Diva and Joey Challenges

Hello again! As I’ve mentioned previously (not to rub it in, Canadianians), it’s spring in North Texas, which means that the weather has no idea what it’s going to be from one moment to the next. I’m about ready to bust out my collection of Aloha shirts (I own over two dozen), but I’m worried that if I do it will trigger a snowstorm.

Last weekend I went with my family and my in-laws to Scarborough Renaissance Festival in Waxahachie. It’s only about an hour or so drive from where I live to there, but when you’re travelling with three kids, an hour drive might as well be three days, so we booked a room and stayed the night.On the way in we noticed a patch of bluebonnet on the side of the highway next to the hotel and decided that we would take the traditional “kids in bluebonnets” picture. I’ve lived in Texas my whole life — and almost 6 years with kids — but I don’t think I’ve ever taken the classic photo until then:

The kids are (from left to right and pseudonymously) Vader, age almost 4; Princess Lala, 2 1/2; and DK, almost 6. Here’s a picture of the boys in their kilts at the Ren faire:

Anyway, enough about my adorable children who are never, ever any sort of stress in my life.

Diva’s Challenge 263 was a lot of fun and I’m pretty happy with what I came up with. I’ve been on a Zendala kick lately and it was awesome to use a whole-circle grid like this:

Okay, so the picture quality is not great. I’ll try to replace it with a good one next time I’m near a scanner.

Tangles:

Knightsbridge makes a good border for this, I think. Once I had that laid in, I blocked off sections of the remaining grid for other grid-based tangles such as

Pand which is such a fun pattern to play around with

Dex A nice 3d-effect one

B’Twined Remarkably easy for how awesome it looks

Butter Apparently the work of a six year old!

Trimonds

Zonked which didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped

Exis Another highly adaptable one

Yincut Because of course Yincut.

Joey’s Roman Numeral VII challenge was also fun. I went the Zendala route with this one as well:

The tangles:

N’Zeppel is one of the first tangles I learned and great for filling up big spaces. I used the globular grid pattern suggested in Diva’s challenge, but the edges were too distorted to use — so I converted those into a random sort of grid, which I think worked well with this pattern.

Marnie I think I did right. I used two different variations of it and I think either one looks pretty cool.

Crescent Moon

Fandango

Ando which is a brand new tangle. I wasn’t sure I’d like it, but I gave it a shot and I actually did get into it

Ping another fairly new one that’s a lot of fun to draw

X-ess I don’t know if I totally got what I was going for on this one, but it looks alright to me.