I continue to see new creative projects which I can realize with a simple coconut. After making a drinking cup, a cookie jar and an orchid pot I now recreated a project I already did in the past, but now with a coconut as an important part. My new project is a coco insect hotel. I made an insect hotel without any coconut in the past that is already hanging on our outside wall for a couple of years. Sometimes insects hang around, but it is not a very popular/busy object.
The ‘old’ insect hotel requires that the insects fly. Flying is the only way to arrive and that probably limits the usage that we see. The newly created coco insect hotel is created in a similar way, but I will not put it on the wall, but instead simply place it among the plants on the dirt. This way the insect hotel can serve a much greater amount of insects.
First step was cutting a cocunut in half. This is getting easier every time now that I’m getting some experience. With the coco cut open you need to remove all the white inside. I use a dull knife to cut the white ‘meat’ in small strips which are easy to remove. After drying the empty coconut I sanded the edges and that was the coco part. All done. Now I get some reed, and cut this into small pieces of around 4 cm each. I used two types of reed, new fresh green reed, and older dried up light brown reed. The fresh green reed was easier to deform, so it made it easier to fit inside the coco. Before putting the reed inside the coco I sanded it a little to take away any imperfections. I mixed sizes so that different insect could find different sizes rooms in our hotel.
I put some paper inside the back of the coco, so the reed does no go in to the coco all the way to the back. The paper fills up the back part, and after filling up the front with the pieces of reed I could align the pieces a little by pushing the a bit deeper into the paper, or by pulling them out a bit.
Super easy, super tasty and super fun to make. What else could you ask for.
I bought the mechanism for a tidal clock. Basically a regular clock, but instead of showing the hours it will indicate the time it takes to reach high tide and low tide. We love visiting the La Laja beach with low tide, so this is a perfect ‘thing’ to place on the wall. I only bought the mechanism, so I will need to make the entire clock myself. I could have bought a finished product directly, but I did not like the versions that were available. I thought I could do better myself.
Our birdhouse showed us we that we had set our goals way to high. Our objectives were unobtainable. Maybe it was caused by the heat, or the general lack of birds in our area. We don’t know, but it is clear that after more than half a year we haven’t seen a single bird getting near the birdhouse we placed outside of Alex’ room.
It arrived! A big box was delivered to my home. I am very happy because I know what is inside. Do you know? The kids will be happy for sure, even though Alan will need to be a bit patient. He is still a little small for this box. Alex will be very happy, as it fits perfectly with the small collection he already has.
All the kids in Alex’ school have a spinner, except for Alex, and that situation needed to be corrected. Buying a spinner would have been the easiest, but making our own spinning toy was much more fun.
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