Experimental Flowers

Here are a couple of more flowers I've made recently but haven't had a chance to post. The first is a purple poppy like flower; I was trying to figure out what would the size diffence in petals be if I used 15/o, 11/o, and 10/o beads for the same pattern. I also tried making the leaves with a reverse basic wire on the bottom so the wire can't be seen in the finished flower.

The next flowers are my attempts at some West Virgina wildflowers: fire pink and phlox. These were both made with Victorian technique. It seems to be better for very small, detailed flowers.

A lot of catching up since April!

Wow! It's been awhile since I've last posted!!! So here's a brief run down on my life since April. Our friends Mike and Kim got married in June in Kim's hometown close to Pittsburg, PA; Paul was in the wedding party. Lovely ceremoney! Congratulations to the happy bride and groom!

Mr. and Mrs. Michael L.

Paul & I at the wedding. Isn't he hansome!

After that we finally got all the hurricane damage to our house fixed, siding and all! Then to top it all off, Paul and I painted the ENTIRE outside of our house. Huge amount of work that took a good two weeks. The house came out beautiful! So, after that we needed some rest and relaxation and went kayaking on Red Creek (MS) for the day with a couple of our friends. Very neat, can't wait to get out there again.

Paul and James siding the house
Paul fishing on Red Creek

Also, good bars have been hard to come by since Katrina destroyed most of them as they were on the water, so we've found one in Pascagoula, MS that has really good bands--Buck Cherry, Nonpoint, Revelation Theory, Candle Box to name a few. It's weird how every small aspect of your life is changed by a natural distaster of this magnitude--who would have thought it would be hard to find a bar???

Getting ready to go to Thunders!

Now about my flowers! Since we've been spending every waking moment trying to fix our house, I haven't had much time to work on any. However I did make some poppies for one of my friends for her birthday. I've also sold my first arrangement!

Poppies for TashaMy first arrangement I've ever sold!

Paul's also accomplished one of the milestones as a graduate student--He passed his comprehensive exam's yesterday--YEAH! Congratulations! He's been studying for them for the past month. We went out to celebrate last evening with a few drinks. He's leaving this Sunday to go on a research cruise to collect larval billfish somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Hopefully he'll get to do a little blue water fishing on the side and catch us some goodies for our freezer :) He caught a marlin last year--released it as it is not the best fish to eat.

South Florida

Over the last weekend, Paul and I drove down to Ft. Lauderdale to see our friends who will be getting married in June (It was a bachlor/bachlorette bash). We had a neat house close to the beach. It ended up being a very interesting and fun time. We all got lovely tans, checked out the area, and learned to love Jäger bombs. At the end of our stay, we went to the Everglades for an air boat ride. Here's a couple of photos:

The north-eastern Everglades

Purple Gallinule

A Florida gator eye--Guess how close I was to take this picture :)

Back to a previous post

Back in February I mentioned I helped one of my friends celebrate her 30th in Mobile, AL--I've finally got the pictures back! Here's the before: And here's at the end of the night: On another note, the birthday girl was in a terrible car accident on Tuesday, which Paul and I actually saw on the way back from Florida. We didn't know it was our friends in the accident at the time. The car was so smashed, it just looked like a twisted chunk of silver metal. Luckily, she and the guy she was with are going to be okay!

Azaleas

I wanted to share our lovely azaleas (and my new roof!). I almost had these ripped out when we first bought the house, but Paul trimmed them up and now they are blooming beautifully!

Tiling

I've actually managed to learn to tile and did a backsplash in my kitchen!!!! It was fairly easy to do as long as my first line of vertical tiles was straight. My kitchen is finally back to pre-storm condition! Yeah! My next project is going to be tiling the floor in the dining room & kitchen.

I've been trying to dscape our yard too. That's been an interesting learning experience! I've been watching my yard for the past couple of weeks to see where the sun hits. I've planted foxgloves, caladiums, ferns, calla lilies, crocosmia, daisies, Louisiana yellow irises, white ginger, and Dutch irises. I've also ordered toad lilies (Tricyrtis) for some of the shaded areas. I'm pretty excited about them--they look like orchids and bloom in the fall. Our azaleas are blooming now (pink!) and are gorgeous! We trimmed them last September and they have lots of new growth.

Last couple of weeks

Sooooo....since I've last posted, I've been really busy at work and then managed to get sick. I took a couple of days off work to recooperate which was really nice (made some flowers!). Also, one of my girl friends turned 30 and we stayed in Mobile for the night to hit the clubs--7 girls and alcohol always make for a good evening!

I've actually had the chance to make a bunch of flowers lately...yeah!!! I've been working on fantasy flowers which have allowed me to get a bit creative and play with color combinations, and petal and leaf shapes. Here's a picture of some of the flowers I've been making.

Another thing, which I think I may try tonight, is the tiling I mentioned before. I've finally gotten all the things I need and am a little nervous about ripping apart my kitchen for this. Hopefully all goes well!

The Working Life

For the last week and a half I've been madly doing the winter quarter of the salt panne sampling for work. I have 4 pannes at the GBNERR and 2 on Deer Island Coastal Preserve. Salt pannes are high salinity areas in the mid to high marsh that have fairly unique plant and animal communities. I've been working on the Deer Island pannes this week doing some small mammal trapping, so I thought I'd post a picture of one of my sites and one of the boats I get to drive--Deer Islands is in the background. Sometimes my traps are sprung by things other than mammals and I find a very colorful, pissed-off land crab.

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.