A Little Tangling Practice and a Ramble

I came across a post on a tangling site that pictured a tangled piece by Tomas Padros that used hexies as a base and explored some of the hex-based tangles on Tangle Patterns.  I have a pack of hexie index cards and they were perfect for this exercise.  In the first one you can see some of the variations.

This nest one is based on Tomas' tile.  Trust me, it looks complicated but it's repetitive and simpler than it appears.  In my case I did have the hexies to begin with as my base.  It would be harder to lay down the "bones" of the hexies by hand first I'm sure.  

I fooled around with it some more.  Kind of reminds me of a chainmail bracelet I made once.

Then I saw a step out for this acorn tangle by Annie Reiser, CZT called, Annie Oakie.  She also had a Youtube video showing how to add the oak-leaf tangle (I forgot to write down the name) to the spray and left it up to the tangler to embellish with other tangles and background.  I think I'm going to try this in color too (and work on making those acorns not so wonky).

There's a big rummage sale coming up sponsored by the Visiting Nurses Association and I'm not planning on going, but rather, thought it would be a good idea to go through some "stuff" to see what we could donate.  (This is a huge sale on a fairgrounds with many large tents with different categories of items and they make a lot of money during their sale.)  I found a basket of bits and bobs from when the kids were little and found some memories.  One of them pictured below.

This little elephant brooch, minus the fastener now, took me back to the early 60's.  I remembered that I had gone to the Englishtown Flea Market with my grandparents, I think I was in the 4th grade at the time.  When I got home (we lived upstairs in my grandparents house), one of my great uncles came to visit later in the day and my grandfather told me to show him the pin.  I remember my uncle made some kind of comment about not many people would be happy to wear that pin after the elections and remember being very confused about that statement.  It wasn't until years later that I realized that he was referring to it being the mascot of the Republican party and this was  the election after JFK had been assassinated and things were going the way of the Democratic party then.  I just liked elephants at the time and thought it was pretty cool.  Like I mentioned, it's broken now, but it didn't go into the donation box or in the garbage.  I'll slip it back into my jewelry box and when I'm gone and they're going through it, the memory that went along with that little elephant will be gone too.  But I wasn't ready to part with it yet, even though it had been hiding for all these years. There were other memories that went into the 3+ boxes of "stuff" that HWNSNBP took yesterday to the drop off.  Only a small portion of what we still have to go through.