Lightning Round

I'm on vacation this week and the wireless coverage here leaves a lot to be desired. So I will just post my response to the Diva Challenge and return with more details next week. The challenge was to use Meer and Auraknot in a duotangle.

Intersectional Art

Last week I went to see the 20th National Exhibit of the Embroiderers' Guild of America. This is a traveling exhibit and I certainly had to travel to see it...three hours each way. But there are some really amazing pieces and I am glad I got to see them. Here are a couple of pictures I took.

Beautifully beaded box top

This is all stitched!
by Lee Ann Kleeman

A stitched Zentangle by Catherine Jordan

Magnificent embroidered box also by Catherine Jordan

The exhibit has moved on to Iowa now and will finish up in Wisconsin so if you get a chance, check it out.

This week's Diva Challenge is to use the tangle pattern Knightstar by Daniel Lamothe. Daniel has taken inspiration from mathematical graphing. I love it when artists independently come to similar solutions. There was a needlepoint designer who also loved to play with graph paper and developed some needlepoint stitches that use the same concept. The stitch equivalent to Knightstar is called a Crescent Stitch. And if you stitch all the way around instead of just the two opposite sides you have a Jessica Stitch. (In the illustration of the Jessica Stitch I linked to, if you stitch only side 1 you have a Crescent Stitch.) I decided to stitch this week's entry and used some other needlepoint stitches that use the same grid base. The second square is made up of Rhodes Stitch and Waffle Stitch and I put a Jessica Stitch in the center.

Art Circles

I belong to a mixed media textile group and recently we did a mini-workshop about using fabric transfer crayons to create a background for a stitched piece. I decided to do a quick tangle on paper....

And then ironed it on to a piece of  fabric. There was some organza available that had various photos printed on the fabric and I selected one of a sunset and basted it over my piece....

You can see that the tangle image is the mirror of the one done on paper because of the transfer process. I'm planning on adding some simple stitching to make the tangle more visible. It's an experiment but I really fell in love with the photo-transfer on the organza and hope to use that idea in future pieces.

I had so many ideas for last week's Diva Challenge but just never executed any of them...so on to this week. The challenge was to use a string made out of circles and tangle away! I was decided to use a TanglePatterns string that I have admired for a while and kept it pretty basic.

String: TanglePatterns 116
Tangle: Reticulated

Hopefully you've all found someone to "art" with at least virtually. So much inspiration out there!

One Love, One Heart

After the turmoil over the last week I thought that the challenge posed by Suzanne Fluhr, the Diva's guest blogger, was very timely. The challenge is to give expression to "Give Peace a Chance." As I was thinking about how I would approach the challenge I happened to hear the immortal Bob Marley's song One Love. I am also sort of geekily interested in various map projections. Just as a matter of physics you have to distort something to flatten a globe onto a piece of paper. The Mercator Projection that most of us a familiar with is great for nautical navigation but not so great at accurately representing the actual size of the land masses. The Peters Projection is an accurate representation of the size of each continent but distorts the shapes of those in the tropics more than Europe and North America. I was thinking that it would be cool to have the globe projected in a heart shape...and lo and behold someone out there has already done it! So I used it as a string for my response to the challenge.

Tangles Used: Curl, Amaze, Beadlines, Nekton and BB

"Let's get together and feel all right."

Architecture of Change

We had a lovely holiday on the 4th, grilling burgers on the patio, watching the fireworks display down the hill from us and sipping our Sangrias. Sadly my camera isn't really up to taking pictures of fireworks but this will give you an idea.

I had to take my car into the shop this week and while walking back to pick it up I had a chance to take a picture of this very interesting wall. I've admired it for years and this was my chance to get a good picture.

There are other elements to the left and right and much of it is blocked by the trees that have gotten large over the years but it is a really intriguing architectural design.

This week's Diva Challenge was to use the flag of your country as an inspiration for a tile. I decided to do a Mandala because I wanted to focus on an image of unity and a prayer for peace. Little did I know how much we would need this during a week of horrific violence.

Tangles Used: Miander, Capell, Diva Dance and Gra-vee

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.