New Toys

I love playing with new tangle goodies like pens, papers, colored pencils, and other tools.  Although it's nice that I don't need a room filled with craft supplies to enjoy my Zentangle® practice, I do like to experiment with different things.  Fortunately, they're still pretty small.

This week I got to play with my new "Zencils" or stencils by Acadia Laser Creations.  This Zendala tile features one of the Celtic knot stencils.  The second I traced the stencil, all I could see was a knot of Zander across the whole tile.   I had a relaxing time filling in all of the areas.  For the smaller sections, I wanted to continue playing with line work and added some Paradox and Betweed.  The shading was just as fun as the tangling!

I'm looking forward to playing with the other stencils soon.

Season for Leaves

I love autumn!  It's my favorite time of the year.  In addition to celebrating my wedding anniversary and my daughter's birthday, it's also time for stunning color-changing leaves.  I love the way the orange, red, and yellow tones look against the brown trunks and cloudy, gray-blue fall sky.  It's like the leaves are going out in a final blaze of glory before succumbing to the bleak grayness of winter.

What do the changing and falling leaves make you think or feel?

One of my favorite tangled pieces, and one that is most often discussed by others, is my autumn leaves piece using a Dreamweaver stencil.  You can read more about my inspiration and creation of this piece on a past blog post.

As the weather grows colder, and the stores become disturbingly filled with Christmas decorations and gifts, I find it difficult not to think about the ever-approaching winter.  I felt inspired to recreate my autumn trees with a wintery look to help ease into the idea of cold, snow, ice, skidding cars, slush, bulky coats, boots, slip-and-falls, and all the other things that come with my least favorite time of year.  Sure, I love Christmas and the pretty look of a snow-covered yard, but after a few days, I'm ready for spring again.  Here's my tangled tree version of winter trees:  

This time I tangled all of the low branches since winter makes it much easier to see all the bony lines when the branches aren't not obscured by lovely leaves.  I quite enjoy how skeletal and stark this piece came out.  I hope you like it too!

If you love these trees, check out my upcoming craft fairs this fall. 

A Day to Tangle

I love spending the day with fellow tanglers. This weekend I taught the My Tangled Garden class to a couple of my return students.  Since they've tangled with me on many occasions and have taken my original garden class, I gave them a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure style class and let them opt for the white garden on black paper.  We played with white Gelly Roll pens, white charcoal and colored pencils, and the new Zenstones from Zentangle.

It's breathtaking to watch the ghostly gardens appear on the black background.  We explored a variety of new patterns too.  Didn't they do a beautiful job?

Next the Tangle Club met and enjoyed a few hours of tangling, chatting, and sharing new ideas.  I pulled out a fun project for everyone to try--scratch magic papers!  We used some animal stencils to create a variety of fun and colorful critters.  The different colors emerged before our eyes as we made our selections of patterns within or around our animal shapes.

It's getting close to Halloween, so I thought I should tangle a bat!  I love him.