no sign of the three bears

This week I've found myself in a Goldilocks mood.  Nothing is quite right.  I've been preparing lots of backgrounds for the spring tangling ahead of me.  Inevitably this has meant using colours outside of my comfortable range - lots of yellow, pink and bright green.  I've been using different techniques to get the colour onto the tiles - a bit of hefty hack, some masking fluid, some stencilling.  Some of the tiles came out too pale, some horrifically bright.  Explosion in an 80's legwarmer warehouse bright!  I also worked on some dubious coloured paper and found it too smooth when using my pen, too rough when shading.  Whatever I tried I felt dissatisfied.

And then I heard myself advising a fellow tangler to work with what they'd got, learn to know and cherish their limitations and let go of the things that they found too difficult.  Time to apply the same to myself!  So later in the week, once dry, I cut up my newly coloured tiles - and they started to not look quite so bad.  You'll be seeing them here over the coming weeks!  And I continued working on the dubious paper.

This week's tangling was largely a matter of fortune and misfortune and the blurred line between the two.  I recently discovered that the usual album I store my finished tiles in has been discontinued.

My album of choice - I've filled two of these since I start tangling -

that's 576 tiles!

After endless research I discovered some sleeves that hold 3.5 inch tiles and have some ready to go into a large ring binder.  Seeing as I would be building my own album I thought it would be a good oppurtunity to source some sleeves to store my Zendala tiles - currently I just keep them in the tin.  I'm usually very precise when it comes to measurements, but I was so thrilled when I thought I'd found the perfect sleeves that I forgot to double check the size of the Zendala tile. When the sleeves arrived the tiles wouldn't fit! The openings are 4x4 inches and the Zendala a little larger. I then successfully bought some sleeves meant storing CDs which are perfect for my Zendala.

A happy home for my Zendala tiles -

these are the first three I ever tangled!

But I didn't want to waste the other sleeves as I loved the fact that they held two 4x4 spaces and four 2x2 spaces.

What fun, to have different sizes on the same page!

[Pocket pages made by Simple Stories]

 
Around the same time I was clearing out some old paper scraps from when my only creative outlet was occasional card making. I found a virtually unused pack of textured card stock in a wild array of colours. One side was far too textured to tangle on, but the reverse look viable. I cut tiles to size in my current spring colours.

UK tangler Lucy Farran has created her own prompts for the month of March. Called Botani-tangles, she's focusing on broadening her use of organic tangles.  Her list is well chosen, with familiar and unfamiliar tangles, and a good variety of types of tangle, all still within the organic theme.

March prompts chosen by Lucy Farran - aka The Lucky Tangler

I set to work tangling on the two larger tiles, and then the little row of Bijou's down the side.

Not so mellow yellow - Hollyhock,

Sanibelle and new favourite Loblolly

 
The pen moved quickly across the paper, meaning I felt less control than I usually have. On the plus side the black stayed really intense. Shading was also challenging as the paper is both smooth but with a residual texture from the other side.

In the pink - with Icantoo, Eddyper (which never comes

out as I want it to) and the dark and desirable Dayzee-Mae

All in all it was a different experience than my usual familiar papers. But there's a lot to like about it. As a whole page spread it feels like a sampler of organic tangles. I've always toyed with the idea of building my own tangle directory, but always find the thought quite tedious. But I can imagine having pages like this where I would browse the way tangles interact with each other. A great way to choose tangles I might have forgotten, but also more pleasurable to tangle in the first place.  I've used most of the tangles for the first 15 days of Lucy's prompts, but not necessarily in the order she suggested.  But that's the beauty of tangling - we can do whatever we fancy with it, and if we get lucky we might even find a bowl of porridge that suits out tastes!