First Ever Blog Post!

Hi All, and thanks for visiting!

This is my first ever blog post, and let me tell you - I've been putting this off for awhile.  I'm excited to start sharing with you all my creative process, my upsets & successes, as well as those things and people that I think are inspiring.  Along the way, maybe I'll inspire some of you, and I'm sure some of you will inspire me.  I'm very nervous about this whole blogging thing, but I'll do my best to be genuine, honest, and fun.

I'll leave you with some photos of an afternoon I spent last September harvesting porcupine quills.  Before anyone gets upset, let me explain the back story.  There's nothing that makes me sadder than seeing animals killed by the side of the road.  It's such a senseless death and although I don't approve of killing wild animals for their pelts, horns, tusks, etc I do feel that if they've already died, finding parts that can be used in craft is a way to honour them. 

So, with this in mind, I came to school one day and found out that our Maintenance Manager, J (who is my boss and one of the most amazing people ever) had come across two porcupines killed on the side of the road on his way in to work.  Not missing any opportunity to help out, Joe put both in the back of his truck so our Aboriginal Visual Arts program could harvest the quills and use them for their beadwork.  Because I'm the sort of girl I am, I jumped at the chance to learn how to pull quills from a porcupine.  I was really surprised at how much the hair and quills were mixed over the whole body, and it was very interesting to see the hairs that you could tell were growing into quills.

L from school taught me how to pull the quills and we shed a few tears together, but also got to know one another better which was a great experience.

More images after the jump.  If you're at all squeemish you might want to skip these, but if you're a curious sort I hope you find them interesting.

Photo credit to Karen Ruet of NBCCD for these photos.