Sunday, June 16, 2013

Repetition, grid style!

Squeezing another one in at the last moment! I had the chance to work on this week's challenge while the kids played in the pool in the evening and I had run out of the homework type things I had brought to do. It was kind of fun. I had to make up my own because I was never near the computer to look up the suggestions Maria had made in the original Zentangle blog post about it. A few are other grid-based tangles that sprang to mind so you may see some familiar's in there. I think my favorite is the archway pattern at the bottom. I also drew them out individually on the right so they can be seen in the simplest form. That is about all I've done besides homework and kids activities this week. We (hubby and I) managed a baseball practice, two games, two cross country practices (one thanks to a neighbor), a gymnastics lesson, one trip to the water park truncated by a thunderstorm and a couple of evening swims in the neighborhood pool on top of a 40+ work week and 4 days of 4 hour classes with accompanying homework. Sometimes it helps to write it all out or it doesn't seem like we accomplish much each week despite running around like headless chickens!



Sunday, June 9, 2013

Birds on a Wire and Nebulae on a shirt.

This week's Diva Challenge is to use a tangle that is a "border pattern". I have played with it before but I find it difficult to try intentionally to use a border pattern. It seems like it takes a certain type of string to host one successfully. So for this I just used it over and over again. I like it quite well this way. I think I would omit the 'ball' attached to the scroll the next time, but overall I like it as a fill pattern.




finished shirt
In other creative pursuits... I read an interesting blog post about painting space-scapes on black T-shirts and just had to try it out with the kids this weekend. Other than them not having enough patience to stick with the layers and layers of paint required to achieve the kind of look we were shooting for we had a good time. My fingernails are now caked with purple, black, red, yellow and blue acrylic paint that won't seem to scrub off... but I can always claim that it is interstellar space dust, right? If I can keep them from wearing them for one more day I can add the glow in the dark paint to really make them shine!


same shirt, just bleached
canvas tote now sporting a lovely nebula


same tote just bleached
my daughter's shirt front, just bleached


my daughter's new spiral armed galaxy shirt

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Bales and bales of Bales.

I have just gotten my toes in to test the waters of the new challenge so far this week but I can already tell I am going to have a great time browsing all the great, creative tangleations of Bales that were entered for this week's challenge over at The Diva. I worked out a bunch of testers and included some of my favorites in the official entry.

So, I found it interesting that if you begin with a triangular grid you get something that looks a lot like the Flower of Life version of Fife, until I went back to the description of Fife where it draws the same parallel. I will simply claim that great minds think alike! I like the harlequin look of the half-filled version and the checkerboard feel of the diagonal fill. The spirals of the Tortuca-version almost buries the original look of the Bales bones. All in all a pretty interesting experiment. 

In the interest of, you know, full disclosure, the one below is the sketch version where I was working some of my ideas out. I thought it was interesting that if you fill the space in Bales with a square spiral or continue to echo the curved lines to fill in the space you end up with what pretty well amounts to Puff and Socc.


I will be trying to fully enjoy my last week before my summer classes begin next week. Baseball practice and Gymnastics lessons will begin and hopefully will ease us back into having to be somewhere on a schedule before the full blown madness begins of mom being in class 4 days a week starts. I don't think the classes I will be in will be conducive to tangling in my notes much. Only time will tell. Have a great week.