Late, but not forgotten.

Well laid plans and all that... this dare was done quite earlier in the week than this post might indicate. I wan't completely pleased with it and hoped to have another go at it but it did not pan out. Too many cookies for neighbors and holiday parties at kids schools to attend to (although the back side of a survey about the program I helped out with at the middle school might surprise the coordinators of the event!). So here it is...

Better late than never! See you next week!

Happy, Merry, Joyous Holiday... almost!

Oh, the happiest part of this time of year is that I am not currently in classes and have little teaching responsibility other than normal house and family stuff... it is heavenly! I have not actually been using all that time to the greatest benefit, but I am still getting used to HAVING it in the first place, and not having a long list of imposed tasks and deadlines to occupy my time. Ahhh, I hardly know what to do!

Participate in challenges, of course! Laura will be taking a break over the holidays so I will just have to go back and do some of the large backlog that I missed to keep myself busy. I have much to make up in challenges and in practice. I have been looking through old books trying to find the nifty Christmas tree I did last year that I wanted to use as a card this year and perusing all the older drawings as I looked for it... boy, I was much better then that I am now! But as for now, I did another holiday themed piece this week to take advantage of the last Diva Challenge for 2013...

I was thinking ornaments since we were doing the tree finally this week. I liked it in black and white, but it seemed like it needed something. Once the color was added it looked a little... 'coloring book' but maybe it is just the red-blue-green scheme. Unfortunately the sparkle gelly roll pens I used to highlight certain parts do not show up well in the scan because that does make it seem a little more elegant. 

this was before color

Well, I will be seeing you - have a great holiday season!

A new challenge

So here it is another week and another challenge - this time using the tangle Boo*Kee. I was finishing up my semester this week but did not have a lot of class work to do in the evenings - just very intense days after which I needed some veg time - perfect for drawing.

I used it mostly as a border and I like the possibility of a little 3-D effect on the version across the top. I also tried to make it a little bigger and 'form fitting' with 'meh' results. The thing I do like in this piece is the Mooka-inspired tendrils coming out of the Antidots. That cropped up in some of my class notes at some point and I like the new way to use Mooka. 

I had a couple of others in the drawing book, one was from a challenge a few weeks (months?) ago and the other was just an exercise in color over the Thanksgiving break. I thought I would scan them in for my files and share them here because I can. Have a great week!

Sea Creature

Rainbow Kustler

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.