A couple of weeks ago I shared a photography post celebrating the rare Wall butterfly. I was over the moon to not only spot this butterfly in my garden last summer but to also have found a pupa in the grass that was invading my patio!
This is literally the rarest butterfly I’ve ever seen in my Wildspace!
Super exciting, and of course I had to make one to add to my collection.
I decided to make only make a female as there isn’t masses of difference between the two sexes.
So, Wall is basically a medium sized orange butterfly with brown patterning…sort of a cross between a Gatekeeper and a Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary. With a real life wingspan of 44 (male) and 46 (female) it means my needlework version is around 9cm across.
I’m so unbelievably pleased with this one!
As usual it has a very thin stainless steel wire concealed in the edge of the wings to help the keep their shape and it was lovely to work on such an intricate pattern.
Well that’s a wrap for this week…22 butterflies down and only 50 to go, I feel like I’m really getting through them only another twelve and I’ll be halfway through my challenge!! 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 wanna see all my other (much prettier) butterflies they’re HERE!
This week I’ve got a super special post for you, I’m really very excited about this one!!
But first lets go back to the glorious sunshine filled days of July 2025…
Last summer I met a whole bunch of Wall butterflies for the very first time, mainly while walking around the village – they seemed to have a colony in the old no longer used and derelict churchyard, but I wasn’t expecting to ever see one of these butterflies in my very own garden.
I always assumed any small-ish orange and brown butterfly in the garden was probably Meadow Brown or Gatekeeper so I wasn’t really chasing every single one I saw…big mistake when I realised my garden of wildflowers was attracting a slightly-rare butterfly I was over the moon.
Wall (Lasiommata megera) is similar in size (about 4.5cm) and colour to Gatekeeper, but is so much more patterned and I think looks more like a small fritillary butterfly. They like to bask in the sunshine on you guessed it walls.
Can you believe we’re already nearing the halfway point in June! (OMG that means we’re nearly halfway through the whole year!)
I’ve got a new one frame to share with you, I kinda ummed and arred about what I wanted to post this week and in the end I was scrolling on insta and one of my photos popped up so I figured as I hadn’t shared it here yet, why not do it now.
We regularly get hedgehogs in the garden here at night and a few weeks ago I met a real Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle out and about roaming the garden in the day! I’ve never seen a hedgehog during the day before, she was sitting in the grass and we didn’t want her to be left out in the open so out came the sturdy gloves and she was (very carefully) put in the quietest corner of the garden inside the hedgehog house. But I couldn’t resist getting a quick photo!
Look at her little nose!!
The European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) is one of our most famous wild animals, covered in sharp spikes and really rather sweet these animals are normally spotted at night but at certain times of the year can be seen during the day while collecting nest material!
Hedgehogs eat more or less anything they can catch from crunchy beetles, to slugs and worms! These amazing creatures are covered in about 7,000 spines which are actually modified hair (its super sharp!) and have the ability to roll themselves into a ball when threatened.
We have 3 or 4 individuals who are all different sizes, and I’m forever finding their droppings in my wildspace – I think backing onto natural farmland has a lot to do with the creatures that find the garden, we also get rabbits and badgers and somedays we even have Red Kites and Buzzards fly over the garden as well as have owls at night!).
After taking her photo and placing her in the hedgehog house, we put some food down – which she devoured in 10 minutes before disappearing under the fence so I think she was healthy and just out for a stroll!
I really hope we get hoglets in the future!
Thanks for stopping by to check out this post, do you get hedgehogs where you live? They are so very cute! As always thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!
I thought this week I’d share a new recipe with you!
I’ve got a set of specific recipes I always go to and with the prices for pre made baked goods going up and quality (sometimes) going down I’ve finally realised that I genuinely prefer my own baking over shop bought alternatives and its great having a cupboard full of fun ingredients that if the need arises I can just grab and bake myself into a happy place.
Personally I find baking to be rather soothing as something I really struggle with in life is anxiety (I get so upset and spiral if I think I’ve done something wrong or let people down) and I find one of the things that helps me calm down is baking, specifically baking biscuits or cookies. I’ve shared one or two of my recipes before and kinda thought why not post more of them and maybe make like a mini digital recipe book and share the ones that help my mental health the most (on the off chance other people find them helpful).
To be fair I don’t bake particularly complex things.
So, I figured I’d start with one of my favourites a chunky honey, oat and cranberry cookie decorated with lashings of dark chocolate that even has a chocolate base!
These cookies do contain egg so they aren’t vegan (but egg substitutes are available). I’m a vegetarian and I don’t like the taste of cows milk so I use oat/plant based instead and I’ve got a free ranging duck and a chicken for fresh eggs (I try to contribute as little as possible to intensive animal farming).
So with that in mind lets bake some awesome cookies…
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Makes 13-ish decent sized delicious chunky cookies.
For the biscuit –
225g unsalted butter (proper solid butter not spread and straight from the fridge)
55g Caster Sugar,
55g Light brown soft sugar
1 Large Egg
275g plain flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp organic Rowse honey
100g dried cranberries
1 tsp almond flavouring
90g plain chocolate, cut into chunks
170-200g dark chocolate (or milk if preferred)
Top top! Use an ice cream scoop to portion the dough, it make great chunky cookies!
The method –
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C, gas mark 4; line 2 large baking trays with baking parchment.
Chop the cold butter into cubes and lightly combine with both types of sugar using an electric whisk on a low setting.
Add the flour, bicarb, almond flavouring, honey and the egg and whisk to combine.
Mix in the cranberries and oats with a large spoon until distributed evenly through the doughand then rest the mix in the fridge for an hour.
Use an ice cream scoop to create chunky cookies (or use a spoon that works too!) and spread them across the baking trays.
Bake for 10 minutes until golden at the edges, remove from the over but leave to cool on the trays for 5 minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.
Decoration –
Once totally cool, lay the cookies back on the baking paper and melt 170-200g dark chocolate. Put a good spoonful of melted chocolate on the baking paper and then place each cookie on top for a decadent chocolate base. To use up the extra chocolate use a fork to flick it back and forth over the tops of each cookie.
After about an hour the chocolate will be set and you can peel them from the paper and enjoy them with a cup of tea!
They’ll store in an airtight container for 3 days!
Overall I’m always overjoyed by how yummy these cookies are.
These are so, so good and don’t take too much effort…the hardest bit is leaving them while the chocolate sets! I really quite enjoyed writing this, I love baking and I really hope you like this recipe (let me know if you give it a try).
As always thank you so much for reading my friends, and have a lovely week!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
ArtyMissK 
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