the OFFPRINT: Longing for Spring

Thanks to this color palette:

I want to be slathered in suntan lotion, wearing shorts, a cute top and a sweater and laying on a towel on some warm grass somewhere. There can even be a breeze if Nature's really feeling like it.

Thanks for that, Color Collective. I love you and your beautiful colors and awesome pictures. But you make me want too much.

This post from Apartment Therapy intrigues me. It sums up the best links to the compaines with the best mail-order plants. Yes, you read that correctly. Mail. Order. Plants.

Say what?! I think it's crazy. What happened to shopping at a nursery or, you know, Home Depot and Lowes if you're about big box stores. (Annie and I got the best plant from Home Depot for a whopping 50 cents. It's called "Purple Passion". It's our love-fern equivalent.)

But really, that post just makes me want to garden. And have a garden. Particularly a kitchen garden. But when I get too lusty after my own plot of land, I remember this quote I picked up recently:

If you ever get sad that you don't have a garden of your own, remember that you have hundreds of beautiful gardens all over the city and all over the world.

Try to erase the language of "want" from your head. You have everything that you need.

--from Prudent Advice for My Baby Daughter

So instead I'll just take a good look at our Purple Passion, give it a sip of water and enjoy the garden that's already planted and thriving all around me.

This book looks wonderful. Warm weather always makes me want to break out my screenprinting supplies and take on a project.

Thanks to AT for this.

What I like about this book, though, is that it uses really simple methods with, by all appearances, foolproof directions. There are a ton of projects from screenprinted messenger bags to making a wax seal stamp and how to affix your wax seal to a letter or bottle. Anyone wanting to buy me a cakeday present can keep this bad boy in mind.