Anyone for Dandelion and Burdock?

While getting stuck into my new painting, I decided to Google the main plant in my new painting and hey presto it’s ''woolly burdock'', look at those cute woolly pom-poms! That’s the burdock.

I was even more surprised to find that you can eat it and then boom … a flash from the past, Dandelion and Burdock cordial popped into my head. I remember drinking Dandelion and Burdock cordial as a child and I seriously unimpressed. The drink was bitter, herby and tasted like liquorice and considering we call Dandelions pee the beds in Scotland, didn’t really appeal anyway. Your mum telling you it was good for you didn’t help matters, the dirty brown colour wasn’t appetising and so Dandelion and Burdock didn’t make it on my list of favourite drinks. Glad the flowers of burdock are cuter, they actually look like cotton wool balls and then burst into pink flower a little like thistles. 

Here you can see some of the pastels involved and one of my nasty pastel habits; lying pastels and pastel pencils on the top shelf of my easel, where unfortunately the dust from painting drops upon them and makes them grubby. Now comes the big dilemma, a clean up is on the cards but as the labels no longer come clean, is it time to remove the labels? 

I'm torn on this one, why? Well, firstly even if the label is a bit grubby from my ''clarty fingers'', the paper does protect the pastel stick if you happen to drop it and secondly you can (sometimes) still read the brand and the number of the colour on the paper wrapper. There is nothing more frustrating than falling in love with a colour, having a half a stub and not knowing what it is. I tend to try and leave my labels on as long as I can but even I have to admit that some of these are looking seriously revolting. 

Try as I might, I just can’t stop plopping those pastels down on that top shelf; some pastellists make a sort of tray out of aluminium foil and stick it above  the shelf but to be honest that seems very faffy to me, so I'll have to bite the bullet and clean. 

Now Dandelion and Burdock is said to clean the blood and help the digestion, we were always told that picking dandelion flowers made you wet the bed, so I think I'll skip the incontinence and stick with gin.