This is a quick post that falls squarely in my "Other People's Work" category.

Remember my blog post from 5/23/18 with the phenomenal mosaic that resulted when the entire class put its tiles together?  Review the picture here.  It's at the bottom of that post.

Well, my internet buddy Susie Ng from Thailand saw that photo and "couldn't resist" giving it a try herself.  (Thank heavens.)  So she recreated the original tile--putting her own unique spin on it--and then used Photoshop to create a mosaic, using her single tile as its basis.  Check out this result.  Fantastic!  I'm so thrilled that she couldn't resist.  We all benefit.

And--hold onto your hats--here is the mosaic she created from the above tile, using Photoshop.  I absolutely love this!

Susie is one of the most original and creative tanglers I've ever run across.  I read her blog avidly (find it here) and always learn something.  I frequently go back and study  her tangles to see how she has handled things I would like to learn.  We've struck up a bit of a penpal relationship too, and she's just the nicest person.  Don't miss her frequent postings in support of animals and animal rescues, often found at the very end of her blog posts.  They are alternately funny and incredibly compelling.  Enjoy.

Thanks to Susie for allowing me to post this.

Hey!  Not bad!  In fact, really great work by the 6 new students who learned Zentangle® from me this afternoon.

I'm guessing students ranged in age from 55+ to well into their 80s.  All of them did just great.

In preparation for the class, I did these two tiles last night in case I had time to teach all this today--but of course we only got through one tile, the first one below.  The second tile below I did "just in case," but I kept it in my back pocket.  Below those is a photo of the lovely classroom.  It was my first time using a document camera and projector, and I'm pleased to say that went really well and made it easier to teach.

And here's a look at our lovely classroom.  Thanks to the Community Center.

Who doesn't hate to miss a good parade? 

My buddy P emailed me this picture only minutes after I'd driven away from her house today.   My car had been parked just feet from where the picture was taken.  (For outside-the-USA-readers, today is Memorial Day in the US, when most towns have parades to thank veterans.)  She's located about 1/4 mile away from the center of town.

Ok, so this was not the parade I was expecting, but I'm so sorry I missed it!

Getting ready for teaching Zentangle® this week, I did the two tiles above.  These are not tangles I'm planning on teaching tomorrow but were fun to do as warmups. 

Meanwhile, here are additional pictures of that fabulous parade.

This is the final post in the series on the Zentangle® workshop I took last weekend with Martha Huggins and Molly Hollibaugh.  I'd be the first to say how lucky I am that I had the chance to do this.

Here were the final tiles that we did, and their mosaics (if that language is foreign to you, have a look at the first post in the series, on May 20th).

Of course, we then put our tiles together into one large mosaic.  Look at the variations. 

And now for something completely different.  After the above exercise, we went on and practiced doing "embedded letters."  This was great fun.  We could use our own initials, or someone else's initials, or just use initials of words with meaning to us.  Here was mine:

Here's the wild mosaic that was made by everyone's embedded letters:

Such variation.  Truly lovely.

And we finished - and ran a bit overtime, which meant we didn't get to do a mosaic on this one - with one tiny Bijou tile using Huggins:

It's no surprise that we were all exhausted after all that drawing.  But good-exhausted.  What a weekend.  There was a surprise appearance by Rick and Maria, the founders of Zentangle, on Saturday afternoon, but the weekend was owned by Martha and Molly.  Fabulous job, ladies.  Thank you.

My last two posts have been on the Zentangle® workshop I attended last weekend with Martha Huggins and Molly Hollibaugh leading.  All in all, we had over ten hours of drawing time.  That's a lot of tangling!  And oh, was it lovely.

In the previous posts, I've showed our first drawings and talked about why I liked the workshop.  Yet another thing I liked was that we worked with "oldies but goodies," some of the most familiar tangles.  Or early tangles that haven't had much attention recently.  I love to revisit older tangles and see them in new ways.

So to continue with my own results from the workshop, plus the fabulous "mosaics" (everyone's tiles collected and displayed together), here are some more things we worked on.  Today's post is not the end--there is at least one, if not two more posts about the weekend coming over the next couple of days.

Let's start with an old favorite, Bales, done on a Bijou tile (tiny tile) as a warmup:

And of course, once we had these done, we made a mosaic of them.  Have a look at the cool similarities and differences:

Next we did another Bijou tile with the tangle Well, which many people have trouble doing.  Frankly, I had forgotten all about this tangle and hadn't tried it in years.  Loved the reminder and doing it after all this time.

...and of course, we made our mosaic of that also:

But of course we couldn't leave it there.  Next we combined the two tangles onto one tile (Bales + Well = "Wales").  Oh, this was even more fun:

...and then of course the class mosaic:

One of the things I liked about this past weekend with Martha & Molly (see my two previous posts) was how we started our work by practicing familiar monotangles, each on a tiny Bijou tile, and then used all of them on a standard-size tile. Finally, we put them all together for the Big Surprise. 

The process looked like this:

Next, having warmed-up with the Bijous, we used the same tangles together on a regular sized tile, thus:

And then...we put all the standard-sized tiles together to form this amazing mosaic of tiles.  I love it when this happens--it's always the Big Rewarding Surprise!  See below.

This was the final tile we did at the workshop that ended yesterday.  I've referred to the Perfs (the official Tangle name) as "Pearls" in the title of today's post because they look that way to me.

Because the venue needed to ready the room for the next workshop, there was no time to do a class mosaic so I don't have a picture to show of what would undoubtedly have been a really magnificent collection of tiles.  I really enjoyed creating this one, and would like to play more with this particular string.  Thanks to Martha & Molly for a truly amazing experience.

When I got home last night it was smotheringly humid here, really unpleasant.  But overnight the weather shifted.  Here was Dave Hayes the Weather Nut's forecast this morning.  It cracked me up!
"THE 411 FOR THE 413: SUNNY, WARM, SWEET, NICE, AWESOME, PLEASANT, KILLER, GREAT, LOVELY, FABULOUS, MORE PLEASE, AND THANK YOU..."

He turned out to be 110% accurate.  Love him--so helpful.  It is absolutely exquisite out there.  I just took a long walk and spotted these phlox broadcasting their extraordinary color along the sidewalk.  Most phlox here are shriveling up now, but because these are in shade for much of the day they're still going.  In person, the color is nearly psychedelic, almost too much for the eyes.

This little beauty is a much smaller mosaic that the one I posted yesterday, but it is the same pattern I posted yesterday.  I took this shot of  "3-Z tiles" placed into a tiny four-person mosaic before everyone else at the workshop added their own tiles.  Even though it's small, I had trouble remembering which was mine, but I finally determined it's at the lower left.

This is an even better illustration than yesterday's of how we all heard the same instructions, and we all used the same materials, and yet each person produced a unique result.

Just back from a workshop led by Martha Huggins and Molly Hollibaugh of the Zentangle® family.  (If you are unfamiliar with Zentangle, click on that link and prepare to enjoy their well-done website loaded with art eye candy.)  I was very fortunate to attend with a good friend, and we got to spend the whole weekend doing art.  Such luxury!

I have many more photos to post but to start, here are examples of two tiles we did this morning.   After both my own tiles, I'll post the mosaic from the group.  Not familiar with this terminology?  Not to worry, here's what I mean:

"tile" = a small piece of paper that we draw on, and
"mosaic" = the collection created when a class puts all their tiles together.

The fun of the mosaic is that everyone has heard the same instructions, but look at the assembled collections of tiles below (mosaic) to see how individual each tile is.  And yet they go together wonderfully. 

Here are my own two tiles, and the class mosaics follow.

Two of my good buddies have been wanting to learn Zentangle®, so I went over to their place and did a class today.  They did great--have a look at these results:

 Really well done. 

Of course, I forgot the handouts I had carefully prepared and printed before the class.  It's been about two years since I have had a chance to teach tangling, mostly because of buying a house, packing, moving, unpacking, and then the Great Broken Wrist Adventure.

So it was truly wonderful to be able to refresh my teaching skills today with kind friends.  Mind you, I have NO idea what they thought about it, but I sure had fun, and am delighted with their results.  I hope they are also.

Much of what I've been doing in the last month involves embroidery with punchneedle and wool yarns.  Unfortunately, I can't really show it here because the designs I'm using, both of which came off t-shirts I own, are not mine and I can't reach the artist for permission.  But I'll show a portion of one of them...the back end of a horse.  Here it is.  I am really in love with working with wool yarns (these are lace weight and/or sock yarns) in my punchneedle.

The pink-ish background is a single ply hand-dyed Malabrigo lace weight yarn.  Really the possibilities are endless since sock and lace-weight yarns come in so many colors now.

One of the best things about this is that I can try out rug designs in punchneedle first, before going ahead with the dyeing for a large rug only to discover that the colors or the design are not working.  Better to find that out in a small punchneedle piece than after spending money for wool yardage or expensive wool rug yarn.

After weeks of playing peek-a-boo, leaves are exploding on the trees here.  Yesterday I could see houses clearly through the trees in my backyard.  This morning when I looked out, all I could see was leaves.  Overnight.

Of course, it's not actually overnight as  budding and growing has been happening for weeks, but something in the weather of the last few days has caused an explosion of leaves from their buds.  They are so green, tender, and beautiful.

I haven't deserted the blog; my lack of entries is only due to the fact that I have been focused on punch needle embroidery and am working on two large projects that I haven't been able to get permission to show.  The designer is dead, unfortunately, and I've no idea how to get in touch with his estate.  I'm still working on it.

But since I'm teaching a Zentangle® beginner's class in two weeks, I'm now focusing on that.  I found out today that the class is full and has a waiting list.  I warmed up this morning with the typical beginner's tile (including tangles always taught and one frequently taught in a first class.  If was fun to go back to basics.

I'd hoped to use my new projector and ipad for teaching this time, but in trying them out over the last couple of days, I've been unable to make them work well.  Argh!  I'll figure it out. 

My "beginner tile" above was done while I was holding up the projector with my left hand and tangling with my right.  Talk about awkward...even so, I could feel myself slipping into the meditative state found when doing Zentangle.

Next I decided to try a new tangle:

The Diva Challenge in mid-April involved two of my favorite tangles, Shattuck and Tripoli.  A "duotangle."  (Click on that link for eye candy--scroll down to the bottom of her blog for the location where everyone posts their response to her challenge)  Here's my response.  You really never know what will happen when you sit down to tangle, as this just proves.  This one's just...odd.  I like it though.  Other than the two tangles requested for the challenge, the tile includes random linework.

I can't express how good it feels to be tangling again after several weeks of working on other art.  Tangling has a unique place in my heart.  Rug hooking can be so relaxing and meditative.  Ditto with any type of drawing.  Punch needle embroidery is also extremely relaxing.  But tangling just takes me to another place, a quiet place, a place of focus and calmness.  And it happens almost as soon as my pen hits the paper.

"The last time I checked, it was still legal to take long, deep breaths."
--Jeff Davidson