Tangling for cancer research

I drove up to Lowell this morning to attend a fundraiser for cancer research at Lowell General Hospital.  Lowell is such an interesting town now, with its emerging converted mills, the wonderful canals, and its rich textile and manufacturing history.  Beautiful old buildings are everywhere you look, and most of them have just been or are in the process of being rehabbed.  The Quilt Museum is fabulous.

There was no time to explore the town, though, as I needed to get to the fundraiser.  I was only able to stay for two hours.  The last ten days or so have been non-stop guests and working, so art and creativity has had to take a back seat for awhile.  Am hoping that now I can focus on this again, and today was a start.

The fundraiser was basically a long tangle workshop; since I could only stay two hours I brought a project to work on:  I wanted to tangle my new meditation journal.  I envisioned a mandala with its center entirely tangled.  However, when I finished doing the above work, I realized it was finished, to me.  Perhaps I'll add more later but I don't think so.  Now I have to figure out how to protect the cover from the oils on my hands, which you can see are already darkening the lower left corner.  Some kind of fixative?  Need to investigate this.

One of the other CZTs led us in doing the tangle "Stella," by someone we think is named Janna Pharmer.  A couple of us saw the instructions for this one last year (I even used it then and then promptly forgot about it).  I did it on a regular tile and used colored pencil on it as well as graphite.

---

It just felt so damn good to be drawing a bit again.  Before my life ramped up several days back, I was working on my tarot rug too, and was at least able to get the letters drawn onto it.  That took me much longer than I had thought.  Then I began seriously designing the main part of the rug; I was at that stage when I had to stop working on everything creative and tend to the rest of my (wonderful!) life.  Finally I think I am ready to get back to designing...scary stuff for me but I need to apply myself, or just "show up" as the quote in my last blog entry suggested.