How to make a butterfly feeder from materials around the home

I got an email from The Wildlife Trust which was promoting their 30 Days Wild project, and when I clicked over on to the website, I also found that they have a great activities page detailing various projects to make with your children.

How wonderful is that?  It's all for free and you can pick from making a butterfly table, a bird feeder, or even a wigwam for plants to name a few.

With easy to follow steps for children, items that can usually be found around the home and garden,  this is a great resource site to get us all helping nature and outside this summer.

We chose to make the butterfly feeding table but changed some of the materials to fit with what we had around the home and garage.

From the Wildlife Watch website, you will need:

* 4 screw eyes

* 30 cm square of plywood

* String

* Jamjar lids

* Sugar solution

* Coloured card

* Scissors.

We didn't have a 30cm square bit of plywood, what we did have for some reason, was a cupboard door from an Ikea unit, which was sitting waiting to be upcycled, in the garage.  Perfect.  Also see here for what flowers butterflies like.

We did find 4 odd metal screw eyes, but on looking around the garden, we don't have any thick enough tree branches to hang our table from, and having found some legs in the garage too, we decided to make a standing table rather than a hanging one.

The final deviant from the original plan was that we added velcro dots on the bottom of the lids to stop them from moving around.  Again, these were sourced from our craft supply in the house.

As per the original instructions, we added some colour paper (if nothing else, to cover the state of the door), and the table was ready to welcome the butterflies.

A lovely simple afternoon project using up my "just in case" pieces.