shine on

This week the Diva invited us to enjoy Lily Moon's wonderful Amphora tangle!  Now that's an invitation I'm not going to miss.

I fancied doing things a bit differently today - so had a go with the nail varnish technique that Maria demonstrated a couple of weeks ago.  I'd tried a few test strips on various papers, with various pens I use.  Some cause a slight deepening of the paper colour, and in others its more profound.  When I tested it on a tile of Kraft paper it produced a lovely deep wood-like tone which I thought would work well with the ancient roots of Amphora.

A work in progress - pausing to let each stage dry

I used it on alternate stripes of the tangle, and in the space between tried out some newly bought Tombow brush pens for a bit of grey shading.  I kept my tangling close to the original, but added a bit of Beadlines and some white highlights.

The finished article

I really like the contrast between the cool and warmer panels, and while the photo struggles to catch how it looks in reality (my scanner threw up its hands in horror!) there is a lovely sense of age about the finished tile. 

cutting the string

My work on this week's Diva tile - in which we were invited to Duotangle with Molygon and Marasu - was strange from start to finish.

Firstly I selected a pre-coloured tile from my Leftovers stack.  I immediately found it rather unappealing, but decided to stick with what I'd picked.

I then had a 'clever' idea of making it so the Molygon looked cut out with the Marasu viewed through the holes.  Which seemed better in my imagination than it looked on paper! 

Then I thought that lots of black ink might come to the rescue...  and I selected a sky blue pen that I rarely use...

... and well, who knows.  It's an odd one, not one of my favourites, but it is what it is.

But the strangest thing occurred only once I stepped back from it.  When I'm not tangling I write, and much of what I write about involves memory.  My mind is a kite - dancing this way and that in the sky, sometimes in cloud, sometimes in the clear blue.  But when I'm not actively thinking, actively remembering - when I'm doing something that shifts my mind in a different way - like tangling does - it's like the kite string has been cut.  I drift to wildly unexpected places.  When I looked at the tile I got a sudden flash of a perfume my mother used when I was a child - not the smell but the packaging.   I hadn't thought of it in years, but a quick Google and there it was - an almost exact replica of the striping on my Marasu.  How weird and wonderful!