With a little help from my friends

With immense gratitude for friends, I'll do a short post today to share how I got through this week. Many of these tiles were inspired by friends and members of our wonderful Zentangle community.

 

From a composition I admired on 7F5RStudio's website.

Alhambra String stencil by Marieke on Etsy

From Eni Oken's blog on Gothic Tracery

A "What If?" tile that began with one I made last week.

A morning meditation: No regrets. No resistance. No anticipation.

"Take Heart" pattern. #tanglingforukraine

Please take a moment to be grateful for your friends. Where would we be without each other?

All is Well

Happy belated Valentine's/Palentine's/Galentine's Day! I hope that you found yourself surrounded with love and appreciation!

An excellent youtube video from Eva Wu

My week had me feeling stressed out and sad. I know it happens to all of us, and we "muddle through somehow". I found solace in paint, ink, paper and pen, and, perhaps most importantly, the Zentangle Method. As I've mentioned in previous posts, when I give attention to gratitude and appreciation, my spirit lightens.

  

A "note to self". I used the previous tile and added some collage elements.

Inspired by a lovely piece on timefortangling.blogspot.com. This piece started with incredible frustration as I tried to make the string using Bales. You can see some of my scraps. A lesson in self-compassion and patience. "Anything is possible, one stroke at a time."

 From 7F5RStudio's Tea and Tangle Tuesday video on youtube, featuring two new tangles, Everitas and Medianna.

This morning's tangling, from tanglepatterns.com Refresher 233.

I wish us all peace, love, and joy in the week ahead.

Meals on Wheels

"What do we do with all these tiles we make?" My Zentangle students frequently asked for ideas. I usually pointed out that they stood alone without frames, could be tucked by the corner behind light switches, made into cards or gifts, hung from ribbons, placed in albums, only to receive blank stares. And I understood! I, too, was starting to have tiles pile up.

One day, my friend and fellow tangler Melissa offered a new idea. What if we used them for cards and gave them to our local Meals on Wheels clients? Melissa offered to set it all up, and a community service was born. Since October 2020, we have made cards every week. Sometimes, we use Zentangle artwork, sometimes stencils or freehand drawing. Each card has a personal note. There are currently 4 of us in this group, and a few others contribute as well. Every so often, we get positive feedback from some of the 165 or so clients. These always make our day! And getting together with my friends, Melissa, Pamela and Becky, to share our results, has lightened the monotony of the pandemic! We gather every two weeks, usually in one of our driveways, and catch up for an hour or so. A breath of fresh air!

This week, I decided to raid my "tile drawer" to make 41 cards. I added some digital paper words from  Pink Monarch on etsy.

After I made my cards, I had a little time for some random tangling.

Rozhki, with watercolor

Gray distress ink with blue Microns

If you're in the Triangle area and would like to join our team, email me!

Time

"Time expands to fit my needs."

This was from this morning's meditation. I've always thought that time is fickle, that we could never count on time to be constant. It either moves fast or slow! My lesson plans, carefully laid out in timed segments never worked out to perfectly fit the given time. (Thankfully, I always had more materials left over at the end of class!)  Now that I'm retired, time seems more plentiful. This week I enjoyed spending time on several tiles, as I found myself adding more love, as Maria says. I took time to make deliberate strokes, and then enjoyed going back over them to make them more confident and clear.  As I relaxed and focused on drawing, I felt that time was working with me. Here are my results:

Inspired by a pattern on the Mosaic app

A question from Mindful Art Studio

A note to self, with tangles from my "Try This" board

Two "WhatsItz" from 7F5RStudio

Tile 3 from 7F5RStudio's Singapore Botanic Gardens class.

Have you felt time expanding to fit your needs?