Totally, Dewd!

Greetings. It's been a while.

The Diva this week challenged is to use Dewd,  a new tangle from Zentangle.com. There's a lot of good information at that link, including a video on how to draw Dewd.

It is a fun tangle, and I went big this time:

It has been AGES since I got out my large notebook with the paper that I love so much. Dewd was a good start, but wow did I ever run with it. It felt like this one might get too busy, but I think there's enough open space to make it just interesting.

One of the things I thought of as I was thinking what pattern to choose...well, patterns.  Human beings love them, whether in art or looking for faces in clouds. And repetition. When you're listening to music, whether a favorite, or something new, isn't it a treat when a riff gets repeated, or a theme from the first movement shows up in the third movement? Or think about collections that people gather. I have my chicken collection...and no two of them are the same...but there are many of them and all of them are chickens. That's what I thought about when I finished here...it's a delight to see the same pattern appear in different places, or one motif from a complicated pattern showing up over in the corner, or changing it out a little bit, exploring the different ways to fill up spaces using the basics of the pattern...variations on a theme? Unity of shape filled with diversity of detail.

Well, creating this was fun. It took a couple of evenings, and I finished a challenge before Saturday!

Other projects:

On the Traveling Tangles Project, I finally finished up something one of my swap partners treated me with way back when...Stephanie Drewa sent me nine ATC's that had been started...well I did a lot of them right away, then between the new job with new hours and other life stuff just crowding out my free time, a creativity slump hit, and I forgot about them. Well, I found them this week and finished them up.

These are my finishes...she started with patterns according to the ABC's, and I finished with the ZYX's :)

 

And these are Stephanie's starts. It's the first Traveling Tangles stuff that I've done in a long time. But now it does feel like I'm back.

But let's face it, what you all have been waiting for all along...a picture of the baby! 

Orion loves his Opa. 

And isn't Wylie just so sweet with that baby? My heart is full!

Minimalist Post Today?

The Diva created a tangle and named it after her amazing little boy Artoo.  Artoo has always reminded me of the Japanese Lantern:

This week's challenge was to use Artoo, and this is what I did with it:

Artoo, purk, pokeroot, b'twined, schnek and something fescu looking
but it isn't Fescu

It is pleasing EVERY time, to make an aura around a section then put something in behind...add shading and viola! One of my very favorite techniques.

Joey also has a challenge this week...a Cube string, looking 3-D and use B-tween .... well, here you have it:

This is actually the FRONT of the tile that I did the Diva challenge on. I've been doing that lately. Turning a tile over and tangling on the back. Well this one came from a batch I made with the tissue transfer coloring method.

I was hoping the side and top would look more 3-D but the way they look over lapping on the edges is nice. Makes up for it a bit.

And that's it.

Except one more pic...Orion had a baby blessing, and I brought a gift for him...and his mom put the ribbon on his head...

Jolly baby!

he was a hoot...kept on busy with his playthings, but he'd toss his head back and forth, making the little sparkly tendrils dangle before his eyes.

Nine Tiles!

I have enjoyed the nine tile montage challenge from Joey this past couple of months. This week is the final tile, and the challenge was to use poke root. FUN!

But I missed last week, when Printemps was the challenge pattern...and this was how I did that tile:

This is how it looks, connected to tile number 7, 

with N'zeppel.

 this is the last tile, pre-tangling...LOTS of white across there.
One thing I've been doing with all the white spaces in the tiles, has been to pack lots of tiny Tipple in there...and this is A LOT of white space...so I did the tiny Tipple but it got to be too much pretty fast..

So I poke rooted in there, and the rest flowed very easily. 

 I dunno, I think it turned out pretty neat. The white space full of tipple and pokeroot...just nice.

(edit: AND
I just (carefully) read Joey's challenge for this week
AND
it is PokeLEAF not PokeROOT.
oops.)

This is what things looked like before starting.

 This is what I ended up with...now, I like all of it, and there are places where the string connects things together, 

But the bottom half of the montage seems more disconnected.

I may play around with it some, to get things  more unified. 

But this has been SUCH a fun challenge. Most enjoyable!

From our Diva, we received a monotangle challenge. A monotangle is a great opportunity to explore one pattern, use it in a variety of ways, or bring about that unity that comes from using just one pattern in a piece.

This week we were given Striping to work with. 

shiny 3-D funky worms on a psychedelic floor?

The fun part of striping is making it look three dimensional by curving the stripes. This one would be trippy if the stripes were colored!

Oh! I also wanted to share this fun little tidbit...my almost last swap on swap bot was a zentangle swap, where we were to decorate a postcard with our tangles, and put it in an envelope with a tea bag...individually sealed, of course...

Well look what came in the mail from Singapore:

This is the work of Debbie New, whose blog Tangled Pursuits has shown off many Diva challenges over the years.

This is on my wall at work and I look at it frequently.

Who knew that taking up zentangle as a hobby would get me happy mail from SINGAPORE!

Oh, and one more thing:

Orion is 5 months old!

He can roll over all by himself tummy to back. Once on his back, he can scoot around by kicking his legs...that IS pretty comical. He's eating solids once a day. His favorite is mashed yams. He's a happy boy. 

thanks for reading...thanks for commenting!

N'zeppel and DuoTangles

This week has been an N'zeppel week in the challenges. 

Which I love,  because N'zeppel is my favorite tangle, especially when it comes time for shading. 

Also this week, for me anyway, it has been duotangle time. 

 It all started with the Diva challenge last week, using cozy patterns, which I did.

Then I got playing with Helen Williams' Crumpled Rose pattern and thought

"By George, wouldn't PixieOze go well here?"

and made this a duotangle, too.

So, when the Diva Challenge came along, I just kept up with that overarching theme:

N'zeppel and Orbs la dee working together in this one. 

Orbs la dee is another favorite. 

Then, when Adele Bruno put out a String Thing challenge using Fassett...

Fassett and Tipple. 

It has shading! It has contrast!

This one was so much fun. Isn't Fassett neat the way it goes deep?

Here are the nine ATC's before I strung them.

The Seventh Tile!

(This is NOT a duotangle)

This, from Joey's Nine Tile Montage challenge.

N'zeppel was her chosen tangle this week and the string I had in there was squarish with two loops.

N'zeppel and Coil worked well there.

And another loop did well with Meer.

I carried the rays over from Concert in the fourth tile.

This is how they look together. Pardoon the glare; they are in their page protector.

I'm still pondering Tile #6. It still seems so out of place.

 

There you have it.

 

 

 

 

Baby enjoying his blueberry puree. 

 

 

And that is all. Have a great day!

Comfort Tangles

Greetings, readers.

well it's been a week, and that's no lie. I'll start at the beginning.

A few weeks ago my son, who has bipolar disorder, flipped out and got physically abusive with his wife. He shifted from a sofa here to a floor there, various places until finally one of his cousins drove him to the ER and when they saw him, they admitted him, flat out. After 72 hours of stabilization and observation, he was released and has nowhere to go. His wife won't have him back, the cousins are all bad news and staying with them will be extremely unhealthy, and he is refusing to take a bed at a shelter. :( My homeless son. I am so sad for him.

That's the short version. Needless to say, this has been a huge worry for me this month. But so many times I've been able to get to a place of quiet and ease with my tangling...

The Guest blogger for the Diva this week gave us the assignment to choose cozy tangles. Well, I had already pretty much filled up a page of my sketchbook one evening, keeping cozy and de-stressing, so this is what I chose for that challenge:

I don't know what the frond like one is called, maybe Fronds? and of course the delightful Muscari. I call this one "Relaxation on Paper" because it gave me focus and kept me in the NOW for quite some time.

Thank goodness for this little hobby when things in life are dark.

And gratitude also for the wonderful things in life...like the baby getting back from Denver:

He found his feet!

This one makes me laugh.

His dad gave him a teether that looks like ribs! ha!

and his mom gave him blueberry puree

for his first solids. 

Hee hee hee!

Ain't life grand!

I also finished the current tile for Joey's nine tile montage challenge...then realized something. Lemme splain...

This is how I laid it out and put a string on it...but when I got to the sixth ATC, I found that the string doesn't connect with the bottom tile at all!...

so I got looking at the color pattern and thought...hmmm

Is this how it should go? because there's some warmer tones at the top of tiles 1-3...and there are some connections with the string, too!

Maybe this is the best arrangement:

HA!

Well anyway, no mistakes in zentangle. I'll figure out something. 

Meanwhile, here is my sixth tile for the Joey challenge

Ginili was the featured tangle, which is one of my favorites. It goes really well with Suzanne Fluhr's Aloha...which I didn't use here hahahaha but it is always worth a mention. 

So, you can see how the bottom of the tile has no string, which should be there to attach it to tile #9 in a few weeks. 

Hmmm. 

well, I'll figure it out. 

My daughter told me my montage reminds her of An Octopus's Garden in the Shade.

What do you think?

Garr, that sixth tile is OUT OF PLACE!!!

Other delights of the week:

IN WHICH ICONS GO OUTSIDE THE BOX

This on my FB feed...the holy family: Joseph playing with the Baby Jesus, and Mary reading, while the Ass eats the halo and the Ox is trying to figure out how to do the same. I just LOVE this image.

IN WHICH I MEET SOME FRIENDS

This is Anne.

Years ago, in the era of dial up, I was a member of a religious discussion group Renewing Your Mind. It was the first discussion forum I ever joined. That forum went away in 2001, to all of our deep sadness, but we continued in a different venue, still discussing every kind of thing...such as the vastly important thread about which is better, bagpipes or fiddles. Or what is the difference between red shift and blue shift (THE Tim Bergland has a blue shift...just so you know) (or was it periwinkle)

There I met (online) many people whom I have counted as friends for decades...and this year I met TWO OF THEM!

This is Byron

Anne was in town a week ago for a DoTerra conference, and Byron came to town this past week for something with his job. So, last week Anne and I went to the Blue Iguana, and yesterday Byron and I ate at the Red Iguana. Yum! and what a blessing to meet IRL these wonderful people who have been a very real part of my life for so many years.

I've met two others, a few years ago. Eleanor who came to Utah as part of a geological tour of the West, and Valerie who crashed at my place on her way across country to move to Moscow, Idaho from Maryland.

One of the great assets of the internet for us introverted types is that we get to connect with people without the draining effects of ACTUAL HUMAN CONTACT! But seriously, these people are FRIENDS that I treasure, and I hope to meet many more of them. Maybe some day I'll do some sofa surfing back east and visit ALL THE PEEPS!

IN WHICH MY MORNING COMMUTE IS GLORIOUS

While waiting for the Trax

A few days later, walking from the bus stop to work

Now, with these kinds of sunrises, AND there was a full out rainbow a few days ago, isn't it worth it to have a little bit of time waiting for public transport to get to work?

IN WHICH IT IS NOT MY BIRTHDAY NOR CHRISTMAS

When I got home from work day before yesterday, I noticed out the side of my eye, that someone had left the end table light on...it barely registered as I was absorbed in something or other. Then when I did look up WOW!

Wylie. He is REALLY good at gifts. But doesn't it make a pretty picture with my jumble there on the table? 

IN WHICH I ENJOY A TOMATO

better than candy

toodle-ooh...ttfn...later, gator...see ya when I look atcha...byeeee.

Quickly Now

This will be a quick one. I couldn't go back to sleep so I got up and decided to do a blog post.

First....here is a link to my newest pattern BOSCH  

I used it in a regular zentangle tile with N'zeppel
Bales, Leaflet, and Neuron

My challenges:

The Diva assigned square strings this week.

 My string...gee wiz, my wobbly border!

 I decided, since the string was squares, that I would use patterns featuring circles...Onomato with a few Scruffles, Nippa, Hopscotch, Go4th, Widgets...and then saw Equare, but it needed Wud eh?

I did do Joey's challenge last week, but haven't got it done for this week yet.

I'll have a pic with everything together, next time.

Then, because I was still in bosch mode, I decided to do the String thing challenge (but I didn't enter it)

Jetties, Lollywimple, Purk...and I threw Bosch into the mix

And then, since I was in the mood for my own patterns, I created a page with ONLY my patterns on it:

Torsdag, Starsket, Flysh, Tso, Spie, Nugget, Gala, Pillarph, Bosch

In the Traveling Tangle world I had the MOST delightful surprise, as Sue Bailey posted a long ago swap, with her finish:

Isn't this SO impressive! I love it!

And, my final swap bot swap: an avocado themed ATC:

this goes out tomorrow

this arrived yesterday

Of course, the big news all week was Hurricane Irma, and I made this with all that mayhem in mind:

Niuroda, N'zeppel, Diva Dance, Tipple, Printemps,
some triskadons and some triangles.

The new family has been out of town for two weeks, helping Orion's other gramma after knee surgery, so i don't have new pics...but these will do.











I sure do miss him.


see you next time!