Busy week!

The last week and weekend have been spent renovating/repairing our house. The repairing part is due to Hurricane Katrina....yes it's still a mess down here! The renovating part is what we (me and Paul, my significant other) should have been doing instead of dealing with hurricanes!!!!!!!!! So, we sanded the new drywall in our kitchen (gianormous mess), painted the master bath and kitchen, replaced cabinet hardware and outlet/switch covers and blew insulation into the attic (another huge mess)...whewwww. I'll post pictures of the renovations/repairs after I tile a backsplash in the kitchen, which should be interesting concidering I've never tiled anything in my life. I already have the tiles--Cayman Dolphin series from Lowes. They're really neat and kind of look like crashing surf.

These are some pictures of the house the day after Katrina. AND we were LUCKY!! On the next street to the south of us there is nothing left, just slabs. Sooo...we closed on our house at the end of June 2005, moved in August 5 and was hit by the most destructive hurricane to make landfall on the US on August 29. The interior is our kitchen; when the gabled ends blew out the kitchen ceiling fell in. Believe it or not, we didn't loose anything! No flooding either, just rainwater.

A couple of recent projects......

I thought I would post some pictures of my recent projects. One is a trillium bouquet I made for my mother for Christmas and the other is an arrangement of pitcher plant flowers. I've been a bit stuck on pitcher plant flowers ever since I got to see them firsthand last spring in the pine savanahs of the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (where I work).






Below are photograhs I took of pitcher plants in the wild. The redish-orange flowers are hybrids of the whitetop pitcher plant (Sarracenia leucophylla) and the yellow trumpet pitcher plant (S. alta). The yellow flowers are the yellow trumpet. The pink interior shot is a variety of the purple pitcher plant (S. purpurea) found only along the Gulf coast of the US.

Hepatica

I think with my very first post, I'll include a picture of Hepatica I made for my mom for Mother's day last year. Hepatica is a small wildflower that grows in woodland areas. This is a combination of both the French and Victorian techniques. I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out how to make the leaves and finally used the "lacing as you go" techique. For those of you who don't know, this stuff is called beaded flowers--flowers made with beads and wire. Both techniques have been around for 300+ yrs. I've been interested in (read: quite obsessed by) beaded flowers since February 2005. Prior to that I was doing off loom and loomed bead works.