a little lime

I have so many scribbled on pieces of paper scattered across my desk right now - pattern ideas, drawing ideas.......things that have just popped into my head. Yep, it's a mess! I haven't had time to get up to my room and draw, because, you know........it IS Spring and there's gardening to be done, a lamb who thinks I'm his mother and does not want to be weaned (though I do have him down to one feed a day), running my daughter around, catching up with my other kids......oh.....and having coffee with the first CZT I have met in real life! Exciting! Yesterday I met up with the lovely Jenny Farrell for a coffee at beautiful Karunga Native Nursery (well worth a visit if you're in Melbourne and love Australian native plants). So, onto this week's diva challenge ..........I wanted to go with the colour option and for some reason I was determined to do a string themed thing and it just wasn't working out.......after 2 aborted attempts, I scrabbled through som...

Oh happy day! Yesterday was my last day at school........not just for the term........but forever! I finished up one week early due to orientation, school concerts etc. Bonus!!! I am now back to my most favourite job as a full-time, home-based mum after a 5 1/2 year hiatis. I wonder if my husband will now expect the house to be tidy and dinner to make it to the table before 8.30pm? haha.....probably not. I have also been busy, busy working on a Christmas surprise for my blog subscribers which I am hoping to have on the blog within the next week - are you excited? I am. LOL. It's ready to go, but......I am in the process of ironing out blog/internet/html.......gaaah. I hate that stuff! All the research into making these things work within the limitations of blogger gives me a big, fat headache! I just want to draw. This week's challenge was to use Boo.Kee - I loved the look of it as soon as I saw it - circles are a favourite for me. I did ha...

The challenge this week - Pea-nuckle and Well ................. together. I find Pea-nuckle frustrating enough on its own, let alone trying to make it work with Well. They do not play well together! At least not in my journal. So, I fell back on a favourite transitioning tangle - knyt - which works for me as a very structured, yet organic tangle allowing me to go from the more rigid Pea-nuckle to the more flowing Well (you can see the steps on how I draw Well like this here ) It doesn't feel all that exciting to me as I've done similar things before with different patterns, but at least I managed to get these two tangles to call a brief truce. I do like the mechanical feel of Pea-nuckle in this design - reminds me of a stretchy metal lattice thingy. Yeah, one of those. LOL. 2 weeks to go! I did my last Thursday classes today and have just two Tuesdays left. hx

This weeks Diva Challenge : Quib. I always struggle with patterns like this - as I find continuous patterns (i.e. ones that can go on in any direction forever) far easier to deal with - Quib, feels (to me!) more rigid without as much room for creative spin, maybe it's just my frame of mind this week as I'm sure others have managed to come up with incredible ways of using it. So, what to do? I could either use the pattern as inspiration and head in my own direction, or keep it as is and try and create a point of difference to make it mine - in the end I did both. This one is the closest to original, but instead of tucking the ends back into another "hole" they're capped with my favourite flower. And, some colour with the lines weaving a bit. Quib (sort of) is in the middle - I used my string drawing method , with stops and starts to get the strings going over and under each other. I also strengthened up the lines along one side...

Well, things have been pretty crazy around here.......for months, really. My computer went into fibrillation earlier on in the week and though we have been able to resuscitate it on and off (like now - let's hope I make it to the end of the post!!!), and the ipad is useless for blogger posts - I haven't found an app that allows me to do enough editing to the posts to make it look like I want, so the computer's the only option. A new computer is on it's way, though, I am scared of Windows 8, so I may be buried in the learning curve for a bit. So, the challenge - I hadn't had a chance to play with cruze and scribbled down some ideas earlier in the week, finally got a chance to finish off this piece today. My mini break for Melbourne Cup week is over and I have 5 weeks till the end of the term/end of my 2 year contract - I cannot wait! Hope you're all having a great weekend! hx

A "use my tangle" diva challenge this week - 8's parte dos. Pretty. Alright, confession time........ I'm actually a little scared of complicated dot grids - my dots go all over the place, I lose track of what I'm doing, etc, etc.......so, to be honest, I did not even attempt to draw this pattern using the instructions. Once I saw all those dots I had horrible flashbacks to my first attempts at Mi2 and promptly hid in my closet. It took John 2 days to coax me back out. I kid you not. O.k., yes, I am kidding. It was only 1 day. Because I love the look of these patterns, and still want to draw them well, I like find ways that work for me and suit the loose, flowing drawing style that I (mostly) prefer to do. My approach is to look at the pattern as a "whole", break it down into shapes and once I understand how those shapes work together, I  just draw it out from there. 8's parte dos initially pared back to x's and +'s for me,...

The diva challenge this week - use knightsbridge and tipple - together! Individually - yep, use them both quite a bit and love 'em. Together........meh......not so much. Definitely a contrast. So here's my deconstructed knightsbridge.........with just a little touch of tipple. It was only once I had completed the linework for this one with all the curls and crossovers that I realised it would be impossible for me to use solid black for the alternate blocks - any overlapping elements would lose their definition without any contrast - so I ended up working with black and dark grey tones for the black(ish) blocks. Solid black can be pretty hard to control for shading, but I'm pretty happy with how it worked out. More play definitely on the cards. hx

As I use colour fairly frequently, this week's  diva challenge  should have been an easy one for me to approach. The problem was I couldn't think of anything that I really wanted to draw - so, not being one to suffer for my art, I just slipped right into my comfort zone and used both my favourite pattern and colour. Here's my mooka'd up butterfly in shades of purple. hx

This week's diva challenge was, not surprisingly, the newly released zentangle pattern - Well. Every time I approached this pattern using the grid as a base there was some weird gravitational pull going on that kept making me convert it into something very like paradox - I just could not help but put directional lines in it - and voila - paradox. So, I ditched the grid and "randomised" it. First, I approached this by doing random large and small circles on the page and connected them with the directional lines to create the base pattern. I loved it and went on to experiment more with colour and shading, and eventually evolved into a different way of drawing it. Fun, fun. It may no longer look much like the basic pattern, but it was definitely the genesis. Love how these look like butterflies I am about to head off for my last classes for term (woohoo!) but will put up a little tutorial on how I approached this either later tonight or tomorrow. h...

Beamz......lovely, but so, so geometric. I definitely deal better with curves. I couldn't really think of anything particularly clever, or original, so just switched up the line direction/sizes of the boxes and came up with this: Any lines that ran through a box I omitted making it hard to see where the design originated (somewhere up near the top left). I don't love it, but I like it better than I thought I would. My other version barely has any resemblance to the original pattern, and was likely influenced by LeeAnn's wonderful organic design which I saw on facebook before I got around to checking out the challenge this week. Basically, I turned all corners into curves and made daisies from the loops. We had a fabulous week of unseasonably warm weather and have now dropped right back into reality with the usual cold early spring days - the wood heater is in action again. I did get all the seeds started and in their little greenhou...

This weeks Diva challenge - Tipple - which is, basically, clusters of circles. Fun and so very useful! I LOVE using circles, sometimes as a fill and others as a feature, you can see some examples in my gallery if you want to check it out. Today I went with lots of loops with little clusters of tipple nestled here and there. For a change, I decided to go for some strong, juicy colours in shades of pink and purple. Fun. hx

The diva challenge this week was to use Dex as a monotangle. I really love the 3-d look of Dex and have used it in a few of my intensely patterned pieces, but as a stand-alone - that was hard to think of anything that really excited me. Ultimately, I came up with this, and I'm o.k. with it, but don't love it - my shading's a bit slap-dash but I didn't want to waste any more time on it. I do like that in one spot I can see through 3 layers of windows :) Ever have those weeks where nothing that you draw really satisfies you? Unfortunately, I do, and they're probably the weeks I should just put the pencils down and back away from the desk............. this week has been one of those. Tried this idea - pretty cool, but........yeah, I was bored after about 10 lines. Here's my mini version - you can see I didn't make it all that far. Reminds me of the desert. I think there's probably a little more to it looking at some of the finished ar...

Can you believe it's been 13 weeks since I've done a diva challenge - wow - how fast time flies, right? Ah, well, life's been busy and I've had a few other projects on the go. I enjoyed this challenge, such a pretty, feminine pattern and well, you know I just love, love flowers. So, here's my response: I started off with a loopy line (the darker line running through the pattern, then just henna drummed and mooka-ed it up. The last couple of weeks I have been drawing, still working on the sketches I mentioned in the previous post. I'm pretty much done now. Here's a couple that I really love: Looking forward to the weekend AND the fact that I don't have to work for the next 10 days - a mini break -the school has some special program running next week! Yeeha! hx

Just a quick post - the weather is glorious and I have so many things to get done. I have earmarked this morning to get my flower beds and potager ready for winter. I have a massive trailer-load of horse manure with my name on it awaiting me next to the garden. Yep. My life. Glamorous. Still, I love it :) It was interesting seeing a couple of breakdowns of this weeks Diva Challenge pattern, and here's what I came up with: I think I preferred it before I added pattern and it could do with a little more shading to make the larger arrows come forward a bit, but overall I'm happy with it. hx

This weeks diva challenge was to draw inspiration from star shapes. Even though I don't draw stars a lot, I had fun with this one. So, here's the background story. Occasionally......ah....sometimes......o.k., o.k........a lot of the time I get locked into an idea and I can't just leave it alone. I don't know why I'm drawn to it or what the end result will be. This week I could not move past the idea of a connected 5 pronged star pattern. This was what I was doing or nothin'. And, ya know what I found out? 5 sided things are not so easy to work with so there was some frustrated hair-pulling along the way. Here's the end result: Can you see the stars? I actually loved the negative pattern created and chose to highlight that. I loved the way it varied from 3 to 4 petal flowers seemingly randomly - maybe if I drew a bigger sample I could see some consistency in how this happened. I've been playing with a fun curly bracket pattern and will (hop...

preserving, cooking, milking, catering for 70 at a family event afternoon tea on Sunday. Ah, the holidays......so......um......relaxing. This weeks challenge was a little hard for me to get into so I just did a quick one using on one of my favourite techniques. Suspended frames laced together. Side elevation. Should have shaded the top image more to give the appearance of each frame dropping further back, but, ah well. Maybe later. hx

Did you hear my squeal of excitement when this weeks Diva Challenge  was posted? It was seriously loud. 'Cause, ya know.......me and mooka........we're like totally in love. It all started back when I first saw mooka in the video demo........*sigh*........all that delicate swirly goodness......love at first sight. Love, love, love. I use this pattern a lot, probably way too much (check out the gallery if you want to see some pics). Rather than sticking to a structure, I like to have the scrolls kind of everywhere. I just can't help myself! Usually, though, it's in conjunction with other patterns and the challenge this week was for mooka to go solo. Here's what I've come up with, I felt like using a bit of colour today: A mooka trio: One of the things I find a little clunky with mooka is that the base of the pattern can become a bit bulky and take away from the lovely curly scrolls, so sometimes I like to make the bases of each scro...

This weeks Diva Challenge was fun - I love wrapping things around parallel lines - particularly threads around needles and have done this a few times (check out my gallery if you want to see some examples). For my challenge piece I went along a similar route, keeping it simple, and less freeform using straight lines between the parallel bars. Hopefully I might get a bit of time to play around with patterns going over the bars, too. hx

It's Friday. BIG YAY FOR FRIDAY! I *think* we've made it over the hump - our Jersey is coming to the gate to be milked (she luuuuuurves those pellets), she's no longer scared of the milking machine, we're now able do it by ourselves, so we can share the "shifts". AND from next week I will start getting up at 6am rather than 5am to bring her in. Oh, yeah, and it rained yesterday and the forecast is for more over the next week. woohoo! So, fingers crossed, I can now get back to my regularly scheduled program of drawing. and, oh yes, sleep. Sweet, precious, sleep. This weeks Diva Challenge - the official tangle Quandary - step-outs were released last week in the Zentangle Newsletter. I love it. So cute. Lots of little daisies and I do love my daisies. Quandary Embroidery:  A bit of a recurring theme for me - wrapping laces around needles and stitchery themes. Love them. Quandary cooperated beautifully. Dandel...

I'm tired. Soooooooo tired. Milking. Bah. John and I are up every morning at 5am doing the first milking - the cow still needs us both to get her in and John has been in the kicking zone putting on the cups, etc for most of this week - I have just started to do this over the past 2 days. We need to get it done before John has to get ready for work, hence the early start. The cow has been great (no kicks!) and is getting into the routine - after about another week I'll take over the morning shift by myself and move it to a much more respectable 6am. Anyway, all this = both of us very tired. At least I've been able to have a quick nap most days. And, on the plus side I have fresh milk, cream, homemade yogurt, ricotta, and today - as I have about 20 litres of milk and a litre of cream in the fridge - icream and butter! Now, onto this weeks diva challenge   which was to take inspiration from the Chinese Year of the Snake. Snakes - I don't love them - but living in a ...