Let the Rain Kiss You

There was a fire uphill from us this weekend, No one was hurt and the fire fighters managed to put it out before homes were damaged. But it was quite the sight to see the line of flames as it worked its way down hill and then extinguished in one well aimed dousing with retardant from a fire fighting airplane.

You can just see the line of fire through the tree.

A Cal Fire plane drops fire retardant on a 4-acre grass fire.
Photo by Stoney Meagher

The orange is fire retardant. The helicopter is looking for hot spots.

The drought here has made the hills a tinder box, ready to go up in flames with the smallest of sparks. Thankfully it rained some last night. Hopefully a portent of things to come.

On a less dramatic note I managed to complete my midterm project for one class and portfolio for the other. I teach my final class of the year tonight and then we move on to holiday related projects!

This week's Diva Challenge was set by guest blogger Paula Bramante. The challenge was to use a cairn template by Lisa Rankin as a string or to just use your own vision of stones and ceremony. I chose to use the template and had fun picking out patterns for each stone in the cairn.

Tangles Used: Lazy Eights, Undu, Yuan, Riverstones,
Scroll Feather, Partay, Tipple, Star Map, Linq, Well, and Gravee

A nice metaphor for life, one event building on top of another.

Falling into Fall

This week's Diva Challenge is to be inspired by the season. Living in Northern California we don't get nearly as much autumn color as other parts of the world. It is still quite warm although we have gotten a touch of rain. But the friendly wind blew a few leaves over to me from my next door neighbor's yard and there was some left over tea in the teapot. So I decided to tea-dye my tile using the gift-leaves as a mask. I used tangles that made me think of the season here, DL-Sunray, Drip-Drop, and Pop Cloud and tangled in the leaves. Then I heated what was left of the tea in the microwave to evaporate some of the water and make the tea darker and used that to paint in a background and some shading.

Tangles Used: DL-Sunray, Drip-Drop, and Pop Cloud

Hmmm...using leaf water to paint leaves...kinda meta!

I've been busy with classes and though I've been drawing a lot, portfolios were due last week and next week, I haven't had a chance to tangle much so this was a nice change of pace.

Hoping the wind blows something nice your way!

Sorry To Tangle and Run....

Whew! That was a long week! The usual classes on Tuesday, a stitch-in at my house on Wednesday, teaching on Thursday evening on top of my normal classes, dinner guests on Friday, a party at our home on Saturday, and a workshop on Sunday...<pant, pant, pant>...And then I had to get my portfolio ready for review for today!

This was a nice relaxing Diva Challenge today which was exactly what I needed. I fully intended to do this on a black tile but somehow the black Post-its my friend Sabrina gave me a while back decided they wanted to play with the Munchin tangle. On the second and third ones I used a black Glaze pen by Sakura which is a really fun look.

I'm keeping it short this week so I can catch up on things left undone from last week. May all your tangles be on paper!

Getting an Early Start

Having completed last month's Muster Mixer on the very last day of the month I thought I would get started a bit earlier this month. The challenge is to combine the tangles Facade and Crescent Moon into a tangleation. I usually do a sampler of ideas on a single tile but this month the ideas wanted to be on separate tiles.

In addition to the Muster Mixer there was the Diva Challenge this week. This is a first Monday of the month so that means a UMT (Use My Tangle) Challenge. This month's tangle was a really fun one called Tri-bee by Beate Winkler. I used a tile that I made over the weekend using a new stencil and a spritz of soy sauce (see last week's challenge).

Similar tile before tangleing.

Tangles Used: Tri-Bee and Tipple

Huge warning here: The soy sauce does not play well with the finer versions of Micron, Pitt, and Copic multiliner. They either clog or the ink won't flow. I used a Micron 08 to do the above. It worked well but I had some smearing problems after I was about half way done. Not sure if it was the pen or if my hand was damp from washing dishes. Another good reason not to wash dishes!