Sketchbook Pages and a Wedding Gift

Creative projects from the last week

Happy Thursday! A short post this week as my kids are currently equal parts cute and exhausting, and I haven’t the spare brain energy to write anything Pulitzer-winning. Instead, I thought I’d share a couple of pages from my sketchbook and a fun little creative project I made for a wedding.

First up, this pumpkin sketch may seem more spooky than springtime, but I wanted to test out a new set of watercolour pencils and decided to sketch all the pumpkin varieties we’ve sown in the last few weeks! I’m delighted to say they have all germinated and we have at least one seedling from every variety. Who knows if they will all make it to spooky fruits, but it was fun to draw this tangle of vines to envision how they might all look together!

Next, I spent last Saturday at Butser Ancient Farm for their annual Beltain festival, and managed to slip away for 10 minutes to sketch the wickerman. This year he was inspired by one of the Beaker people, a culture of late Neolithic to early Bronze Age people living around 4,500 years ago in the temperate regions of Europe. They were named after the unique bell-shaped beakers excavated with their remains, which were decorated in horizontal zigzags using finely toothed stamps. The Butser wickerman had his own beaker in hand, and the reusable cups from the bar matched the zigzag decor, too! Nice touch.

Lastly, we are going to our friends’ wedding next month and I decided to grow them a pumpkin because surely everyone loves pumpkins as much as me?! We bought a huge polar bear pumpkin from our local pumpkin patch last year, then I saved and dried the seeds ready to replant this year. I thought a massive, white pumpkin was very appropriate for a wedding, so I’m popping one of the baby plants in this white pot which I’ve decorated with POSCA pens.

If you fancy something to read today, check out the lovely Jennifer Lane’s Substack for an interview with me all about my upcoming book Ebb and Flow: A Guide to Seasonal Living. Jenn and I have known each other for several years now and she is a wonderful friend, fellow author and advocate for finding balance in life. If you love nature, seasonal living and green witchcraft, you will love everything she writes.

Feeling into the ebb & flow 🌊

I will leave you with a photo I took yesterday when the kids and I were out walking in the woods. We found this baby fern curled up into a heart with a little spider on it. Isn’t that nice?