DIY Festival
Give yourself a DIY Festival Day, any day that suits you.
Each day of the self-guided or DIY Festival has a theme. There is a short video (2 or 3 minutes or so) to introduce the theme of the day and there are DIY activity ideas and free resources.
Most of these activities can be done wherever you are in Ireland, and there are suggestions of where to go to do them if you are in the Bantry area.
DIY Festival Day 1: Mosses and Liverworts
DIY Festival day 2: Seaweeds and Lichens
DIY Festival day 3: Creative Adventures with Leaves and Paint
DIY Festival day 4: Ellen’s Letters with a focus on letter writing in the early 1800s and Ellen’s Story.
Mosses and Liverworts
Surprise yourself with something quite wonderful that is so often past by or overlooked. See woolly fringes, springy turf, spreading stars and purple worms!
The suggested activity today is to use the free leaflet available here to find out more about mosses and liverworts (bryophytes). In Ireland you are never far from a moss, as Rory says, “they can be found absolutely everywhere”.
Ellen Hutchins thought that mosses were very beautiful. The Festival team would like to encourage you to find out something new about bryophytes, and take a closer look at three or more different mosses. See if you can spot the details of them and the differences between them that the leaflet highlights. There are also some facts about bryophytes that we think might surprise you.
While the leaflet was written for West Cork, most of it applies to all Ireland. Give it a go, see what you can find to explore, enjoy and appreciate in your local patch.
Using the camera on your mobile phone to enlarge them allows you to see beautiful tiny details. There is an intriguing miniature world out there for you to discover.
If you are in the Bantry Bay area, Glengarriff Woods Nature Reserve is one of the very best places to find mosses and liverworts, and you might like to try the Coorycommane Loop Walk, from Coomhola Bridge, or other places on the
Ellen Hutchins Heritage Trail and combine your moss hunting with hearing Ellen’s Story on the Audio Guide.
If this captured your interest for more information on bryophytes check out our page dedicated to them. See also the Moss Hunting page designed for 6 to 12 year olds.
Seaweeds and Lichens
There are two branches of botany featured today; seaweeds and lichens.
We think lichens are worth a closer look. Make today the day that you explore this fascinating and strange life form. Use the camera on your phone to enable you to see amazing details.
Ireland is one of the best countries in the world for lichens. They can be found everywhere – on the shore, in woods, in countryside and in towns. They grow on rocks, trees, soil, old fences, brick, slate, concrete and many other surfaces.
Choose your way in to finding out about lichens. There is a three minute film, Learning to Love Lichens. There is a free leaflet to download here. Written for Snave Beach on Bantry Bay, it can also be used in many other settings as an introduction. See the website page for two books both with a free online edition, one, an Introduction to Lichens written by Paul Whelan and the other a micro-nature trail of lichens and trees on Snave Beach.
Within Ireland, West Cork, especially the Bantry Bay area with Glengarriff Woods, is a lichen-rich hotspot. It is a wonderful place to start to look at lichens. Snave Beach has a great range of species and the micro-nature trail leaflet and book guide you through them by focusing on one tree after another along the shore.
Paul Whelan’s book, Oceanic Lichens: an introductory guide to Glengarriff Woodlands and Harbour can be bought online or from Bantry Bookshop. The website page has suggested online resources.
If you are near the coast, we invite you to explore your shore to look at seaweeds.
The free leaflet available here is written for inner Bantry Bay. How does your shore compare? Can you find the same species on it?
See if you can take your knowledge of seaweeds further. Are you familiar with the names of the parts of a seaweed; holdfast, stipe and frond? Can you identify and name the most common species? Learn about the zones in which they grow. Find out why they are important.
As with the lichens and the mosses, the variety of colour and form is incredible. There are tiny details that can only be seen through a hand lens or with the camera on your phone.
If you’d like to take your understanding of seaweeds the next step then Frances Gallagher’s book, Introduction to Seaweeds: a guide to inner Bantry Bay can be bought online or in Bantry Bookshop.
Creative Adventures with Leaves and Paint
Today’s theme is nature art, specifically Creative Adventures with Leaves and Paint. This is an engaging series (or two) on painting leaves presented by talented Co Cork nature artist, Sue van Coppenhagen.
This is your chance to explore ways of painting leaves in watercolour with expert tuition all for free.
Sue encourages you to appreciate the shapes, textures, colours and features of the leaves and shows you a range of techniques including staying true to one element; shape while experimenting with colour.
Watch the tiny taster video to see what is involved in Watercolour Flow, and then there are four activity video tutorials to follow through. Three that progress through stages of Watercolour Flow, and one long one for Leaf Painting. There is an accompanying materials list and instruction sheet.
This wonderful free online source is available because earlier in 2021 Sue, an experienced teacher as well as a talented artist, worked with the Ellen Hutchins Festival Team, with funding from Cork County Council Library and Arts Service, to produce videos for Cruinniú na nÓg, the day of free creativity for youth on 12th June.
These are the materials for the 13+ age range, and we thought that they were so good, it was a shame that they were not available for adults. Sue kindly agreed to them being rebadged for adults and this is their launch. The instructions and materials list still say 13+ which we just hope makes you feel young at heart!
We hope that you enjoy this nature art experience, combining art and science, and enabling you to be curious, be inspired and be creative.
If there are children or young people you know who would enjoy something similar, here are the videos for all the activities Sue produced for three age ranges: 5 to 8 years, 9 to 12 years, and 13+ and the materials list and instruction sheets.
And two longer more detailed videos to see: Watercolour Flow, Larger Scale Pictures
and Leaf Painting
Will you be curious and be inspired to find out more about Ellen’s seven year correspondence with fellow botanist Dawson Turner? They never met. They wrote about botany and also poetry, literature, landscape, and in Dawson Turner’s case his family, exhibitions he had seen, other botanists and their travels and publications. Or will you read some of the letters she wrote to her brothers?
The website page, Ellen’s Letters, has plenty to explore; there are letters to read and you can listen to extracts.
Are you interested in finding out more about letter writing in that period and how the postal system worked? There are five panels of an online exhibition, Putting Pen to Paper, letter writing materials of the early 1800s here.
The website page, The Early 1800s, has guidance on costume, dinner parties and marriage. Enjoy!