String Challenge #168 and Travelling Tangles on the Other Hand

String Challenge #168

String: overlapping Candy Corn

Patterns: Fang, Florz and Tira

It's a String Thing#168 presented us with a Halloween theme.  I felt quite challenged by this one as I wanted to detour from spiders and webs.  I couldn't make these patterns play well together. I had the same problem last week and let that one go because I was in a time crunch and in vacation mode. I didn't want to drop the ball again. I'm glad I pushed through.  These string challenges, more often than not, push me out of my comfort zone more than any other challenge and more often than not, result in greater reward. I really enjoyed playing with Tira, a new-to-me pattern by Ragged Ray. It seems to want to be a random pattern, but once I tamed it into a ribbon, the whole thing came together. Yaayy!

I love rain days! I decided to try to get caught up on some Travelling Tangles. Each month we're given a choice of two themes for our group swap. This month it was to either send out tiles with starter art using our non-dominant hand or Breast Cancer Awareness Pink. 

I really liked the idea of the non-dominant hand. The purpose was to diminish being intimidated by perceived perfection. After several frustrating attempts at warming-up in my sketchbook, I gave up. I could barely hold the pen and felt like I was causing serious damage to my pen tips. There was no Zen happening.

In the meantime, the Diva challenge which required us to use Daniel Lamothe's pattern Dreamcatcher, had me completely absorbed so I got out the pink tissue, colored a sheet of watercolor paper, made a bunch of tiles and went all Dreamcatcher on them.  I do have to say they came out brilliantly. I'll share some of the results of those next week.

As non-dominant hand tiles began arriving in the mail, I used my vacation as an excuse to ignore them for a bit. Yesterday, I decided to bust-a-move.

My finish...

...to Anja Schaffeld's amazing start, travelling all the way from Germany. 

I was and still am seriously impressed with her precision. Once I drew the first circle of "Cuke", I realized it was so much easier working on the tiles as opposed to my sketchbook because I could easily rotate the tile and as long as I kept my patterns small, I could practically hold my hand still and move the tile.

My finish...

...to Anita Westin's start, travelling from Sweden.

my finish...

 

to Sabrina Kirjavainen's start, travelling from Finland

As soon as I ventured into larger patterns, that's when I got in trouble. Anyhoo, this was a great challenge. I went really, really slow and focused, focused, focused and you know what? It was totally Zen;-)

oh... and here's another pic from the wedding weekend:

Me, my nephew (the groom) and my sis

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