For my friend

This evening I got a message from my best friend´s wife.  My friend is ill. Very ill. There seems to be just one way to go for him now. I have expected this message for some time now and feared to receive it. All day I have been working on my exhibition. Working with frames, fixing details and painted. Now I realize he won´t be there this time. And there is nothing I can do about the way life is. In this sad mood I sat down tangeling. A black tile.  I love black tiles a lot. They are special. And I worked on my personal string-challenge, which has come to no. 127.

Black is holding things together, to keep a kind of safety inside when things are to busy and threatening around on the outside. The patterns that came around in this tile are Antidots (Anita Roby Lavery), Xav (Adele Bruno), Papyrus (Suzanne McNeill), Knightsbridge and Tipple. Doing this my thoughts were with my friend from the first stroke to the last. 

Zentangle-makeover

This week our challenge from the Diva is different from other challenges! She asked us to look through our stacks of tiles and find one that we wanted to turn into something more satisfying. A sort of remix or makeover. I didn´t have to go back too far! The one I choosed is one I made 11th of January with Henna Drum in focus.

Henna Drum (Jane McKugler) was followed by Aura Leah (Carla DuPreez). Both patterns are so pretty but my outcome seemed to me too boring! So I went on with it:

Now I am much more satisfied with it and I don´t find it boring any more! Thank´s to the Diva, Laura Harms for a new great challenge!

Diva´s red and IAST 150

A little bit late but not too late I hope for IAST 150. Adele Bruno´s celebration no 150 is such a fun challenge. The string has got a lot of movement and the patterns are her own so beautiful ones!
First I made it in black and white only, but looking at it I had to add some red, not only because the Diva´s challenge, but I wanted to make it more like a celebration-tile. Here are both versions:

I liked the first one too, but I think the one with red added just fit perfect for this occasion! the patterns of Adele Bruno are:
Iza, Teenos, Uncorked and Xav. Xav I had not seen before and that is an amazing pattern! I will play with that some more time!

Cirkular string with Maryhill

I made this for Joey´s circular challenge this week:

The string consists of two circles and then we should use Maryhill (Betsy Wilson, but not in the centre. I made this in my sketchbook. The other patterns are Beadlines (Margaret Bremner) and Crescentmoon.

Add some red and Kassandra

The Diva´s challenge this week is bringing the color of red into our tiles. It is a beautiful challenge, I think we need some red today! 

I gave the red color to my own pattern Kassandra this time. The other patterns are Dex, Fescu and Fassett (Lynn Shelton Mead. The string is no. 125 in the library of Tanglepatterns.com.

About the pattern Kassandra: I made it about one year ago and the name is from our cat Kassandra. I studied her paws and made a lot of sketches on the pattern she had on her toes. I wanted to put it in focus on this tile today, because this is the day we knew would come but we didn´t want it to! She became 19 years old and she has been with us for 12 years now. When we brought her and her sister from the shelter of Stockholm we never belived they would be with us so long, because they were not in a good condition then. Bessie, her sister left us 13th of December 2013. And now Kassandra is gone. This tile is for her and we miss her deeply. She was beautiful into her last moment. 

This picture of her I took this morning. I had hoped the vet would tell us she could live for a long time yet, but that was not the case and deep inside we knew that.

Travelling tangles 1

Travelling tangles project was something that I had seen something about but I didn´t know exactly how it worked until I was invited. Now I have tried it and it is fun indeed! You start a tile, don´t finish it and send it to someone you have got as your partner. You get an unfinished tile back and finish it. At last present the result in the group. Here is mine unfinished that I sent to Jolanda Baan:

And this is the result:

It was special indeed to see the outcome. And so fun. As I had looked at this it was like a part of another person took place in a part of me. Very exciting! Than it was my turn! Yesterday I found a letter in my mailbox and there was a wonderful little creation. I felt a little afraid to destroy it going into it with strokes that might not fit! But today I made it! Here is the wonderful letter I got:

And here is what I made out of it:

I had such a great time doing this! Thank you Jolanda for giving me this wonderful gift!

Wavy Grid

The wavy grid is special. It is also known as Ogee-grid and appears in many patterns.I have practiced it many times, not only in zentangle. I have used it earlier in knitting, in bakery and in my paintings. When I think about it I should be really good at drawing this grid! But it is always some kind of a struggle to just draw the grid! Then making a pattern in it is something else! It always appear to be much easier to do that! The Groove-pattern (Eden Hunt) is based on a wavy grid. 

I wanted to do one more monotangle of Groove using string 124. But that didn´t happen, because Discoleah (Tina Akua Hunziker)wanted to play too. And that pattern I can´t resist! You find the step-out here.