One Stroke at a Time: januari 2020

Is my blog still alive? I ask myself, since I haven´t been posting for almost two month! It is and I have tried to brush it up a little. We have a new year and a lot of things has happened in the Zentangle world. Project Pack 007 is done and it was all about gray tiles. I loved that project pack almost as much as I loved 006, the no-mistake PP. But now it is a new year and it has started in my journal too. I decided this year I wanted to try making my own journal and I searched on YouTube to find something that would work for me. I wanted to have a Squared journal, since the tiles are squared most of the time. I must say I struggled to get it all together, I didn´t want to cheat, I wanted it to be something I would like to work with every month all through this year. And here is my beginning:

When I got it all together I was quite proud of myself! I only used stuff I already had. The paper is good drawingpaper, acidfree and I used some monoprints on the cover. I might do some more tangling on the cover but so far this is what it looks like. And here are the fist pages:

To choose the word for this year wasn´t too easy. I landed in the word "experience". I love the quote of Albert Einstein: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science". So I went for that.

The first prompt of the year came from Danielle de Rome and she wanted us to focus on our hands. My hands are my tools and hands together can save this planet. I was thinking of a project in Sigtuna kommun: all students on all stages of education was invited to make drawings of their hands with written messages on them and decorate the hands in every kind of creative way. The hands were all sent to the climate conference in Copenhagen. That was such a wonderful project.

Extra prompt: Make a pie for the pieday! I didn´t know there was a pieday in the US. We have "kanelbullens dag" in Sweden and that must be the closest we get. But I love to bake pies so I tangled one on a gray zendala and on the day 23d of January I made a meatpie for dinner.

Today is the last day in January and tomorrow is the start of Valentangle, hosted by Marguerite Samama! I couldn´t bare myself though. Last year I saw a post from Lynn Shelton Mead were she had made a "bittybook" with tiles she had created and later on one with Bijou´s. I loved the idea but didn´t know how to make this. But as always the solution was to watch Youtube again! And here is my little tiny bittybook that can carry my Valentangles 2020 on Bijous!