Lazy Days of Summer: Diva Challenge #224 - Tipple, Square One Meer, That's New To Me #26 "N", New Tangle "Fichy"

Happy Birthday to Chewie - 7 years old and looking good!  Laura's photos of the backyard party are so great and bring back memories of the fun days of my own childhood.  By the time my girls were ready for parties, pizza and video games were the rage, or rent a hotel pool or some such.  I always loved the hanging out in the back yard and running around getting grass stains on my freshly ironed cotton dress (oops!)  My birthday is in the winter, so parties were mostly indoors, but we still got outside for snowballs, skating or sledding before digging into the cake and ice cream. One of my favorite parties (I may have been about 7) involved each girl (always segregated parties in those days) fashioning a fancy hat out of colored tissue paper and then we paraded up and down the block to show them off.  How we strutted!

I did have to chuckle at the photo of the boys frolicking with the hose to cool off...at 27 degrees Celsius, which translates to about 80 Fahrenheit.  Where I live now, that is almost winter!  The past couple weeks here have been hanging in at about 112F, which equates to 44.44C - I looked it up! Oh well, as my husband says, I never have to shovel that sunshine. 

So, happy summer!  At any temperature!

What better relaxing and effortless tangle for a summer day than Tipple?  Always a go-to to spice up some other tangle, this time we make it shine on its own.  As I read Laura's blog on Monday, I had a cup of my favorite morning beverage in front of me and as I looked down, guess what was there? 

Renaissance tile with gelly roll pens, Derwent Intense pencils and white chalk pencil.

 



 

 



The Square One focus for the week was Meer.  So many people did beautiful ribbons and folds with all kinds of embellishments - pearls, flowers, la-la-la!  I never quite get to that point.  So I just gave it a double wash across the tile and topped it with my new tangle, Fichy (step-out below), and tucked in a few Inapods.  While working on this tile, I had that familiar sense of disappointment that it didn't look like much.  When I started to add the shading, though, it all snapped into place and now I'm pretty well satisfied with this!  I think the lesson there is to go through the Zentangle process - the entire process - and see what you get.  I often surprise myself.

For Suzy Mosh's That's New To Me Week #26, we were to use tangles beginning with "N" that we have not used before and include any tangle by Neil Burley.  He is a prolific tangle-pattern creator, and has published a book of them.  I was able to download a copy.  The price is £3.50 GBPt with the current exchange rate, it is only $5.64, as opposed to about $8.00 when Neil first offered the book.  Well worth adding his beauties to your repertoire of tangles.  I used two of his in my previous work for the Beads of Courage challenge and the "D" TNTM challenge. 

Here, I have used Caren Mlot's Navaho, Beth Snoderly's Nuwave, and Neil Burley's Rokpool.  What I learned from this one - don't be afraid of the dark!  I added black fill and extra shading to get a result I liked.

NEW TANGLE!

Last week I tried out Tina Hunziker's lovely new tangle, Discolea.  Thank you, Linda Farmer, for your post about it and especially for pointing us to the tutorial on how to draw the Ogee grid.

http://tanglepatterns.com/2013/04/how-to-draw-three-types-of-grids-for-your-zentangles.html

I have avoided using patterns of that type because I can never control those wavy lines to make them line up.  But with the newfound skill I learned, here is what I did with Discolea,

I started experimenting with the grid and came up with a similar tangle, but one I think is different enough to warrant a new name.  If you look at the shapes, you will know why I named it Fichy - oh yeah!  There they are!

 

So, it has been a busy, good week.  Stay cool!

Thank your for stopping by and know that I cherish all your comments.

 

Namaste,

Antonine