The Diva's Weekly Zentangle Challenge #225

Quandery, Limpitz, Sooflowers and Ahh. With colour!

This week there is a guest blogger - Jen Crutchfield CZT - over at www.iamthedivaczt.blogspot.com. The challenge is to use colour, perhaps 2 or 3 colours you don't normally use or think go together. I stretched myself a little with this one, choosing orange and green, which I wouldn't normally put together (at least not with other colours as well). Sometimes it's hard to know when to stop and I'm not sure if I went a little too far with the colour on this one. I actually quite like the two colours together though.

Lots of journals on the go...

I've been journaling quite a lot lately. I have always written quite a lot but since beginning to do zentangles I'm doing a lot more visual journaling too. Then there's also the online things like this blog and my other one, www.pausingforsmallstones.blogspot.com. I'm a regular rather than a daily journaller. Some days I write or draw more than once a day, other times it might be days (or longer) between journaling. I began thinking about how I journal this morning as I have signed up for an online course (Lisa Sonora's FLOW: 30 day journal project). I printed out the first three days of prompts this morning. What wonderful and inspiring ideas! I will be dipping in and out of these wonderful ideas and choosing some to explore deeper. I would love to do it all but life is rather busy at the moment and it's not feasible. That doesn't mean I have to miss out altogether though!

I've been journaling (on and off) for quite a long time. At the moment I have 4 journals that I am using regularly (almost daily). I was thinking about all this as well as what my six words would be for Six Word Saturday and came up with

 

Lots of journals on the go...

 

 

 

 

Some of my writing/drawing is for my eyes only and this is really valuable. The green spiral book and the visual journal are more public and I do show others what I have done in them. I use the green one for drawing ideas and practising tangles while I am learning them. The visual diary is mostly zentangle 'tiles'. Here are a couple of my latest ones -

 

 

For Adele Bruno's It's a String Thing #99

 

This was going to be part of a bigger piece but after drawing this I wanted to stop.



 The brown book is mainly used for writing poetry. It's where I scribble down ideas and work on poems. There's lots of repetition and lots of crossing out, rearranging. I feel like I need an A4 size book for this. I bought a smaller one recently as this one is nearly full but gave it away as it felt too small. I also really want it to have the elastic closing. The butterfly book was given to me by my daughter late last year when I needed a new journal. It's my main writing journal and also contains ideas for poems as well as various other things - lines I love in books, things I've done, feelings, etc. It has blank brown pages. I like to change what type of journal I write in. Sometimes lined (although often I don't keep to the lines) and other times blank like this one. I tend to doodle more in the blank ones.

I'm looking forward to receiving the next email prompts for the journaling course and continuing to enjoy all the creativity.

 





Tangle with Y-H-A

You can't hurry Hurry! This week for Diane and Carolien's Weekly Zentangle Challenge the letters are Y, H and A. One of the patterns I chose is Hurry. I found I had to really concentrate to get the lines straight and not bumping into each other. It looks quite effective I think. I try to choose original patterns but now that I've done a reasonable amount of tangling there are some letters that I have to look further afield for. For Y this week I chose Lianne Woods' pattern YNY. A simple but effective one with lots of possibilities. I don't love how it turned out on this tile but it is one I will be playing with more. The other tangle I chose is Ambler. Lots of fun - spirals are great to draw. I can imagine playing with this one more too.

Anyway, here's my tile -

Now to begin L, Q and D!

The Diva's Weekly Zentangle Challenge #224

I use Tipple quite a lot, usually for those little spaces I want to fill. It's not a pattern I am likely to choose for a monotangle so this week's challenge from the Diva was a bit of a challenge for me. I traced around a large hexagonal button a few times then - lots of Tipple.

Laura is away from her blog (www.iamthedivaczt.blogspot.com) for a while, enjoying Summer with her family. I was glad to read that there will be guest posts in her absence and I'm looking forward to next week's challenge already...

Yes, sometimes and other times No.

It's been a busy week for me, with a couple of particularly exciting days. One was a first day working at a new school. I was very nervous beforehand and it was quite a challenging morning but I was very pleased afterwards with how it went. The other was a pamper day held yesterday for which I had been part of the organising group. It's been quite a lead up and there were the usual worries before an event - Will it work? Will anyone come? Will there be enough food? What have we forgotten?

I was again very pleased afterwards and it was a wonderful day. There was heaps of delicious food and pampering experiences available, including hair styling, massage, tea tasting, henna tattoos, meditation, make up, warhammer figure painting, tai chi, and yoga.

My main part in the day was to plan and run a table with a few wordplay activities. There was sand, playdough, a quiz (matching quotes to authors), and writing inspiring words on bookmarks (inspired by Patti Digh's book, Four Word Self Help). Stay tuned for a longer post about this! 

There were lots of inspiring conversations during the day. At one stage there were three of us chatting about various things. One of the other women was playing with pebbles in the sand and making a word. I began making the word Yes on the table with some of the pebbles. When I had done the Y and e she turned hers around and I saw it said No. We had a great laugh at the synchonicity! We talked about how they can both be difficult to use at times and both important.

 

My six words for this week -

Yes, sometimes and other times No.

 

Since, I've been thinking about how for some things the answer is not a clear yes or no but maybe a not yet. I'll be writing some more about that soon...

 

See how other people describe their week or part thereof in six words at www.showmyface.com.

 



Tangle with J-W-O

Back again for Diane and Carolien's Weekly Zentangle Challenge. This week the letters are J, W and O. I decided to choose a pattern for each letter and then put them together. After a bit of experimentation (and a couple of false starts), I found they could fit together quite well.
The tangles I used are Jonqal, W2 and Oof.

The Diva's Weekly Zentangle Challenge #223

I'm continuing to enjoy the The Diva's Weekly Zentangle Challenge. What I really like about this challenge is how it stretches me out of my comfort zone, and encourages me to try techniques I may not otherwise. I find I explore a tangle more than I probably would have without the challenge. This week's challenge was to use the tangle Umble. I first met Umble a week or so ago through Rick and Maria's Zentangle newsletter. I gave it a bit of a go, combining it with Funf which I discovered on www.tanglepatterns.com.  

Umble and Funf, as yet unshaded

Fun, but I don't think that I would have used Umble again for a while if not for the Diva's challenge. I thought I would try a monotangle but in the end I thought a Jetty (is that the term for one of Jetties?) would be just right in the centre.

I almost stopped partway through as I liked it a lot at that stage. I think I may replicate it to there and then do something different in the future??

I kept going and here's my (almost) monotangle of Umble.

It was good to spend a bit more time with Umble and starting to see more possibilities...

Tangle with F-M-T

This week for Diane and Carolien's Weekly Challenge the letters are F, M and T. As always you are able to use only tangles starting with those letters or add others as well. I chose to have one tangle for each letter this week and used Finery, Man O Man and Tagh.

To join in the fun go to http://www.dianeclancy.com/blog/2015/06/weekly-challenge-11-tangle-with-f-m-t/.

The Diva's Challenge - Take 2

I had another go at the Diva's Weekly Zentangle challenge. I find that sometimes when I do a tile I get ideas of how to improve it. That happened this week and I'm much happier with my second attempt. I really love the pattern, Funf which I discovered on www.tanglepatterns.com.

The Diva's Weeky Zentangle Challenge #222

Another fun challenge this week - to use the colours of the rainbow. I wasn't sure if I'd join in at first. I hadn't used colour in my zentangles until today. What a great excuse to get those COPIC markers I've had my eye on at Officeworks. Such a treat! A few little changes I'd like to make but overall I'm happy with this week's effort. Now the dilemma of whether to use colour or not in my next creations.

Visit www.iamthedivaczt.blogspot.com to see how other people interpreted this week's challenge.