"Oooh—Shiny!" Week: Monday

In keeping with my goal of posting every day this week, my first "Oooh—Shiny!" auxiliary example was completed today at a brand new business: a non-profit coffee house in my community called "The Empty Cup." 

Today was the grand opening of this long-aniticpated venture, brought to you by the Adoption Foundation of TN. In their words, "The Empty Cup is a new kind of coffee shop that will be a gathering space with excellent coffee, local food, a market place, and live music. But it goes beyond that. The goal is to rethink how adoption fundraising is done. The Empty Cup will become a sustainable source for adoption fundraising. As people pour into The Empty Cup, they will pour back out to local families in the form of adoption grants.
Why is it called The Empty Cup? 
As the community pours into The Empty Cup by purchasing coffee, donating time, or visiting the marketplace, the coffeehouse will pour its net profits back out in the form of adoption grants. That’s why the cup stays empty."

This is my kind of place! I first learned of it nearly 2 years ago, so it's taken a while for everything to fall into place, but TODAY was THE DAY! And I was so excited to be there with my two teens at 7am when they opened the doors for their first day of business.

My daughter and I got our coffee drinks (a cappuccino and a caramel latte; my son doesn't do caffeine in the morning . . . he even turned down a hot chocolate when I suggested he order one!) and we had to head out quickly to get to school, so I went back later in the day to enjoy a more relaxed cup of coffee in the cozy, eclectic environment of The Empty Cup. Before I left home for my second visit, though, I started a tile with a rubber stamp, some copper pigment ink, and copper embossing power. Not only did I emboss the image (which has very fine striations; the photo does not show it well), but I also sponged the ink around the edges of the tan Renaissance tile, and dipped it in embossing powder to create a ragged, copper, heat-embossed edging. I rather liked how it turned out! I don't love how the scan turned out . . . it is shiny, not dull, of course.

At home I used a fine-tipped black Permapaque (by Sakura) to tangle inside the star, and I gave it an aura with a Faber-Castell pen in sanguine. The rest of the tangling was completed as I sipped my coffee at the coffeehouse. So relaxing! The bottom right corner looks different not because I forgot to add step 3 of the tangle fassett, but because I rather liked the way that section looked before I competed the final step of the tangle. It's okay that it doesn't match everything else . . . it has a cool look of its own.

The star stamp is an Alesa Baker Design from Impression Obsession (D9436).
The tangles are Zentangle®'s auraknot and fassett by Lynn Mead.

Once I had added the white perfs at the perimeter of the star, I wasn't quite ready to leave, so I took out a Bijou tile and scattered some dots on it with a copper Permapaque pen. The dots didnt look great (old pen?), but I decided to use them any way. They looked better after I outlined them, and I just kept going. There isn't much that is metallic in this one except the rings drawn with my gold Uniball Sigma pen. The gold is a bit brassy, and I don't love it on this tile, I still enjoyed drawing sez with a variety of black and brown pens. I finished it off with tipple.

Whoah! It is dangerously close to midnight. Time to post!
Leave me a message if you have any questions or comments! See you tomorrow!

Fillling in for the Diva...

Hello! If you are visiting here from this week's Diva Challenge, WELCOME!
If you are here for any other reason, WELCOME!

I am so excited to be the guest writer for Laura Harms' "I am the Diva - Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT®)" blog this week! You can read the my official post with the challenge I came up with here. I also challenged myself to post a blog entry here in my own blog every day (!!!) this week, sharing additional examples and ideas.

Let’s see if I am up to the task! Visit often check on my progress. :-) Disclaimer: when I talk about posting every day, please know that I give myself until midnight every day. I am a night owl, and sometimes can’t get my creative energy focused until the day is nearly done.

I will return later today with my thoughts and example(s) for the day...for now I am off to attend the Grand Opening of a very special place. What kind of place has a grand opening at 7am? Tune in later to find out!

Happy Monday!

Now or never?! Now.

Hello and Happy New Year! Time to start this blog up again! It's still January for a tiny bit longer (well, maybe 15 minutes!) so I am going to consider it still appropriate to wish you a very happy, healthy, creative, and prosperous new year full of laughter, friendship, comfort, peace, joy, love, fun, meaning, and beauty...and anything else you might want to squeeze into/out of 2016.

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I did. In November we celebrated our first full year in our new home. What a difference it makes to be living in a place that fits us so well! It still feels "new" to us, though we are quite settled in now. In November we also celebrated the sale of our previous home. Woo-hoo! Much of my attention in 2015 was spent getting the old house ready to put on the market, as we wanted to make it the best home we could for potential buyers. New paint, new carpet, a renovated master bath . . . and then there was the attic that we needed to empty. The more we did, the more work we found to do. We finally listed it in late July, but even after that we continued our efforts. This is why I only made time for one blog post in 2015. So much of my time and energy were spent managing the old house, settling into the new one, and entertaining a lot more than we ever did before! To add to that, my eldest is in her final year of high school. Need I say more?

2016 is off to a grand start. I am so excited to have several things lined up already in the Zentangle realm! I will be revealing more over time, but my big announcement for this blog post is that I will be teaching 4 classes at Stamp Escape in Pigeon Forge in April! Two of the classes will be Zentangle Foundations, which is the class that covers the basics; "Zentangle 101" as some teachers refer to it. The other two are longer and more advanced. In one class, we will create ZIA Knots, and in the other we will explore using stamp and scrapbook supplies to enhance Zentangle-inspired art. Click here to learn more about Stamp Escape, and to see my classes, click here.

In the meanwhile, here is a recent shot of some Bijou tiles I have been working on for a swap . . . 

There will be more announcements soon! Stay tuned!

When? How?

When did I stop blogging? (Oh...well, that would have been last August.)
When do I begin again? (Hm-kay...I'm trying to now.)

How do I get started when it's been such a crazy long time since I last posted?
How do I "cover" the last um....9 months???

No, I did not have a baby! ;-)
The 9-month timing is a coincidence.

But we did go through a major life change. We bought a new home. And moved. After 17 years at the same address!
This was a biggie for us. I loved our previous home...it is a great house in a neighborhood we love, with wonderful neighbors and a convenient location.

We did not want to relocate. But we needed something different in a home. So...we searched around and until we found what we were looking for. We ended up buying a home on the other side of the same neighborhood. It's exactly what we needed! *Happy sigh!*

I can't pretend that moving was easy. It was an ordeal. We got thorough it; enough about that. I'm sure I'll write more about it later.

There have been other things on my schedule as well...I might eventually get to some of them. For now, I have a tile to post for this week's Diva Challenge, # 218: White on Black on Found. And I am a bit flummoxed because I realize that in creating it I unintentionally used the same basic string as the last two tiles I posted! REALLY???!!! Couldn't I have used a different composition?!

Well, I could have. But I didn't. And I want to move forward. So I am sharing it anyway:

hypnotic, a hybrid hybred with some beadlines thrown in,
a hint of tipple, and floo.
Drawn on a black Zentangle(R) tile with a white Signo pen.

Comments are always deeply appreciated.

Twing Fling

Here's one of my latest tiles. It is inspired not just by Diva Challenge #180, "UMT - MacDee by Anneke Van Dam" but also by one of my favorite Zentangle groups on Facebook: Square One: Purely Zentangle. This new group, established by two CZTs, is devoted to the original format brought to us by Zentangle^®: the 3.5-inch square tile, tangled with black ink and shaded with a graphite pencil. 

cadent, twing, and MacDee

I deeply appreciate the vision of founders Chris Titus and Jenny Perruzzi for having the vision to establish Square One: Purely Zentangle. I love seeing all of the innovative compositions all done with the very basics. I look forward to the weekly focus on one particular tangle. The current tangle focus is verdigogh, so I'll be working that into a tile soon.

I encourage you to check out Square One: Purely Zentangle and join in. It's a great way to connect with other tanglers and strengthen your Zentangle practice.

Happy Tangling! Leave me a comment if you wish to let me know what you think!

Amy

Duotangled

This past week flew by as I unpacked, laundered all the clothes from our trip, and took the kids to various appointments. Now that we are home from our grand British vacation, it is "back to school" season here! School starts August 11, which I know sounds early to some of you, but keep in mind that our summer break began at the end of May.

There was much to be done this week, but I managed to find time to tangle two traditional Zentangle tiles for Diva Challenge #178: "Duotangle by the Letter!" My first and last initials are A and B.

avreal & bales

aquafleur & Margaret Bremner's beadlines

I still haven't downloaded my photos from England and Wales . . . but I took loads! Some on my iPhone, a few on my iPad, and a few hundred (I think!) on my son's digital camera. It's been a few years since I'd been to Europe, but I remembered the frustrations of running out of battery life and filling up memory cards, so I was well-prepared this time. My family doesn't have a lot of patience for posing for photos, so I don't have all that many classic, posed vacation pics. I do have lots of closeups of architecture and textiles and other ornamental objects, as Zentangle has turned me into a shameless pattern hunter. Can you relate?

While we were touring around Great Britain, we spent considerable time in our rental car getting from here to there. I kept a sketchbook and pen handy, and the joy of being on vacation and surrounded by the beauty of the Welsh and English countryside inspired a few new tangles. I haven't done the step outs for them yet, though. :-) Is it odd that I use vacation to work out nonrepresentational patterns instead of drawing the beautiful scenery that surrounds me? (It doesn't bother me, even if it is a bit odd!)

While we were traveling, I did not bring any full-size Zentangle tiles to tangle. What I did bring was my tin of the new Bijou tiles! They are perfect little travel companions! I had envisioned tangling some Bijou tiles at each destination, and leaving them behind for others to enjoy, but once we reached a destination, we were so busy sightseeing, there was rarely time to sit and draw. While we were in York, in the spirit of my B.Y.O.B. challenge, I prepped a tile with some Earl Grey tea (see it here along with a greenish Bijou tile, both of which were tangled in the Newark airport on the way home) and utilized truffle to tangle a Bijou tile that I still haven't shaded (shown in this post). Not exactly enough to leave a snail-trail of darling little tangled Bijou tiles around Wales & England. So they came home with me, just as Bijou came home with Rick and Maria. 

If you have no idea what I am talking about, read all about Bijou here. :-)

As always, comments are welcome and deeply appreciated!

Happy tangling!

Homeward Bound

I am indeed writing this as my family and I are homeward bound, around 38,000 feet over the Atlantic. There's about 2 hours left until our plane lands in Newark. 2,717 miles traveled, 940 miles to go. Our ground speed is 478 miles per hour. This seat map display is pretty cool! But all those numbers are not aligned at the exact same moment. The display changes between screens and the figures it rotates through update constantly. It's taken me a while to write just this, as I am terribly slow and clumsy with this iPad Mini keyboard. But it beats the tiny iPhone keyboard I was trying to blog with as we were standing in line to board our plane in Newark last weekend!

The dark and light brown areas
are dried tea--I stained this Bijou
tile while enjoying my first cup of
tea in Britain. It was Earl Grey.
The difference in intensity is simply
because I had to blot the large central
area in order to move the tile to
a safe place to dry. I didn't have time
to tangle it until we were on our
way back home.

Great Britain. That was our vacation destination! The kids and I had never been, and it's been 25 years since my husband had been to England. Our passports had expired earlier this year, so we renewed them at the start of summer, and made some plans. After all, we have precious few summers left that both kids will be free to go on vacations with us; once they start college, who knows what their availability will be!

This bijou tile was started and completed
at the Newark airport. The central design
was inspired by all of the the roundabouts
on British roadways.

It was a marvelous trip. I can't wait to tell you more about it!

(This post was updated on Saturday, August 2.)

I have a bit of an obsession with taking photos out of plane windows.
At the time this was taken, the combination of sun and clouds was
quite delightful. Soon after, the sky darkened, and we had to circle
around for a while, waiting for severe storms in Knoxville to calm
down before our pilot could land the plane. We got to watch the
lightning storm from the sky. On the ground, hail fell, and lots of
damage was done, though fortunately our home was not effected.