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!

Stacked and Tangled

This week’s Diva Challenge by guest blogger  Jane Reiter is to tangle on a Bijou tile and then stack it on progressively larger tiles. I didn't think this was going to take quite a long as it did. And since I started it on Monday and finished on Tuesday I'm not sure what the actual total is but I'm sure it is right around 8 hours! Mind you, it was 8 very fun and absorbing hours so no complaints here :)

Tangles Used: Purk, Triral, Brella, 3-Loops-6, Phirst, and Coil

Spring Break

This week is Spring Break for me. Since I don't have any classwork to do over break I decided to do something I have been wanting to do for a long time. I bought a book called Notan, The Dark Light Principle of Design about 1-1/2 years ago and have been wanting to do the exercises in in ever since.

So this week is my opportunity to dig in. It is a short book with only 6 projects and my plan is to do one a day. I have done the first two projects so far using 20 year old construction paper left over my children's youth. I bought some new paper yesterday so future projects will be in black and white instead of dark gray and tan.

It is really interesting how such simple exercises can get you looking at things in a different way. I'm looking forward to do these again as well as doing the next projects.

This week's Diva Challenge is to do a monotangle using Shattuck. I decided to do a recursive version where the Shattuck string contains Shattuck which contains Shattuck. I think if you got really loose with this and left out the dark separating lines, you could make an interesting sky.

Here's to a recursively wonderful week!