Cicada wings and blooming things

Every year we are blessed with the emergence of one type of cicada or another. They spend most of their lives underground feeding on tree roots, once they emerge and break from their nymphal skins their adult life is relatively short. Their large size makes them easy to spot as they cling on to plant life or other things and I've even found them on the ground attempting to fly but their wings are so weak that all they can do is spin just a little bit.

The above is a photo of last year's Periodical Cicada coming out of its skin.

After looking at their wings closely I thought it would be an interesting fun project to create one in glass. The structure of the wing is really quite lovely.

For the first one I had made I had taken a wing that had fallen off of a cicada and simply scanned it and blew it up to a larger size to create a pattern.

For the first two wings I had created I has used textured iridescent glass. For the one I created yesterday I chose to use lightly textured sea green glass~~its fun to try things in different colors plus I've got a boat load of sea green glass that I need to find a use for.

For the previous two wings I had only added a single loop to the base of the wing, for this new one I've added a loop at a second location along one size as to allow the wing to be hung both vertically and horizontally.

I'm not quite sure if I like the location of the second loop, perhaps it should be placed further down towards the end of the wing.

Assembled using glass, copper foil and solder, the entire outer edge has been wrapped with a type of lead channel to give it strength. Cicada wing suncatcher is available for sale now in my Etsy shop.

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Spring has come on in a really strong way here this year. Our winter was really mild so everything had awoken quite early. Most of the trees are in full leaf already, which doesn't usually happen for another month.

A few days ago I had noticed some lovely wild azaleas growing on a hillside just down the road from me. There are quite a few of these shrubs, I had picked the easiest to climb to to get some photos.

The flowers are really lovely growing in clusters, bright white trumpets with a heavenly scent. Members of the rhododendron family, I'm not quite sure which species these are--wild, mountain or other.

This is a view of the shrub I had picked to photo, tucked among various other trees the whiteness really stands out looking for attention.