As previously reported on the blog, The Appalachian Pastel Society (APS) has announced it's 2007 exhibition winners: Ella Maguire Memorial Award winner, Irma P. Webb's Country Lady, is pictured here.

The APS has now announced its call for entries to next year's exhibition, for which Margaret Dyer will serve as juror. Best of Show will recieve $1,000 and other prizes will include cash awards for top winners, pastel sets and other items donated by pastel product suppliers. The opening reception will take place October 3, 2008 and the show runs through November 22, 2008 at the Gallery of the Arts Council of Henderson County, in Hendersonville, NC. The deadline for CD entries is August 1st, 2008. A prospectus for the exhibition will appear on the APS website soon.

Want to see your pastel society's news up in lights (so to speak)? Send the skinny to pjedit@fwpubs.com and include web-ready digital images at no more than 72 dpi.

People are funny about their old books and magazines. Some readers swear by the save-everything-forever approach, secure in the knowledge that they can go back and find information that they may want some day in the future. Others, less comfortable with clutter, may be a bit more inclined to read and recycle. Many find themselves somewhere in between, cranky about clutter but unwilling to let go of anything (me, me, me).

I know from our research (and from conversation) that most readers of The Pastel Journal fall into the keep-it-forever camp, at least when it comes to copies of TPJ. And I’d imagine that, depending on one’s skills (or interest) in organization, these magazine libraries may take the form of a cardboard box in the closet or a tidy shelf of labeled three-ring binders. But regardless of where you fall on the neat-freak scale, you're going to want to know about a brand-new option for maintaining your magazine archive that's compact and portable: We've just released a computer CD with digital files of every page of every issue published in 2007!

Here’s how it works, just pop the CD into your home computer or laptop. (The CD uses a PDF format, making it compatible for PC and Mac with Acrobat Reader, a free program already installed on most computers). There at your fingertips you'll find each issue of the magazine, ready to read page-by-page, just as you might a print issue. Or, browse the Table of Contents, and click on a story title to jump to that article. You can even click on coverlines to get to the related story. Best of all, if you know you saw an article (or artist or product review) in 2007, but can't remember which issue, you can use keyword search to locate it—that's a whole lot easier than digging through that cardboard box for dog-eared pages!

Click here to get more information about the CD (or to order your copy). And then, be on the look-out for a CD of 2006 issues later this year!