Look, Ma! No drawing!

Have you seen the Zentangle 12 Days of Christmas videos? We're up to day 8, and the projects all involve creating dimension in one's tile to make it 3D! Not just through extreme shading and highlighting, but dry embossing, folding and more!

I haven't been able to follow along as faithfully as I usually would, and that's okay. But I did want to share a few of my creations, and hope that they, in turn, might inspire you.

First, a dry embossed card for my sweetie. (This was day 3 of the 12 Days of Zentangle.) I followed the basic idea, and then added some color. The texture that you see was created with an embossing tool, by "carving" the design into the paper. I would love to do more of these. If you don't have the tool, you can use a ball point pen that is out of ink, or a mechanical pencil with no lead.

We have a new Christmas tree that is quite a bit smaller than what we usually have. I needed some more decorations, so I decided to make a garland with folded tiles. (I had seen this years ago on the Zentangle blog.) I used some distress ink and pigment dyed papers for most of the 2-inch tiles. I made a template with Flux on a regular sheet of copy paper so I didn't need to draw the individual patterned tiles. I

cut them out, and folded all these 2-inch squares. (Parallel folds spaced 1/2 inch apart.) Then I glued two sides to make the triangular prism shape. Tips: I used a scoring tool before folding, and double-sided tape to assemble them. I strung them together on some 1/8 inch satin ribbon that I had. I think it would be interesting to put them on a wider ribbon, too.

My other project was an ornament that Rick made on day 8, using 4 Bijou tiles. I chose to use more dyed paper for these.

Even though I haven't been able to draw along with the ZT crew, I have enjoyed finding inspiration to create decorations for our little tree.

My New Year's cards for Meals on Wheels featured a quote about new beginnings.

May you find magic in every new beginning!