Truffles and Lace

Good morning!  Most days we head out early to enjoy the morning air here in the Valley of the Sun, but this particular day, there is nothing pleasing about that air - hot and stuffy! Highly unusual, as even hot days usually start with a fairly pleasant morning.  This one is akin to the rainy days of old back in Chicago.

When I was a little girl, I waited for a rainy day so I could color or make paper dolls from Sears catalog models and then draw clothes for them - always adding the necessary tabs to hold them on.  I looked for my subjects in the bathing suit or (gasp) underwear sections of those venerable publications. I'd cut the models out, then glue them onto stiff paper or cardboard.   Then, cut a vertical slot in the bottom, cut a half-circle out of cardboard with another slot at the top of it, and fit the pieces together.  Voila, the doll stands up!  Sometimes, if I was lucky, there were some pictures of clothes already in the catalog that would fit my new dolls.  Yay!  Cut those out, keeping little tabs at the shoulders and sides, and my doll had a high-fashion outfit straight from the pages of the source of our fashion sense - Sears and Roebuck last season catalog (of course I wasn't allowed to cut up the new one!).  But mostly, I just drew my own outfits, colored with crayons or colored pencils, and dressed them with my interpretations of high fashion.

Since I have been Tangling, I have been more of a purist.  Use those "official" tiles, stick to black ink with pencil shading.  Go really wild with tan tiles and add shading with a brown pencil and highlight with a white pencil and maybe a dot or two of gold from a Jelly Roll pen.  Color?  The how and why has escaped me, even though I thoroughly admire the colorful images that others produce.  Beautiful!  But I can't do that.

So, this week, on the I Am The Diva blog site, the challenge was for a new pattern called "Truffle".  I have been trying to figure out how to respond to these challenges, and finally figured out you must have a blog of your own to post your responses.  Hence, my new blog!  Right here!

I started working with this new pattern, and got something very lacy looking.  I went nuts with adding a different pattern to each Truffle, and it just looked to me like lacework stretched out in a frame.  Then came the part where I usually shade my shapes and get something with dimension and form.  This time, it was different.  If the object of a challenge is to make you stretch and grow, then my stretched lace needed something very different from me.  I decided to add some watercolor pencil glow around the edges of my lace.  I think it works.  New directions are sometimes trial and error, but this may grow on me.  So, anyway, here is my Truffle tangle: