It's not Autumn until you've made a conker worm...

We've managed to find a good couple of horse chestnut trees this year that haven't been completely pillaged by the local children.

At the weekend I was passing on my conker playing skills - you remember the game: the one where you have a conker on a length of string and someone else tries to hit it with their conker (invariably soaked in vinegar or baked to make it harder) and you keep smashing them together until one breaks or someone's hand gets accidentally smashed...

To avoid all the usual *pitfalls (*injuries) we used small conkers and haven't artificially hardened them.  Actually it was a lot more difficult than I remember to even hit the thing!

Today we used up a load making conker worms... this is a thing it seems that ever one knew about but me.  So yesterday I spend a good part of the day smashing conkers with nails to make the holes, and then today we fed wire through them to make these :

I know worms don't normally have eyes, but it just looked like a string of conkers otherwise - call it artistic licence.

Also we have started an experiment to see if it's true that spiders don't like the smell of conkers... today is day one, I'll report back after day four is complete.