Old Friends and 20-Sided Shapes

This morning I decided to revisit an old friend, the Zentangle Diva at www.IAmTheDivaCZT.com. Every Monday morning she posts a challenge for the week. I used to do them all the time, and many times found inspiration in her prompts, so I returned to her website to see what was up. This week she asked for stripes. 

I drew my stripe string first  and started with Betweed, a tangle pattern I  have always loved, but  recently messed it up and realized I had forgotten how to draw it. I practiced with Maria Thomas's instruction video until I felt confident again. Maria says Betweed looks like woven Moroccan leather, but to me it always looks like something a Native American woman might use for a papoose.

Then I did a small area of Shattuck, just because how can you do stripes without Shattuck? For the bottom stripe up I used Zander, one of my favorites, but this time I made it a fun, fat and bulging Zander with a few little jewels on the bands. For even more inspiration I got down the Zentangle Primer and used a little spidery guy in the upper left stripe that somehow turned into a triangle. On page 120 of the Primer are about 100 triangle fragments. This is K12. 

Once I had jumped on the fragment and reticula bus, I remembered how much I liked T5, AKA Sleepy Owl Eyes. So in they went. Only the center remained. I wanted something that would tumble across the stripe and burst out with enthusiam. I went for Flux, which didn't quite burst out, but did have plenty of enthusiam. Done. What fun. While I am tangling, I just feel happy.

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A couple of days ago our CZT group met. There are four of us, and we have met for well over a year by now. I am very fond of the women in this group. This month it was my turn to present a project, and I had met Pat Verhagen at ZenAgain in Providence, R.I., last November and seen her Icosahedrons. These are 20 sided figures. I thought they would make a good project for us. Pat was very helpful and very reasonably priced. You can reach her through her wonderfully named store Cut Up And Sew on Palm Coast in Florida. Her well-designed templates made this whole project simple. 

She sent me around a dozen of these Icosahedron templates. This photo shows our CZT group's partly finished efforts.

And this is my final, double-sided-tape-glued-together icosahedron. I enjoyed this very much.