native greens

we had a going away party for the head teacher of te pouahi last night, she is a truly inspirational woman & much respected so she will be greatly missed. i made a few bits & bobs for the venue, in this arrangement the box is covered with bark that was laying around our woodpile & filled with harakeke & manuka. some of the girls made some flax flowers & we shoved them into pots of beech, taken from the mountain of winter trimmings piled up in our garden. i also made these lemon tartlets to take for shared kai, they were supposed to be mini lemon meringue pies but we won't go into that - suffice to say i am a lucky girl to have a granny in town.
i've corrected the spelling mistake & reprinted my business cards, originally i wanted to do them on recycled brown card but there wasn't any in the whole town of nelsonnyjim, in the end i printed them on watercolour paper so each card can be hand painted individually. wallah

the 4th day of may

i've been trying to make bouquets out of what i can find around here & up the matai valley, this bundle of foliage includes the very last of the strawberries from our patch. i love to collect & hold magnolia leaves at this time of year, that central yellow fade to a brown edge is so pretty. louis had a praying mantis as a pet for a while, we feed it insects we caught but it really was disturbing watching it eat them from the inside out. they give me the heeby jeebies, this one had his dukes up ready for a bit of powpow, ever the aggressor. did you know they sometimes eat their mates? ew.