It has been a hot and sunny weekend here in the deep mid-west!  It did rain last night and that was very welcome.

I had a single ripe tomato on my plants and this morning when I went to pick it, it had gone, stolen, presumed eaten.  One of our furry long tailed garden friends I am sure is the guilty party.  I always try to grow lots of tomatoes to share with the squirrels but to take the very first ripe one, that was mean. Lesson learnt, when I see a ripe tomato, don’t leave it, pick it!

Over the weekend  I bought a few new art supplies in the form of acrylic gouache and some basic kraft paper to make sketchbooks from.  I love the colours this gouache comes in and choosing a few was a difficult job.

I bought this book from the library sale cart for a whole 25cents!  I don’t think I will use it for anything except sitting on my shelf because my grandad was a morris dancer and it reminds me of all the dances we used to watch as kids!

Of course we ended up at the antique mall for a quick look around.  I wasn’t going to go in, but I am pleased I did as I bought this ‘Larousse Illustre’ encyclopedia/dictionary.

I love that it is called ‘Nouveau Petit’ because it is neither!  I already have a 1930’s edition which is gorgeous and compared to that, this one is a much newer 1952 edition!  As for the petit, it is certainly not at more than 1700 pages!

It is full of wonderful illustrations.

Another thing I stumbled upon this weekend was the new 30 day mark making challenge hosted by Rae Missigman, I found it a couple of days in but catching up is no problem.  I decided I would like to make a mini journal for the challenge and try to fill it up.

I made a couple of stacks of paper and needed a cover.  Then I remembered the good old library sale cart, I saw a Raymond Bradbury novel with a great cover on Friday.  I raced to the library 15 minutes before they were due to close and grabbed my prize.

It was the perfect size for my two signature book.

Apologies to Mr Bradbury, I have never read this book but I did hack the cover off to use for my sketchbook.  However I love my sketchbook very much!

The paper inside is plain kraft paper and some textured whitish pale greenish paper I bought a few weeks ago from my local art store.

So that was how I filled up my weekend, as well as a couple of visits to the gym, doughnuts (keep a balance!), dog walking and dodging the heat.

I hope you had a lovely weekend.

Happy Monday x