Suzy Mosh *I* Challenge

some good challenges this week, and the first one I completed is SuzyMosh's. The challenge is to use new tangles, starting with the letter I.

There are a few at tanglepatterns.com, and I chose insydout and itsytwisty. Itsytwisty is one I've been wanting to learn, and it IS a lot of fun.

As I played with it, I found there's an easy way to make the "ribbon" look really nice, but not until I was almost done with my piece.

 Here I have the first two strands of itsytwisty, and you can see how the "twist" looks kind of pointy and not elegant. I don't dislike it, but it really doesn't look ribbony at all. I was following the step outs on  Diana Sexton's blog the best i could but for some reason, I thought the idea was to make these points connect, but it really didn't make a smooth, flowing ribbon at all. (Though I actually like the look of that last twist in the burgundy ribbon. I'd like to explore the sort of angular effect it has in other patterns that have a curve to them.

In this one, I figure it out, and it has a much smoother look.

So I thought I'd put a little tutorial here, to sort of show what I finally figured out.

so, in itsytwisty, you have a line of buttons, with a ribbon threading through them. To show what I did, I just made the lines that go inside each "button."

Notice, I numbered the ends of each line 1 or 2.
when drawing the lines for the ribbons, go from 1 to 1, and then from 2 to 2. This causes the lines to naturally cross each other.
On the bottom, you do the same thing, on the alternating lines. Without the disc shapes there, it's easy to connect them on the bottom, but when you have the "buttons" in place, you have to sort of eyeball where the connections on the bottom would appear, but you still go from 1 to 1 and from 2 to 2. 

So, that is how I did the last strand of itsytwisty in my piece.

And this is what I ended up with:

On the left edge is something I enjoy doing, that I've never named. It's got elements of flux with some classic Mehndi thrown in, and lots of spirals. A double aura around that. Then a rounded Insydout. some Flux and Fescu along the edge of that, with Niuroda nestled up in the corner. And three strands of itsytwisty flowing out from there. The starry things are a simplified version of my Starsket.

Insydout will be fun to play with some more, and I like insydout. It has potential for a lot of variety.