Saturday, October 29, 2016

String Challenge #168 and Travelling Tangles on the Other Hand

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


Thanks so much for visiting my blog. Your thoughtful and generous comments delight and inspire me.



6 comments:

  1. I love the way you took the String Thing challenge - very original! And I'm so thrilled to see you using Tira! So clever to contain it in a ribbon - I hadn't tried that although I've played with putting it into a grid with interesting results!

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  2. Love the composition and the beautiful colors of your Challenge tile!
    Your tiles with the non-dominant hand are so beautiful! You really did a great job! Many thanks for this wonderful swap!
    Here you could find what I did with your tile: http://blog.glueckskiesel.com/?p=1854

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  3. A beautiful IAST tile with gorgeous colors and so has your skirt, very nice!!!
    I think it is very brave and interesting to swap with the non-dominant hand, these tiles are special and I like the results.

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  4. I didn't know how to do this IAST... You are combining the string and patterns in a great way!

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