatekeepers are often seen out and about with Ringlets and Meadow Browns and sometimes its quite hard to tell them apart. They are slightly smaller than Meadow Brown with a wingspan of up to 47mm (so theres not a lot in it size wise).

Continue reading “Meadow Brown vs Gatekeeper!” →

Embroidered denim jacket {Pt.5}

On By ArtyMissKIn Art2 Comments

Hey friends!

This week, I wanted to share another Wonderland flower jacket update!

I’ve finished the Tulips and the Sweet-pea flowers! Literally I couldn’t be more pleased with how its looking.

In the end I decided to make these final few flowers in really bright colours, the Sweet-pea faces were quite tricky to get right and the eyes were so tiny – in the end I used a single thread! The Tulips were much more enjoyable to create and I’m so happy with them, the general shape of the petals lend themselves to automatically look fairly three dimensional.

These bright colours frame the central white rose quite nicely.

I’m not planning to add anymore flowers now but the last stage is probably going to be a few bread-and-butterflies – either just a few dotted around or maybe an arch of them (I haven’t decided yet!).

Only a little bit more to do and I’ll be able to wash away the stick and stitch paper and finally see what it looks like!

So that’s it for this weeks denim-jacket-project post…I hope you enjoyed it.

As always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!

Ps. Its really hard to photograph this nicely in its current state!!