Three Ring circus

This week's Diva Challenge is to put three tangles together: Tropicana and Cack, and choose a third tangle, either fescu, florz, or linq.

Cack is a tough one for me. It is difficult for me to see it as elegant or pretty. It does have some potential for festive-ness, but it's just an awkward pattern for me. So that is the tangle that I focused on for this challenge. I played around with it quite a bit

 I was trying anything I could to make it unique.

It looks better with a 3-D effect, in my opinion. You can see where I had tropicana and fescu in there. Just playing around, trying to see what looked good.

Thick stripes and thin strings

I like this version. Sort of sideways

The pattern reminds me of two peppermints, biting each other, Pacman style. I mean, really. How silly.

Here I threw in some linq

Well, with all this playing around, I just couldn't find a way to put the rather goofy cack with the more elegant tropicana (one of my favorite tangles). No matter what I did, cack looked out of place with the other patterns. I couldn't make it fit in. Even looking at other work using this pattern, cack just seems to stick out like a sore thumb.

Then, on a whim, I tried adding another dot to the circumference of the center circle.

I followed the same steps as the original cack, using a dot about a third of the way around the circle, and another dot, two thirds the way. And looky there! I REALLY like the look of this version. I played with it some more, and decided on a simple solution: One piece of cack, one motif of tropicana, and a floor of flord.  And some shading.

Like a shrine

So yeah. This piece is like a logo Earthlings might create, once the aliens land, bringing us the technology to reach the stars and teaching us about peaceful coexistence. Because the cack thingy looks like an interstellar traveling pod, resting on the earth. And Tropicana, as always, looks monumental.

In the end, I like this. And I'm glad to have come to a peace of sorts, with cack.In fact, I've got it in another piece I started last night, along with cruffle and some meringue. Widgets. etc.