Zentangle Project Pack 8 - Tangling with Moonlight Gellyrolls

The folks at Zentangle teamed up with the folks at Sakura to introduce their Sakura's new Moonlight gellyroll pens and how awesome they are to work with when tangling.  The kit included 5 of the new colors, a Zentangle graphite pencil and white chalk pencil, a couple of tortillons, and all the tiles needed to complete the 8 days plus a few more.  All the instructions are on Youtube to follow along with so even if you don't have these exact supplies, I encourage you to check out the Youtube videos for some inspiration and if you're game, give it a try.  Concentrating on placing lines, relaxing your hand, and breathing do help with anxiety.  I did these while my sister was in the hospital and the week after she passed to try to take my mind off of things.  I'm finding other ways during this world health crisis to do more tangling.  I'll share some of that in the days to come.  But for now, here are my finished tiles for Project Pack 8.

Day 1 

Day 2 

If you can imagine, the center of this design is actually a small triangular tile that is inserted into slots at the corners and the initial tangling was done on that.  Then the outside lines were added.

Day 3

I can see me doing more of these on any kind of tile or just in my sketchbooks.  This was fun.

Day 4

So I screwed up this one.  There were supposed to be four of the lavender shapes and four of the green shapes, but I got distracted and didn't place them correctly so I threw in another color.  

Day 5

Click on this one to get closer.  It really is more vibrant IRL.  As a note: these round tiles come pre-strung - meaning there are faint lines on them making the sections.  You could see the sections clearer in the tile above.  This one not so much as they had us dividing up some of the sections to make more.  I do like the way the gellyrolls give it so much life.

Day 6

Again using a pre-strung tile.  

Day 7

Something a little botanical.

Day 8

These were pretty cool to do.  There were six of them.  If you notice the design in the center highlighted with the white chalk pencil you can see that 3 are clockwise and the other 3 are counter clockwise.  When alternated and touching points it makes a nice mandala of its own.

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

Happy Birthday Dear

Last week HWNSNBP had a birthday.  I was, admittedly, quickly scrambling for an idea for his card and just happened to pull something together from some things on my work table.  But I do like the way it came out.  I used stamps from three different sets I think and decided to just stamp them in blue and give the center oval all the oceany color.  

Sympathy and Get Well Wishes -

Boy, this has been quite a year so far hasn't it!  I've lost two cousins, a great aunt, an aunt, and my sister since the beginning of January and I'm kind of hoping that I don't have to make any more sympathy cards for a long time.  

One of our school nurses fell at school a couple of weeks ago and had to have surgery to fix her broken leg.  There is a shortage of school nurses already which makes not having her in the district ever so much more of a challenge.  I thought I'd send her a card to cheer her up.  

Tonight we were notified that tomorrow will be the last day of school for our students until April 14th.  Our teachers are using Monday and Tuesday to prepare remote class lessons.  What this means for those of us who work in the office is yet to be determined.  There's only so much of my job that can be done remotely.  I'll keep you updated.  

In the meantime, make sure to wash your hands and keep your hands away from your face.  And let's all hope that these quarantine practices will slow down this virus.  

Jingle Belles - Stuck On You

The goal this fortnight was to use stickers on our Jingle Belles card.  I had these cute stickers that someone sent me for Christmas.  I love the colors and the whimsy of them. I was lucky enough to have some of these papers out on my work table from the last challenge and they seemed to go together pretty well.  I may have to redo that sentiment though.  It seems a little out of proportion to the stickers on the circles.  

Here's a little closer picture of the stickers in all their cuteness!

I managed to get a little pink into this card to match the llama and fox.  Always good to have a little pink for Christmas.  And always good to see what the others have come up with for this challenge.  Won't you take a look by clicking here?

Happy Flying Pig Day!

I'm having a hard time writing this post today.  I know that I should have prepared it earlier, but the last month has been a bit more stressful than usual.  My sister was in the hospital and on life support at one point, rallied and she was then sent to rehab.  She has COPD and Lupus and they believe pneumonia was what put her in the hospital.  I won't go into the details, some of you close to me know the situation was difficult to say the least.  Unfortunately I got a call very early this morning that she passed away at the rehab facility.  The situation is still difficult, but we'll get through it.  I am sad, but she was suffering and I have to believe that she is at peace.

The window in the rehab room she was in had a broken catch on it so it wouldn't close completely.  She was okay with that because it let in a little cool air and she was always hot.  I had called about them fixing that window a few days ago when it was raining, but it was still slightly ajar when we got there this morning to say good-bye.  I couldn't help but hope that her angels, whether pigs or not, lifted her up and helped her escape through that broken window to a place with no more pain or suffering.  A place where my father and my other sister, and her two little babies that she lost would be waiting to welcome her into their arms.  

I will keep on celebrating Flying Pig Day in spite of the memory that I now associate with it.  I gives me a chance to show my support to my "Pig Ladies" and thank them for all the support that they've given me.  We all need that, don't we?

I had a few Friendship plants that I handed out for FPD.  I hope they multiply and are shared over and over again.

Love you guys!

Celebrating Leap Day

From the message board this week:

I had this up for 3 days and no one noticed that Caesar was spelled wrong!  And that was not on purpose.  Ugh.

We will be celebrating with pizza tonight - how about you?

Jingle Belles - Seeing Red Again

I'm back with the second "red" card.  I had thought this was finished yesterday, but looking at it some more this morning I was prompted to find another element to fill all that space at the top.  I decided on the ho ho ho which is actually part of a die that says "joy".  Turned upside-down it looked like ho! to me.  I just had to trim the "j" off and do some trimming in the center of the "o".  I had done this before on a card several years ago - you can see it here.

Getting late, so I'll have to check back with the Jingle Belles tomorrow, but you can see all the red cards by clicking here.

Jingle Belles - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

We're seeing red this fortnight at the Jingle Belles blog - though it may not be just Rudolph's nose.  The challenge is to make a card or cards that are predominately "red".  I actually have two but I need to add something to the other one, so you'll just get this one this time.  

I'm pretty sure that I had some of this buffalo plaid paper in my stash but I could not find it, so a quick trip to Michael's was in store and I was lucky that there was some there.  Oh, I do have other red papers, but I had this in my head and just wanted to get it out.  

I'll be back soon to share the other card, but in the meantime, should you care to check out the other "red" cards, just click here.

Valentine's Day Recap

I do love real flowers but this year I mentioned to HWNSNBP that I saw a paper bouquet from LovePop cards that looked really cool and could be used yearly.  He took the hint and I was so glad.  It stands on it's own, vase and all.  

There was a place on the envelope that you could slide in a message card which he did.

I also mentioned that he might want to use our gift card from the specialty bakery that we used last year for Rachel's baby shower.  They gave us the gift card because they had made a mistake on the order.  They have a f a c e book page and were taking orders for this lovely creation.

It's called a Dacquoise - an almond meringue torte with crème diplomat and fresh berry filling, and macarons.  They had real roses on top of the advertised one, but I'm allergic to roses so we did without (for a little discount too).  All those decorations were edible.  It was very good but very decadent and took several days to finish.

I saw a lot of Valentine bashing on social media sites which really saddened me.  I think you should celebrate any holiday that you want without people who don't celebrate it complaining about it. If you don't have someone you want to share your love with, certainly you can be kind.  

Here's a link to a story that I saw on-line that might just prove that point.

Happy Birthday #1 Son

Well today my son turned 39.  Jokingly I could say that we're now the same age, but I'll admit to a few more years than that.  We got to visit with him this weekend - he and his son were having a boy's weekend as our daughter-in-law was away for her sister's baby shower out of state.  It was a much needed visit for me to see them both.  I was sorry to miss our DIL though.

This card was one of those table clearing scrap creations.  I used the trimmings from the Bubble Wrap Day cards along with some strips and circles in the cast off pile.  A piece of washi tape and a quick HB die cut to finish it off.

I kind of like the bright colors on this - I hope he did.  

Happy Valentine's Day

This was a very quick card for HWNSNBP and admittedly it's a little juvenile, but I've been really pressed for time this week with a family emergency so I'm glad I even found the time to do it.

I did have my Valentine cards for the grandsons done early enough to get them in the mail though.

Now you can see that I had extra bears from these cards to use on HWNSNBP's card.

Someone left this on my desk this week - so sweet.

And another Valentine message from the message board.

Jingle Belles - We Three Kings

Well, if I didn't have these three kings (thanks to Sabrina!), I would have to have three of something for this fortnight's Jingle Belle prompt.  But lucky I was to save this Christmas gift from the last JB prompt for this time. I kept it simple adding the two die cut pieces to a silver star embossed navy background.  I meant to add a jewel or pearl to the center of the gold star in the lower corner.  

The panel with the kings and camels is popped up giving just an ever-so-slight shadow effect.

I think at some point I am going to try these dies in more of a box type card.  The dies are line dies allowing you to place them on the panel wherever you want. We'll have to see how it works out with paper.  

So, please join me over at the Jingle Belle blog by clicking here to see all the other "3's".  Oh, and if you're keeping count (but surely you're not) I made two of these.

Have I Mentioned My Paint Pouring Experimenting?

I don't think that I've shared any of my paint pours here yet.  Paint pouring is basically just pouring layers of paint on a surface and manipulating the surface to get pretty effects.  The kind of paint and the use of additives can affect the outcome.  For my first experiment with pouring I went the cheap route and bought pretty much all my supplies, including paint, at the dollar store.  Dollar Tree has acrylic paint in tubes in a variety of colors.  They also have both Mod Podge and white glue which can be added to the paint to get "cells" and I've learned that that doesn't always happen.  I also picked up a canister of automotive silicon lubricant there.  

For these particular pours, for each color I mixed equal parts of paint and Mod Podge and added water until the paint was the consistency of pancake batter and ran off the popsicle stick (used for mixing) without leaving a mound.  Once all the colors were mixed, I then got another plastic cup and started layering the paint in that cup.  (There are lots of videos on YouTube to see the different processes.) These squares are wooden pieces leftover from our shiplap project in our condo bathrooms. HWNSNBP was kind enough to cut a bunch of them up for me and they were already primed with white paint.  

Let me just add here that my very first set of pours were pretty much garbage as I tried to use all the colors that I had along with the silicon and they looked pretty good when wet, but turned quite muddy when dry, so I will keep them to myself.

These blue and green ones turned out pretty good.

Before I began pouring, I quickly brushed some of the mixed white paint over the surface so the pour would move easier over the surface.  You can see that there are cells in some of them.

Lot's of cells here.  

This is a different color combo.  I tried this after a similar pour that I chucked because I inadvertently picked up a bright pink tempera paint instead of acrylic and it didn't flow well and when it dried it was flat as opposed to the shininess of the acrylic.  So I tried again.  And as the paint cup got near empty, I added a bit of purple to the mix. for some contrast.

My other Dollar Store tools that helped with these experiments were plastic drop cloths, plastic shot cups, aluminum pans and wire cooling racks, rubber gloves (though I found those cumbersome and opted for bare hands for the most part), plastic pallet tools, popsicle sticks, and painters tape.

These were all experimental but they gave me enough desire to go out and buy some more expensive paint and to get myself some Floetrol to use as an additive to the paint to get it to flow better.  Those results will follow soon.