Free Herb Magazine

I posted this to my garden blog but wanted to share it here.
The Essential Herbal magazine is offering a free copy of its sold out edition concerning vegetable gardens :)
dig for victory here and get your own copy!

You might also like to know that Mother Earth News has a "Grow Your Own Food" guide out as well- worth getting :)
Those of us who have been doing this for years are loving the new trend... :D

Nature Notes 19th March

Nature Notes 19th March
Originally uploaded by spinneretta
Click for larger image.

I discovered my watercolour Moleskine was not yet filled. I had left it unfilled so I had a travel book in my bag, but recently I have put my other journals in there anyway :) So I decided today was the day to work on those last few spreads. I did a couple of warm up pages- nothing to show here... then I made this page :)

Art Pages

Playing with my pastels again :) Started out with a study of hands...

I am exploring this medium some, but the limited movement my sore wrist allows is making it difficult :) I really like the one on the left though...
Although I might add that after using pastels my hands can look like the one on the right ;)

Dashed outside this afternoon for a little while to enjoy the sun. It's been 5 days of rain- I am out of practise with that ;)
My daffodils are in full bloom- two clumps are just getting ready :) My hyacinths are smelling sweet and the paeonies are sprouting.
Nice day :)

Whimsy

Whimsy
Originally uploaded by spinneretta

Click for a larger picture.

As I told Lin this morning, I love fog- I always have. That's probably a good thing because there is a lot of fog in the area in England where I come from :)
So when I got up this morning, I heard on the radio that there were fog advisories- THICK fog they said.
"That's not thick!" was my response. It gets a lot thicker in England :)
I wanted to paint the fog- so I grabbed my pastels, and a suitably grey pastel paper and drew. It's a little hard because something has strained my wrist, and it hurts to do things like funny angles of drawing or shaking the fixative >:/
So I went whimsical... the neighbour's stinkford Bradford pear in the fog...

Spring Garden

Spring Garden
Originally uploaded by spinneretta

Since the weather is supposedly going to get cold again, I took advantage of the 80 degree weather to record some of it :)
My usual yearly peach blossom sketch, a few birds and plants and the rapidly darkening sky.
I really hope it doesn't get snowy again...