Work in progress

I really think I could spend the rest of my life designing sleep pillows but sometimes you just have to get out of your comfort zones and explore other crafty herbal solutions in life....
  
  So it has been great fun this week thinking about housefiles.

 Yes you read that right but soon they will be making their presence felt on picnics and worst of all, at bedtime when you're nodding off with your lovely sleep pillow.

   I'm not sure where this idea came from, 
but every summer I hate having to resort 
to spraying aerosols around, containing 
goodness knows what, and the sticky patches 
you attach to windows and doors for insects
to fatally attach themselves to are not much 
better, especially as you end up with a housefly graveyard at the end of the summer. There has to be a better way and I have found it!

Inspired by the way the cicada is celebrated in southern France (see above) I took a closer look at drawings of the common housefly and, guess what, they are a thing of total beauty as indeed are all God's creatures up close and personal ... 


Turns out, when you research plants 
and their properties, just as some are a magnet 
to insects, others not so much, in fact the 
opposite. I'll spare you the science bit but plenty 
of herbs and spices which smell quite lovely to us (lavender, bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon sticks) are a total turn off to houseflies ...  d'you see where I'm going with this?

Last year when I was still immersed in my 
previous life as a local magazine editor, 
I stitched up a quick design, filled it with some 
lovely herbage, hung my Buzz off at the kitchen 
window and by golly no more flies in the house 
driving me nuts when I was cooking!
   Revisiting a design months later is always 
such fun - great to be your own critic sometimes 
so I did less hand stitching on the latest versions which saved time and allowed me to cram more detail into the front of the design.
  One thing I did not change one bit was the fragrant filling because, as they say, 'if it works, don't fix it'.

This year there will be no need for insect mass murder but instead a swarm of buzz offs will adorn every entry point to the house and deter and houseflies tempted by our summer cookin'. I will have had hours of pleasure making them and hope they will bring a smile to the faces of all who see them!