Last week I wrote The Messy Middle, with these pages in their unfinished state — collage laid down, journaling written, color promised but not yet delivered. Well. The color has arrived.

This first spread is the one that started the catching up. Dates and weather for the last days of February and the first days of March, alongside the March Coloring Book of Shadows page — A Witch’s Kitchen. The facing page is still doing its job as an Edges course notes page, now with that bright green wash making all those handwritten diagrams and observations feel like a proper sketchbook page rather than a notepad.

The January CBOS page finally got its color too — yes, in March, and I stand by it. The Edges Lesson Two notes on the left with the red onion and the figure in yellow are a good reminder that messy working pages can be beautiful ones.

This is the spread I’m most pleased with. The February CBOS page painted up beautifully, and the Cherry Blossom ink journaling on the right ties it all together. Reading back through what I wrote there — missing daily sketching, thinking about Ostara, the mention of Danny Gregory’s Start Your Sketchbook Journal course that I’ve been putting off since May — it’s a good reminder of why I keep this kind of sketchbook. It holds things.

And this is the one that closed the loop. More dates and weather, more journaling about Hearts & Honey and the Edges group run, and that final wash of green fading to yellow with Hearts & Honey written vertically down the side. It’s the most designed page of the section and it feels like a proper ending. The pinks of February moving into the spring colors of March!

A note on materials: the bright yellow you see in the CBOS images is ink — Diamine Pineapple Spritz from the 2025 Inkvent calendar, and it is exactly as cheerful as it sounds. The rest is watercolor from my usual palette. The greens throughout — the frames, the notes pages, and that final gradient block — are Winsor & Newton Sap Green, with Daniel Smith Hansa Yellow Light pulling the gradient toward that warm yellow finish.

The pages aren’t perfectly painted. Some of the CBOS collage images have text I’ve blurred for copyright reasons, and there are spots where I rushed. But color does something that no amount of careful collage and journaling can do on its own.