DIY Bee and Bug Houses

One of my many autumn projects for the blog is a series of roosting houses for our winter birds made from dried craft gourds and decorated with pyrography and colored pencils.  Along the way to the creating these kettle gourd houses I wanted to first play around with ideas on making different roof styles.  Most DIY birdhouses use the stem area of the gourd for both hanging and as the roof area, but I wanted something different.

So I picked up some smaller dried craft gourds off of Ebay.com – nest egg gourds, small bottle gourds, and some dipper gourds.  Next I got out my bench knife, my boxes of craft supplies, my dried flowers and grass, and began experimenting.

I never meant to use these practice pieces here on my blog, but they were so fun to create and have so many possibilities that I just had to share them with you.  One of the little delights, shown below, is made with a nest egg gourd, approx. 2 1/2″ high by 1 3/4″ wide, with a corn husk roof, grapevine twist and barberry seed accents.

I was only going to make one or two to figure how the easiest method of adding a roof to a gourd.  I ended us with over a dozen in just a couple of day’s play.  As I experimented with several different roof material ideas I also came up with a multitude of uses for these small gourd houses.

Some of these miniature gourd birdhouses will become Christmas ornaments, some are made to go out into my garden as bee and bug houses, one became a little garden scene shelf decoration.  But my favorite so far is my larger, 4″ x 5″, seed house that will be my sister’s Christmas present.  Inside of this gourd, before I added the roof, I added 3 Red Oak trees, 5 Tulip Poplar trees, 6 White Dogwood trees, 6 Chinese False Dogwood trees, 6 Golden Chain trees, a huge bunch of marigolds, and 12 nest egg gourds – all viable seeds from my Maryland garden to her new Colorado home!  (Shhh! – Please don’t tell her!!!  It’s a surprise!!!)

So join me this week as I share the steps with you for making your own DIY Bee-Bug-Seed Houses for your Christmas tree and autumn gardens.  Then at the beginning of October we will start the pyrography roosting gourd houses with a free Lora S. Irish pattern.

Let your friends on FaceBook, Twitter, and Pintrest know so they can share the fun.

Lora ~