June is always a special month. It can be bone-rattling cold or melting us away, but the light is incredibly energising.
Where we live, we still get a sunset followed by blue hour before the sun starts rising again. But it never gets very dark and I love it. We don’t even have curtains, I let all the light in day and night :-).

June can be pure horror when the Swedish airbzzforce jumps into action. Some years, simply opening a door or window means having to hunt mosquitoes. This year is certainly an exception, as we can even go for a walk in the evening! Most years I wear a jacket + a silly mosquito hat + a shower of mosquito repellent spray (or I refuse to leave the house) hehe.

I started with all the best intentions, but growing plants has been… challenging yet again. Right when my plants needed to be planted outside, we got a very cold and rainy period, then it got suddenly very warm during a weekend and all my sunflowers fainted. Then my pumpkin plants got eaten by snails one by one after yet another cold shock that had weakened them, and last but not least, one of my courgettes turned out to be a pumpkin and is now cramped in a tiny greenhouse that’s way too small.

I’m also trying to grow rhubarb from seeds and that is, so far, going ok. A bit too slow perhaps for the limited summer we have, but we’ll see.

But like every other year, my peas are doing great, and that’s probably the most important edible plant in my garden. Raspberries also seem to do well and the apple trees look promising too (they got a serious trim, so we weren’t sure they would be happy).

I don’t know about you, but I got fed up with all the subscriptions and never owning anything. I’m the kind of person who enjoys having the same music on repeat, watching movies several times, … having just a few things that work.
All that Bluetooth crap with speakers that don’t have buttons, the overload of choices, … arghjh. And even more annoying is that these stupid devices have opinions on the volume of my music, what I should be listening to etc. So out with that junk, I’ve had enough.
My dad fixed an old CD player (it also has a record player and cassettes) that is older than me. As I got the work-in-progress photos and videos of this whole system in pieces, I’m more than impressed that this old thing is now working perfectly! And it had some stickers from my brother which are, according to him, decades old.

Joining Frances Ives for a Patreon session with dramatic landscapes + water as a theme. I got the liquid charcoal out for this one;

It might sound silly but I enjoy going to the recycling center. I find it interesting to see what other people throw away- sometimes it’s frustrating when there is cool stuff in the containers.
There was a new container, however, where people can leave stuff and it’s free to take what others leave there. There is also a small shop with items that are still usable.
But mostly I’m attracted to the containers. Once I saw a whole pile of plaster teeth impressions- from a dentist maybe?

Midsummer nights:

While the rest of Europe was melting away during the heatwave, we got about 30*C. I think it’s the warmest we’ve experienced here, but never in June. Luckily there are lakes to cool down!

Inspired by Frances, I’ve been experimenting with inks, materials I’ve never really been friends with 🙂 — and I’m enjoying them more and more! While Frances The Enabler has some super cool, mega beautiful inks, I’m sticking to what I already have for now. Some inks are a few decades old, and I don’t like to waste things that are still usable.

But I have to be honest,… there is VERY little chance that the creepy acidic Halloween green ink from Ecoline will ever be used. I tried one drop in a sketch and regretted it right away.

Speaking of greens, I thought I didn’t really have or use green, but I’ve been enjoying several green Tombow markers:

Ok, going to study a bit of Swedish now. See you later!