32 1-derful Years!

This was a busy week what with attending a Stitch-N-Pitch event at the SF Giants (baseball for those who don't follow sports), volunteering at the EGA table at the Fair and last but most certainly not least, celebrating our 32nd Anniversary. Where has the time flown? Oh, and my daughter announced that she is engaged!

I didn't get around to posting last week's Diva Challenge which was themed as, "Black and White and Red All Over." It was fun deciding which bits I would add the red to.

Tangles Used: Batumber, NZepple, Tagh, Fission, Star Map

This week's Diva Challenge is to do a remix of an older tile. I choose this tile that I drew in November 2014. I always felt that the foreground needed something distinguish it more from the background.

Original Tile: November 12, 2014

For the new version I drew the Huggins pattern in the background much smaller than on the original tile. I also used a heavier pen for the Trio and more shading (which doesn't necessarily carry through in the scan.) I think this version works better.

Remix Tile
Tangles Used: XYP, Trio, Huggins

Poppies...Poppies.

Well it has been another busy couple of weeks at Spring Valley Designs. I rather belatedly realized that my next teaching contract was for the weekend after the Memorial Day Weekend and I hadn't even started kitting. Oh, and we were out of town over the holiday! The class was supposed to be easy peasy because it was a design I did years ago and stitched on commercially available stitch cards. Or so I thought! They stopped making the particular stitch cards a few years back (nobody consulted me about this LOL) and discontinued all of their products earlier this year. So, after a bit of grumbling, I designed a new stitch card. And my poor husband had to spend a couple of evenings after work lasering them for me. But everything came together and the class went well.

This is the new needlebook

California Poppies 

And this past weekend I took a Catherine Jordan workshop that I have been wanting to do for ages but the stars had not aligned before. It was everything I had hoped for and I had a fabulous time with great people and an excellent teacher. She's a CZT too with basic Zentangle classes as well as some creative classes  combining Zentangle and stitching.

My Finished Forest

Painted Backgrounds For Future Forests

This week's Diva Challenge was to take inspiration from the Beads of Courage, the Color Run, or whatever gives you Courage. The Diva mentioned the #HeftyHack technique for coloring a background so I had to give it a shot. There were some very old Primacolor Scholar markers kicking around my studio so I used those. And when I say old, I mean over 10 years old. One of the purples has turned brown! But they were useful for this project and I was happy with the resulting background. I chose Helix since the pattern already looks like a string of beads and tangled away.

Tile Before Tangling

Tangle Used: Helix

I'm looking to forward to seeing what other people have done with this challenge.

Mystery Tour

Many years ago I bought a plant at the local nursery. It was trying to burst out of a 5-gallon pot and the sign said it was shade tolerant so I put it in a gap near my front and oh has it flourished! I noticed the other day that it is "in bloom" and I thought I would take a picture.

Here is the plant

And here is the (rather snigger inducing) blossom

If anyone recognizes what type of plant I bought so long ago I'd love to know!

I am starting work on my next two embroidered pieces. These will be a diptych.

They were made by using transfer paint on paper and then ironing the resulting image on two pieces of material. Of course each subsequent piece has less intensity than the previous one because of the transfer process. I thought these looked like the same piece of landscape on a cloudy day and on a sunny day so I thought I would explore that idea.

This week's Diva Challenge was to use the new tangle pattern Ellish and here is my result

I enjoyed this as my maiden name started with an L and I have played around with letter based patterns before. I also decided to use the Ellish idea an transfer it to the letter M since my current last name starts with the letter M.

Lots of fun! Looking forward to seeing what others have done with this challenge.

Another Ketchup Day

I can't believe it has been nearly a month since I last posted! I have been very busy teaching workshops, taking classes and finishing projects. So here is a round up of what I've done over the last month.

In my art class we did some shibori dyeing (specifically itajime) and I got sort of carried away...

Bamboo Rayon Scarves

Silk Scarves

Cotton T-Shirt

Another project was to do a Master Copy, i.e. a copy of a piece of art done by a master artist. I chose a piece by Van Gogh that he painted about a year before his death. His piece was 18" x 24" and painted in water color, oil and pastel. My copy is one-quarter scale and done in oil pastel.

Trees and Shrubs by D. Menconi after V. Van Gogh

The second part of the assignment was to appropriate something from the Master Copy into a piece of your own art. I wanted to try to use the movement of the leaves Van Gogh achieved in his piece on the water of this piece I have been working on for several months.

Ruth's Dream

If you want to see in-progress photos of this, you can see them here and here.

On the new design front I am working on a new needlebook to go with the one I did in January. This one will have a butterfly on it.

And last but not least I have done most of the Diva Challenges set over the past few weeks.

Diva Challenge 265

Diva Challenge 266
String 191

Diva Challenge 268
String 200

That's been me. I can't wait to see what you all have been up to while I wasn't looking!

The Meaning of Life

First, I have a bonus for "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" fans. I looked up from my parking space at the doctor's office and, "What's that on the tree?"

Well now we know!

The Diva's husband had the idea for us to use a Spring as a String for this week's challenge. I drew my spiral and then worked Shnek around it. It needed something else so I added Fans in the background and then did some shading.

I'm afraid I am suffering from what a friend calls "cricket brain" so haven't gotten much done this week despite being inspired by many, many things. Hopefully this is just a prelude to a prolific period! (That alliteration is for you Keith)

Global Tangling

This week's Diva Challenge was to a globular grid. I had intended to make the cells fairly big but that isn't how it wound up! I must say that distorting the patterns in the edge cells was very challenging but the result is pretty cool.

Tangles Used: Slice, Sails, Ta-Da, Heartfully and Waax

I have spent the last 4 days working on pieces for my art class. The assignment was to do pieces that demonstrate a particular color combination (analogous, complementary, etc.) I used a template I created for an earlier assignment, filled it with the combinations using Illustrator, printed them out onto glossy paper and then drew on them using gel pens. The photos don't capture the metallic or dimensional pens well but you can see the general idea. Thank you TanglePatterns.com for being an invaluable resource!

Tiling and Shading

I wanted to play around using tan paper. I see so many beautiful pieces done on the Renaissance tiles and wanted to see what I could do with it. I started to tangle in a notebook I bought a while back and was really enjoying the process. Then I added a cluster of 3-Loop-6 and felt that the balance of the piece was thrown completely off. To salvage the situation I got out a small hole punch (it makes 1/8" size holes) and some black paper. After punching out a dozen or so dots, I scattered them on my piece until I felt the balance was restored and then put a 3-Loop-6 where each dot was. I like the result and am happy that I didn't give up on the piece.

Tangles Used: 3-Loop-6, Gra-Vee, Mumsy, and Nzeppel

Some one mentioned The Mosaik Projekt in their post two weeks ago and I was really intrigued with it. I had actually played around with the idea of tiling doodles a year ago but didn't take it very far so this was definitely something I had to try. I have now done the first two months worth (although well past the deadline) and had so much fun!

Tangles Used: Pand, Fission, and Molygon

Tangles Used: Sand Swirl and Barberpole

Tangles Used: Lazy Eights, Isochor, Pax and Yuma

I'll have to try and make mosaics out of them and see how it looks.

And then there is the Diva Challenge this week which was to use the tangle Fassett. I don't think I've used this one before and decided to use a string from TanglePatterns to get me started. I chose String 192 and after drawing it in I realized it had three, large triangular shapes that could be used as "biggified" Fassett areas. So I would up doing a monotangle!

That's it for now. I'm going to The City to see the Oscar de la Renta exhibit at the De Young Museum and a Bonnard exhibit at the Legion of Honor tomorrow. So I should be exhausted but blissed out on art by the end of the day!