She's Baa-aa-aack! Diva Challenge #233: Zenith, TNTM #35 "X" and Judy Murphy, and SQ1 Yincut

Welcome back to our Diva Laura Harms!  One of my personal ZH's for her amazing weekly challenge that has so many Tanglers coming back week after week to share their responses to whatever challenge Ms. Harms dreams up for her followers.  From her photos, it appears she and her family had a lovely fun vacation.  Ya gotta love kids in water wings!

I just want to give a little credit to some of the other inspirational and helpful Tanglers, including Suzy Mosh for her weekly "That's New To Me Challenge", Adele Bruno, for "It's a String Thing", Chris Titus for Square One on Facebook, Genevieve Crabe and Linda Farmer for their tangle catalog and website, and excellent superstar Tanglers like Michelle Beauchamp, Lily Moon, Margaret Bremner, Sandy Hsaio, Helen Williams, Cris Letourneau, and many more (sorry to those I forgot to mention, but whom I love just the same) who share their wonderful Zentangle work with all of us through the magic of the internet.  For those of you who are not yet collecting pensions, you may not know the internet was not always around!  Without these connections, I know I would never have found Zentangle at all.  It would be my great loss, to say the least.

That said, I now move on to say that for most of the northern hemisphere, summer is on the wane and things are cooling down, but here in Arizona, it is still just HOT!  We may have seen the last of the 110+ degree days, but that is the best I can say now.  Still, this is better than frozen windshields, digging my car out from a snowbank, heart-stopping temperatures of -25 degrees, and endless dirty slush in the spring. (Chicago, you know who you are!)  I know which evil I choose! So to all the rest of you, enjoy those last warm days and also enjoy my old favorite season, Autumn!  Apples and pumpkins and crispy mornings, cozy sweaters and fond memories of burning leaves (all against municipal code now in most places, sad to say) and that first night the heat kicks on.  Chicago, I miss you for that!

OK, enough chatter.  Down to the business of the week.  It was a pretty fun week in the Zentangle community.  The Diva challenges us to use the newest official tangle, Zenith.  I was privileged to encounter this at CZT 19, the second class to receive this one.  It is one of those that looks like not much until you start playing around with it  Wow, I have seen some great interpretations out there!  Here is my take of the day on it.

 

 

For That's New To Me, Suzy Mosh asks us to use tangles starting with the letter "X" and add something from artist Judy Murphy.  A couple of weeks ago, we had letter "J", and I used Judy's Jumu tangle, so nice to revisit her stable of tangle patterns.  I chose Cindy Angiel's Xerexez and Xtracto.  The Xerexez reminds me of a flipped version of the Basque cross design that we encountered on our vacation when we stopped in Boise.  Here is a tattoo that looks VERY much like Cindy's tangle, and a green and red traditional version of the emblem, said to represent the unity of the four Basque regions.

 

 

 

Following that is my entry for the week.  I tried to include Cindy's Xtracto, but got some of the lines curved the wrong way, so it is more like Dragonaire, sorry to say.  Oh well, I still like how it works but the actual Xtracto might have been better.  I also included Xeni by Jacqueline Janssen and Judy Murphy's Wiffles as a background for the design.  Xeni is based on a handwriting form, and once I got going on it, I didn't want to stop!   I had fun on this one!

 

 

Finally, the Square One: Purely Zentangle was Yincut.  I really get into the sparkle thing and just went for broke on this one.  But then somehow, one little square went rogue and turned into something else.  Someone online commented that it was a portal to joy!  I love that!

Thank  you all for stopping by this week!   Know that I appreciate and cherish all your comments and insights. 

Until next time,
Namaste
Antonine