Tangling Friends.

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.

Cotton (Valdani size 12) and wool yarns (lace weight or sock weight). Punched on a hand-dyed weavers cloth background (you can see the background in the upper part of the photo, as I haven't punched that part yet).

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.