Your Butterfly Garden

It is important to stimulate your children at a young age. With newborns, they see mostly black and white, close up. Stimulate them with black and white patterns at a young age. Newborns also respond well to faces.

After about 4 months, babies really respond well to colors and it is the perfect time to start your butterfly garden. The first thing is to keep these decorations out of reach of babies to age three.

Hanging material:
Before we start looking into decorating tips, we should look at how to hang these beautiful flowers, butterflies, and other critters. All the decorations are pre-strung with nylon line and a clear plastic loop. You can use the loop to hang with a nail brad if you choose. We do not recommend using thumb-tacks as these fall out and can pose a choking hazard. We have actually found that Stikki Wax works really well. We found this product in Office Max next to the thumb tacks. They are much like the old blue tack stuff we used in college for our posters, but they are clear, and the objects actually stay put.

Color:
Picking which butterflies, flowers, dragonflies, bees, and ladybugs to get is pretty easy if you get them at The Butterfly Grove. All our items are carefully designed so that they all go with each other. Most pastels will go with each other, but if you really want to accent your butterflies, pick ones that are on the opposite end of the color wheel (complementary color). For example, if you have a yellow nursery, you would probably do well to have more purple butterflies than any other color.

Giving dimension:
Your butterflies and flowers are sent out flat for shipping purposes. Start by fluffing them up a bit. The wire is very flexible and so the wings can be spread out to give more of a flying look. The flower petals can be plumped up. Our Madison flowers work great if you cup them from the center, and then curve the petals backward.

Hanging butterflies from the ceiling:
The butterflies and dragonflies come with 2 strings attached to the wings to make them easy to hang from the wall. If you want to hang them from the ceiling and give them more of a flying look, use a thin clear line (fishing line works well), and tie it from about half way down the tail to and attach it to your clear hoop. This will raise the back end to give the butterflies a more animated look.

Depth:
Your butterflies, flowers, and critters come with the same length of line so they all hang on the same plane. If you would like them to fly at different levels, we suggest the following: Remove the lines from the hoop (either 2 or 3, depending on how you have chosen to hang yours… see above). Tie an extra line to all three, and then tie this line to the hoop. This will lengthen your line. Use different lengths to give various flying height to give depth to your room.
Tie backs:
Tie backs are useful for holding the curtains back to give your babies and butterflies some sun. Creating a tie back out of your butterfly is simple. Get about a foot long length of ribbon. We suggest organza. Glue the ribbon on to the back of the butterfly using either hot glue or fabric glue. Tie the ribbon around your curtain, and voila! You have a beautiful tie back. Having a trail of ribbon is nice too, but please be careful so that they are not long enough for your baby or toddler to reach and grab.

Curtain rod ends:
If you have dull curtain rods, why not spruce them up by adding a cute butterfly, bumblebee, or ladybug on either end?