Stick With It; See It Through!

Hello, happy Spring, and thank you for visiting Tanglefish! Please leave me a comment below to let me know you were here. I am delighted to have some stepouts to share. It has been a long time since I have drawn formal stepouts and put them out into the world for all (who are interested) to see. I think the last tangle I published was within, a tangle inspired be a beautiful piece of are by Margaret Bremner, CZT™. You can see within and read that blog entry here. The tangle that I share with you today is not new; it first flowed from my pen back in 2014. I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, flying home from a fabulous family vacation to England and Wales. I had my sketchbook and pen handy for the long flight, of course, and started playing with spirals. I was pondering the tangle opus and had a "what if...?" moment: What if I did not reflect the spirals on the other side of the "vine"? What if I only drew them in one direction? What would happen if I kept going and going, with more and more spirals in the same direction? So I kept going. It started looking really awkward, but I kept going. And then all of a sudden, I LOVED what happened! All because I stuck with it. I saw it through to a natural completion, as the spirals worked their way around. I fit them in each other and around each other, I nested them and layered them. Those spirals leaned on each other and supported each other, and something wonderful emerged. I added a few bells and whistles. I restated the central line over and over as I drew, and when I was done with the spirals, I added rounding in the angles. I had an idea to give it a "partial frame," aura-ing just a few segments and fitting a short strand of pearls in those partial auras. Ta-daaa! A new tangle was born! I named it quickly and easily based on my process of exploring the answer to my "what if?" question: Stick with it; see it through. Or, S.W.I.S.I.T. I love the sound of that; it suits the swirls! This tangle has a mind of its own. It likes to have room to spread out in all its glory and to be the star of the show. So...here it is: swisit!

If you want to take swisit for a spin, I'd love to see what you do with it! Please join my new Facebook group, Fantanglefish, and post a photo!

Happy Flapping

To day, March 20, is the International Day of Happiness. Thanks to the United Nations for setting aside a day for this! Some people might need to be reminded or prompted. 

“Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.”– E.L. Konigsburg

narfello, floo, and gneiss 

This quote speaks to me...it reminds me of a magic carpet that is floating or gliding smoothly on an invisible air stream, with one restless corner flapping as though it might know an even better direction to explore. Sometimes my attention is that corner that just can't settle down because it is excited about so many things! But I think that's really important...to have multiple directions to be excited about. 

So I found a tile to share that has an energetic corner...it was a quick, spontaneous composition that came into being as the second tile in a Zentangle® Foundations class I taught in January.

I should have been teaching today; I had a new ZIA class lined up at the local community college. I was really excited about this new concept for a class, but it did not attract the minimum of enrollments required, so it was cancelled. It's always a bummer when a class gets cancelled, yet there is also always a silver lining. Instead of pouring my time and attention into my class today, which would have been lovely, I got to sleep in, read a little while my husband slept in even later, and eventually we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast. This afternoon we got to work together for several hours in the yard on this beautiful day! It made me so happy!

Our yard has a long way to go before we will be satisfied with it. We have ideas, but tend to put other things first. Maybe this year we can get a little closer to our vision. Yardwork did not always make me happy, but the older I get, the more content I am to engage in the simple tasks of pulling weeds and picking up pinecones & sticks. Especially on a sunshiny day like today.

I decided that I wanted to write today, too. Writing makes me happy, and I haven't written here in a long time. I seem to write one post a year at this point. Maybe this year I will write more. Time will tell!

I started creating a new Facebook Group today. I have a local Facebook group for my tangle peeps here in East Tennessee, but I am getting ready to teach a broader audience. As I put together some class kits to send a Girl Scout Troop on the other side of the country, I realized that it did not make sense to add my local Facebook group name to the insert that I send with the kits, since the troop is not local. So I wondered what info I should add instead. It suddenly came to me: I should start a Facebook group as a companion to my blog. I'm on Facebook a lot more frequently, and it would help to keep me motivated to write here. It would be a way for me to connect with readers. Hopefully I will get more people interacting and responding to my posts. Maybe they (you!) could share any artwork they (you!) create in response to or influenced by what I write/create/share.

I am still in the very early stages, but I think I will call the group FanTanglefish. That has a nice ring to it! It might be FanTanglefish Tangleistic Pursuits, as "Tangleistic" is a term that I recently willed into being for another teaching opportunity that I accepted. I just finished a series of videos for a big CZT event, which is another source of happiness and joy. 😁💖I rather like my new word, tangleistic. 

I have to include a tangled image, of course, though oddly I did not tangle today! Thus, in addition to the tile above, I also offer a photo from a class I taught earlier this year: a Zendala from a Valentine workshop. It features shattuck, betweed, and a tangle I call cl-bahhsonné.