WOW! Look at me, posting a challenge! Looks like I am still alive after all.

It has been a LONG time since I've posted - turns out I am a crazy person and took a bunch of graduate credit hours along with student teaching in an accelerated physics class and, you know, having a family of three kids doing all sorts of activities not to mention just keeping up with their homework and house stuff... I have had a few things on my plate other than sewing and tangling.
I should be finished with the student teaching gig - which took up three days a week - and I ended up spending way more time than strictly required with them, but gosh, I have kinda gotten attached to those not-so-snotty teenagers. I can't imagine just saying - Later! and not showing up for the rest of the semester! Besides, I am still learning some teaching tricks from my most excellent collaborative teacher. Besides, it is WAY more fun to hang out there than it is to tackle my own school work which keeps me away from home for three hours, three nights a week... plus homework.
Ugh, no wonder I have had little time to meet challenge deadlines. I have done a few, but I am never done before Sunday night and am rarely satisfied with the results since I don't get to practice much. I have done some in class, but I have only 5 people in all of my classes, and whereas they all will, and have, vouched for my attentiveness to the lecturer even when I am drawing, I still feel awkward tangling away and not making eye contact with the professor.
So, imagine my surprise when I pulled up The Diva tonight for some eye-candy and found that the challenge this week was the new tangle Quib... which I just happened to try out this week while I was procrastinating, er, I mean taking a break from my studies. AND its done! (wow, lots of procrastination this week... I won't bore you with the details of the work I was avoiding!) Here it is!

Just to prove I have occasionally pulled out the ol' pen in class here is a page from one of my notebooks, worked on over many classes here and there and wherever I found myself not having to take actual notes ...

Maybe I will get to do a little more once the semester is over... but then there is always next semesters classes. Have a great weekend!

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!

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

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.

Black and White Challenge

Wow, this week's Diva Challenge was to use equal parts black and white in a piece. I will admit to having snuck a look at many before I ever embarked upon my own interpretation. I really loved the positive/negative ones I saw, but that is not the way I went with it. I just kept seeing all those tangles that rae nearly equal parts black and white like Bunzo to name the first that popped into my head. So I went that direction with it. I ended up using one that is not necessarily half and half normally, a version of Diva Dance, but I liked the way it came out. Given the black/white nature of the challenge I chose not to shade at all.

Then I thought I should finish up the second entry for last week's Zendalla challenge. It was finished except for shading., so I finished that up and will include it here. It is VERY different than the first entry, even though they use the same zendalla template. That is why I love doing more than one, to see how they differ when they 'grow up'.

Have a great week!

A problem of scale.

I hit the Zendalla Dare this weekend and printed out both the large and small templates because I 'saw' immediately what I wanted to put in part of the larger one. Then I ended up doing the smaller one first because I 'saw' what to put in a different part of that one. Why, you might ask, would both things not go in the same Zendalla? Well, it is a matter of scale. One pattern needed the larger areas of the large version, while the other needed the slightly smaller space available in the smaller version. So there I was, struggling with finding things for the other sections of both sizes! I did manage to finish the smaller one. The larger still sits unfinished. I will update this post, or do another, if I manage to come up with just the right thing, or decide to cast fate to the wind and roll the dice!

NOTE - I finished the second and published it in my next post here. The second is very different than the first, go check it out.

Kuke... and other yummy tangles.

This week's Diva Challenge is to use Kuke, a tangle inspired by lovely, crisp and tasty cucumbers. I love cucumbers and a whole lot of other yummy veggies... but I am not a huge fan of this tangle. Not sure why, I enjoy it in other people's work but it just never seems to look right in mine. I have a similarly hard time with a few other circle-based tangles that are fine in other's work, but look awkward in mine. So, I chose to not do it in "circles".

And I also blended a little Fescue and Allium into it as well. Can anyone tell me the name of the sine wave tangle I used in the two areas on either side of the fescue-kuke? I love that one and can not recall where I saw it or what it is called. I can see maybe using Kuke again sometime so I am glad I tried it, but it will likely not ever be a huge favorite. I will be honest and tell you that I did one other piece that I did not have time to scan but I didn't really like it much. I used small circles and the pattern definitely looks better larger in my opinion. The smaller scale really makes it just look busy in my other example. Hope everyone has a good week. We are headed into summer here and I have a few more weeks off before my summer classes begin. I intend to enjoy every minute.

Before I go I will share two other pieces I worked on these last two weeks...

This one just came out of wanting to use Phicops again and explore the Frickle and Fern like tangle that was inspired by the tea box the other week. I also love leaving sections blank, which I hadn't done in a while.

This one came out of trying to decide what tangles to introduce during my 15 minute spot on Zentangle during an end-of-semester cultural celebration for a class a couple of weeks ago. I ended up using Socc and Betweed and Kunstler.