It’s not where you start….

Travelling Tangles starter 1. Can’t remember the name of this one

I suddenly have several new projects on the go at the same time. (It’s not a new thing, I do tend to be a bit all or nothing, not to mention obsessive and addicted too.) Fortunately, my addictions tend to be to crafts rather than substances, although I occasionally wonder if cocaine would be cheaper! I do spend rather a lot on pens, paper, card, paints, inks, stamps and stamp pads, dies and embossing folders and I simply cannot, I mean CANNOT walk past a stationery shop. No, not a shop that doesn’t move, a shop with pens and so on. It’s as if I have a sort of bungee chord attached and I just bounce right back on in there.

Not happy with these yet. More work needed. Much more!

 

So I’ve got my monthly swap on Artist Trading Card swap, which this month is the one where you do a bijou and attach it to a normal tile. Challenging but fun. I need to do five of these to send off round the world – well, mainly USA. These are numbers three and four out of the five I need to do.

 

Like this

I’ve joined these with a brad so the bijou will swing round

 

Then I’ve joined Travelling Tangles for the first time. A bit nervous about this one because I’ve seen what people can do and there are some extremely talented members of this group. There is a theme of flowers or floral with this swap, so I have done my five starter tiles with that in mind. I’ve done coloured backgrounds using a stamp pad and dauber, then just one motif type pattern on each one.

Pattern is Huabao by YuRu Chen

This one is called Priyanka by Smita Toke

And this is Heli, by Shazia

Like a fool I didn’t make a note of the patterns used, but they are all on my Pinterest page under How to’s and Step Outs if you feel a desperate urge to find out more! In fact, hang on a minute, I’ll go and look…..   Well, I found all but one of them.

 

 

I’ll put them in the mail tomorrow and wait with bated breath to see what people do with them.  And then there’s the Summer journal for Zentangle. I showed you the cover a couple of posts ago and now it has begun. Day 1 was to include just one word, so in spite of world events, or perhaps because of them,  I chose Peace. I’ve had John Lennon in the back of my head recently, singing “Give Peace a Chance” so that was my focus for this little bijou tile. For Day 2 it was one of these fragment/reticula things they keep going on about at Zentangle HQ but, since I can’t afford the Primer and won’t afford all the stuff on the Zentangle Mosaic App, I sort of had to guess this one.  I know the app is free but it’s then view only and every breath after that has to be paid for. I feel slightly ripped off,  so I don’t use it, even though I have it on my tablet.) And for Day 3 we were to use String 153 from Tanglepatterns.com. And here they all are together on their page, joined with just a few ribbons – didn’t want to get over ambitious!

So I’m not unhappy with where it’s started, just hoping I can keep it up for three whole months…

Day 4 was to use purple and feel free to do with it as you will, so I did. The purple background is a bit fortuitous, as I used three shades of Promarker pens, which don’t always like water colour card. Howver, since I knew I was patterning over it, I wasn’t too worried, until the pinkiest of them turned out to be running dry and didn’t cover properly. But, if fact, I like the texture it created.

 

And today, Sunday, was to Dingbat. Nothing like dinging your batz on a sunny Sunday and I really enjoyed this one.

 

I haven’t finished designing the page for them to go on so I’ll show you that next time, I hope.

And then, today being Sunday, we had my son and his family round for Sunday lunch, and my elder daughter too. So there were five adults and a three year old and we had sort of tapas = chicken paella, albondigas, patatas bravas, pulled pork (Alright I know that isn’t tapas but it is niiiiiice.) There were olives and nachos and sliced peppers, carrots, tomatoes and we ate until out eyeballs well protruding.  Strangely, we still found room for dessert – sponge and custard, very Yorkshire and, as my Dad would have said, it filled up all those little corners. We then went out onto the back garden and played with sand with Isla until it started to rain.

So now I’m going down to watch the Manchester Arena concert and do a little crochet, while the dishwasher has a nervous breakdown in the kitchen. And, of course, tomorrow is Diva Day with another challenge. I may have bitten off more than I can chew but we’ll see. OK, Laura Harms, bring it on…

MONDAY

No Challenge – is it a public holiday in Canada?

TUESDAY

Phew, just a day late, don’t panic! The Diva’s week has been a  busy one so who can blame her? And it’s been her Beads of Courage race week too, which is the subject of the Challenge, of course.  I thought it was worthwhile including a full explanation of this, for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

Beads of Courage is an arts in medicine program that helps kids with chronic or life threatening illness tell the story of their medical journey.  Each bead represents something different.  A different procedure or appointment, or special circumstance.  For example, when seeing a doctor or getting a poke instead of getting a sticker when they leave, they are given a glass bead for each thing.  (blue for doctor, black for poke… some other beads are yellow=night in the hospital, pink=respiratory support, magenta=trip to emergent care, teal=tube insertion or removal, rainbow=therapy; physical, speech, occupational, respiratory) and every child’s string is different and unique to their story. 

I got involved with Beads of Courage 5 years ago when my friend Tara and I decided to organize a 5K Colour Fun Run to raise money for the Beads of Courage programming in Saskatchewan.  One night i said to her: “We should do a 5k run together, do you want to run with me?”  and she said: “Why would we raise money for someone else’s cause? We should just make our own run and raise money for a cause that means something to us.” and our run was born that night.  We were very lucky to have some really wonderful people come on board and our 6 person committee has come a long was from that first year when it was just Tara, Maryann and i.  

Our run is 100% volunteer run (unlike other ‘for profit’ runs like Color me Rad or The Color Run” and all the money raised goes to Beads of Courage programming.  Runners start out in white – then they run through 5 colour stations where volunteers throw colour at them to symbolize the beautiful coloured beads that kids on this program accumulate through their medical journey. 

So I’ve combined Day 6 of the Summer project with the Challenge and done a bjou tile with the pattern Myswing, coloured beads and a purple background for the Moebius Syndrome colours. It was a pleasure to do and, if it helps anyone at all, that is goooood. So that’ll do for now and until next time, be good world. (-ish)