These birches grow in the park behind the bus stop. It looks like the branches are sugar-coated! Although it was dark I had to pull out my camera. The photos are in colour but the landscape is in black and white. Monochrome. This scene makes me think of woodblock printing, linocuts, engraving and etching. And again, I'm inspired to create patterns for fabrics.

This extraordinarily snowy winter we've been giving different kinds of snow names. Feather snow, icing sugar, ice mist, castor sugar, sea salt flakes, snowball snow, movie snow... It's been playful and imaginative.

I enjoy studying thoughts and ideas, the origin of words, to broaden my knowledge and explore the background. This winter I found out that it's a popular urban legend that the Inuit or Eskimo have an unusually large number of words for snow. And here I'd been saying "did you know that the Inuit have lots of words for snow!"...