CRAFTY

You are looking at a butterfly feeder, which I painted when I was at the community art fair on Saturday. The sign at Tent No.#12 prominently displayed the following message in big bold letters: Garden Club Fund-Raiser. Crafts Available. You had to buy tickets, 25 cents each, and depending on which craft you chose to do, you had to hand-over your tickets to a garden club member, so he or she could explain what had to be done as they slid your tickets into plastic covered coffee cans. It was easy to see that the adult supervisor at the cash box devised a sophisticated system and that the children understood their duties.

There were numerous stations. I could have made a caterpillar out of half a Styrofoam egg carton, pipe cleaner, construction paper, top soil, and grass seed (4 tickets); or built a bird house planter from a kit donated by Home Depot (6 tickets); or assembled a germination necklace with a small plastic bag, ribbon, water-soaked cottonball, and bean (2 tickets); or bought an already assembled bug sucker made with a small prescription container and two straws protruding from the top (1 ticket); or, as you can see, painted a butterfly feeder (4 tickets).

This was not an easy decision to make because a small child (he said he was 11 ½ years old) demonstrated the bug sucker for me. He found a bug crawling on the tent’s mesh fabric, held the container close to his face with one straw in his mouth and another flexible straw carefully aimed at the bug, and with one long drawn in breath, vacuumed up the bug. The entertainment value alone was worth the price of admission (0 tickets). I explained to the energetic youngster that I only purchased $1 worth of tickets, and his rebuttal: I could get 4 bug suckers. I told him no thanks, that I’d rather feed the insects instead of capture them. In one last-ditch effort, he said I could capture them and feed them. I politely declined.