Diva 277 and Joey 123

I skipped out on Diva’s “moving” challenge because I prefer to do my tangling while sitting still. But this week’s challenge, “circles” was right in my wheelehouse (see what I did there?)

I started with this for my string:

The outermost ring is a CD — the template I usually use for the Zendala things I do obsessively and that I’ll get around to posting someday. The other circles are various other round things lying around — a toy cookie from my kids’ play kitchen, the inner circle of the CD, one of those plastic baby ring-stacker rings. So that was fun. Rather than doing any specific tangles, I decided to do a variation of Stricles: I drew a wobbly sort of grid across it, then filled in the cells with various solids and stripes — and one column of Nipa.

Diva Challenge 277

I left it unshaded for now. I might go back and shade some more later, but I kind of like the plain look so far.

Made by Joey 123

Made By Joey Challenge 123

The focus-tangle for this one is a cool little thing called “Pearly” that I just encountered. The pearls reminded me of Purk, always a favorite of mine, and the star shape of the string made me think of Arukas and Auraknot. I also used a tangleation of Pand I’ve worked up that I call Rzr.

 

Weekly Challenges

So much on my mind. Someday I’ll actually sit down and blog about it…

Joey Challenge 121

Joey Challenge 121

The string for the week’s challenge was a peace sign with the suggested tangle “Organic.” This is one that never seems to come out exactly as I want it, but I think I got a good effect this time. I also used Paradox, which has always been one of my favorites.

Diva Challenge #275: Give Peace a Chance

Diva Challenge #275

I had several ideas for what to do with this one. Ultimately, I decided to use the letters P-A-X — Latin for peace — as a string and as the letters for my tangles. Here is the string I started with:

Sorry for the poor picture quality.

I suppose using “Xplode” for a peace-themed ZIA is a bit ironic, but there aren’t a lot of good “x” tangles. I also used one of the newest TP patterns, A-Dalfa, plus one that is not new at all but that I don’t think I’ve ever used before, Pendrils.

 

 

Diva Challenge 274

Diva Challenge 274

I haven’t posted in ages, and this one will be real quick, but I wanted to share that I have been tangling — I just haven’t been sharing. This is for the most recent Diva Challenge, number 274, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” I decided not just to celebrate my native land of the USA, but also the diversity and equality represented by the rainbow flag of the Pride movement. It was fun crafting with construction paper and glue sticks again.

Challenges

Two really fun challenges this past week!

Diva’s Challenge #270: Skye

Diva’s Challenge 270: Skye

Skye  is a new tangle pattern that’s pretty tricky but has a bold look that I really like. I decided it would play nicely with the most recent string on Tanglepatterns.com, number 211. I also figured this would be a fun time to play around with some “sky” themed tangles. I’ve got the sun (Sonnenband, Sundy), clouds (Cloudfall, Popcloud), rain (Rain), the moon (Crescent Moon, Eclipse [technically I suppose this also would include the sun]), and stars (Star Map, Starawn).

Made By Joey Challenge 115

Made By Joey Challenge #115: Roman Numeral XV

Joey gave us a theme for this one with her selected tangles: Seedings, Black Eyed Peas, Chard, Corn Rows, and Garlic Cloves. To this I added some Verdigogh and Bluebonnets, sticking with the theme. And I believe this is the last of the Roman Numerals. I can’t wait to see what we have next week.

Challenges Accepted

Made By Joey Challenge 114

Roman Numeral XIV

As I understand it, this is the penultimate Joey Roman Numeral challenge. But hey, I can always continue them: it’s not like I’ll run out of Roman Numerals, although it will probably be hard to string something like MDCCCLXXII.

I decided pretty quickly that the big spaces above and below the numeral should be great big barber poles, then it was pretty easy to decide on barber poling the rest of the string as well. I tried a variety of patterns for the poles — not certain how well it worked, but it was interesting. There’s also Bunzo and Shattuck — both of these are ones I initially had a really hard time with but have really enjoyed now that I have the hang of it. There were two new-to-me background tangles — Papyrus and Cheesecloth. I like the look of Cheesecloth but I’m not so sure I enjoyed drawing MDCCCLXXII teeny tiny lines. Also, the Cadent didn’t show up quite as well as I would have liked.

Diva Challenge 269

Diva Challenge 269: Ellish

Before I talk about this ZIA, I want to introduce you to my daughter. She’s the youngest of my three kids, two and a half years old. We call her “Lala.” There is no way I could describe how incredible she is: she’s bright, funny, self-confident, smart. Here are some representative conversations with her:

Me: “Good morning, little lady!”
Her: “Me not little lady! Me just Lala!”
“Okay, good morning Just Lala.”
“Me not Just Lala me just…Lala.”

Her: “I’m a puppy! Woof woof!”
Me: “Woof woof.”
Her: “Daddy, you’re not a puppy: you’re a bee!”

Anyway, since this new tangle is based on the letter “L,” I figured it would be fun to play around with the name “Lala.” So the ribbon at the bottom is a tangelation on Eke with a cursive “l” and “a.” I also tangleated “Ix” with the Anglo-Saxon runes “lagu” (l) and “Ac” (a). Speaking of which, at some point I really should post the rest of my Tangle-Saxon things. I’ve also got something — to be honest, I don’t know what it is — with “lala” in cursive with auras around it.

The centerpiece is, of course, the new tangle Ellish which I think its pretty groovy. I played around with a couple of variations on it. The description of the tangle calls it “Betweedy,” which I don’t really see, but I put in a little Betweedy something in it. It reminds me more of Auraknot, so I did one of those. Oh, and I tried to do a straight-line version of it below the main Ellish. It did not work the way I’d planned, but it’s something I may work on.

 

Weekly Challenges

Hello one and all! I’m actually posting challenges from the last 2 weeks because my life has been so crazy lately. I suppose I’ll start with the more recent ones:

Diva Challenge 268

Diva Challenge 268

This challenge was called “A bit-o-black.” I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do something with a lot of black pearls. so I focused on orb-y patterns. The string, randomly selected from Tanglepatterns.com, is number 142. It was fun, because I got to play with some of my favorite tangles — Boo*Kee, Oybay, Purk, and Onamata. I also worked in some Quibble, Akoya, and one non-orb pattern, D-Vine. The part that was less fun was filling in all the orbs. My ultra-fine-tip black sharpie was all like, “ha ha, nope,” so I ended up using a gel-ink pen, which I think ended up okay. For shading I went with a darker pencil than the HB I usually use — I think it was a 3B.

Made by Joey 113

Made By Joey Weekly Challenge 113

This one was a lot of fun. It’s based on a Roman Numeral XII; the number is a lot more obvious than it is in a lot of my others I’ve done for this challenge series. The tangles were Chemystery, Cruffle, Garlic Cloves (really they look more like watermelons or beach balls to me, but I like the pattern anyway), Ipso, and Verdigogh. All of these are fun except for Verdigogh which I’ve never gotten along with for some reason. I think it ended up working for me this time, though. The real fun was the coloring. For the atoms or whatever they’re supposed to be in Chemystery, I used my Sharpies. I wasn’t actually expecting them to be so translucent, but I kind of like how they look like multi-colored bubbles. For the “ladders” of Chem and the “stalk” of Verd I used some metalic Crayola markers, and I’m pleased with how they turned out. For the rest I used my favorite colored pencils: before I started Zentangle earlier this year, I was on a real coloring kick. Looking at this now, I realize that I never really shaded it, but I actually kind of like it this way.

Now let’s step in the wayback machine:

Diva Challenge 267

Diva Challenge 267

This one is a duotangle of Drupe and Pokeroot. I’ve never been a huge fan of Pokeroot, to be honest, but I like a good challenge. Once again, the coloring was the real fun here. Oh, and yeah, some of those are actually Pokeleaf instead of Pokeroot.

Joey Challenge 112

Made By Joey Weekly Challenge 112

This one is a Monotangle on Knightsbridge. It’s one of those basic patterns that I actually try not do too often so that I don’t get too much in a comfort zone with it. I took some inspiration from Margaret Bremmer’s expanded guide to the tangle — if you haven’t checked those out you really should. I made an attempt at Knightspeek, which I thought was really cool since it resembles a pattern I learned and loved in elementary school — and I kind of screwed it up made it uniquely my own through unplanned variations. I also attempted some mashups of my own — Knightsdox (Paradox with alternating Black and white — needs some work) and K’nzeppel, which should be self-explanatory. I also did a “Knightsbridge inside of Knighstbridge” I’m calling “Knightsception” (and yes, I know that’s not really what “Inception” means). And since this was all otherwise black and white, a little color up top.

Weekly Challenges

I got these done really quickly this week and got by the magic scanning machine, so I thought I’d go ahead and post them. Here’s my Diva piece:

Diva Challenge 266

This used a pretty little tangle called “Crux.” I like grid tangles, and I see a lot of options for playing around with it. I did one section with a normal grid and a Yincut style fill; I also did one warped grid with stars and another even more warped grid with Yincut-y things along the diagonal grid that goes beneath the flowers. On the edge I tried to see if I could get a decent ribbon out of it; it was okay I guess.

Joey’s Challenge is Roman Numeral XI:

Subimus xi

I Googled the Latin for the caption, by the way.

We were assigned 4 patterns, three of which were totally unfamiliar to me: Zippa (the diagonal ribbon with the up and down arches), Susa (the Greek key looking thing on the right. I don’t like how I did it: Mr. Sharpie Ultra Fine contributed a great deal to clean-up on that one), Shons (the flowers with the starbursts underneath — or is it a starburst pattern with petal-shaped gaps?), and Vache 1 (the patches top and bottom. Its name sounds like a robot from a Manga. I like it, and not just for that reason). The hoops are actually [gets out own horn, toots] my own deconstruction of a carpet pattern from the Holiday Inn in Waxahachie, Texas, where I stayed last month after going to Scarborough Renaissance Festival. In honor of Waxahachie (pronounced WOK-suh-HATCH-ee), I’m naming this one “Hachie.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t count as a truly new tangle — I know there are other “circle in grid” patterns — but I had fun making it. Here’s a (very bad) picture of the inspirational carpet:

 

 

Weekly Challenges

As well as weekly challenges of challenging weeks…

Today was just exhausting. While getting ready for church, my youngest, Princess Lala (2 1/2 years going on 17) went into full meltdown mode while we tried to get her dressed (she turned into sweet little porcelain angel as soon as she got to Sunday School, of course). Then in the middle of service, almost-6-year-old DK went into one of his epic meltdowns. I’m glad I’m part of a supportive, loving congregation where I don’t feel obligated to die of shame when I have to literally hold my son’s arms back while he screams at me. This tantrum lasted almost all the way through lunch, at which point he finally gave up. Vader, my very zen almost-4-year-old didn’t join his siblings in meltdownville although he was pretty whiny most of the evening. Oh, and this is on top of the grading that I’m barely keeping up with (semester is almost over…) and the fact that I might have gotten into an e-mail fight with a Shakespeare truther (I swear I’m not kidding: I’ll probably post something about it if anything comes of it). I’m glad I had some tangling to take the edge off of things a bit, personally.

Diva’s Challenge

Diva Challenge: Stripes

So the challenge this time was “stripes” which is nicely vague. I decided three things pretty quickly: 1) I’d do a Zendala 2) I wanted to use something resembling tiger stripes and 3) I wanted to avoid using traditional “ribbon-type” tangles. I think I got the effect I was going for with the stripes. The tangles, working roughly from left to right:

Zuan Shi Hadn’t used it before, but it’s a good, basic filler

Sez same with this

N’zeppel Everytime I use this I think, “am I overusing this tangle?” then I laugh because of course I’m not overusing it.

3-d Room Man, do you know how great it is to have another numerical tangle for when you’re doing an “letters/numbers” challenge?

Hollinbaugh Frame This ended up looking more Lovecraftian than I had intended

Farling I love this one but I don’t use it much because it always seems to take up so much space.

Cubine

Dragonair An trick question if you ever get drawn into a “Tangle or Pokemon?” quiz: it’s both.

Joey’s Challenge

 

Joey Challenge 110

[ETA: Ack! where did my text go? I swear I had a whole paragraph here. Anyway, the important part, the part that goes with the link that is still there, is that I call that tangelation of Diva Dance “Diva Rondo ala Turk”…]

 

And here’s my inspiration for it

Diva and Joey Challenges

Man, what a week.

All week it’s been either raining or looking like it’s about to rain. Today (Friday) and tomorrow are the only days in the next two weeks that didn’t have rain forecast. Welcome to Spring, Texas style.

And speaking of Springs, here’s my ZIA for Diva’s most recent challenge:

Diva Challenge 264

Did I go a little overboard with it? Probably. But it was fun. For the string, I started by tracing the lid to one of my kids’ snack cups in 4 interlocking circles, then drew a freehand loopy spiral running through it. The result was the sort of wild double spiral thing I think I ended up with.

The Tangles:

BB Okay, weird tangent — This is one of the first tangles I taught myself way back a couple of months ago. Later, when I read the description on TanglePatterns I was surprised to see it described as looking like “a picket fence gone wild.” I’d always pictured it as an uneven string of disc-shaped beads seen from the side. Interesting the different tricks perspective will get you when it comes to tangles.

Binda

Btl Joos

La Bel When I copied this one out the first time, I wasn’t real careful with my handwriting and spent a while wondering why this tangle was called “label.” I added a little hook thing to it to make little tear drop shapes.

Mooka

Organic This one didn’t come out quite like I wanted it to — the colored in part is supposed to look like a hole the leaves are coming out of — I didn’t get that this time.

Ovy

Pokeroot

Purk

Vache 1

Zedbra

And now on to

Joey Challenge 109: Roman Numeral IX

Joey Challenge: Roman Numeral IX

Seven tangles suggested this one, and I think I used all of them. My Kewpie doll can be sent to my office at UT Arlington, in Carlisle Hall. These sere a good mix of ones I’d never used and ones that I consider some of my favorites. They are:

Betweed One of my favorites

Demi My first time using this one. To add a little interest, I turned the striping around on it.

Gingham Truth in advertising on this one.

Mei Meh.

Mooka Gotta admit that this isn’t one of my faves. Still, I think I managed to do okay with it.

Ragz Another one I really like. This would be a fun one to monotangle some time.

Zinger I must admit that I had scoffed at this one a bit. Aren’t tangles supposed to be non-representational, thereby disqualifying ones that are pretty much just pictures of flowers? But I ended up having more fun than I expected drawing it.

 

 

 

 

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.