Zentangle Sampler
Wooohoooo!! I have finally made it to the end of Thing-a-Day 2011 without missing a day!
It has been really hard though and I am sure that if I had not chosen to do a zentangle theme for the month that I would have fallen by the wayside. As I mentioned on Day 1, my family has had a really bad year and my creativity has taken a real knocking but in doing a daily zentangle I have had the opportunity to focus on something that quickly and easily develops into a thing of beauty with little conscious thought and without the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ or staring at a blank page. And it has helped me by giving me a few minutes each day where I can just get lost in the process of zentangling and enjoying my classical music without giving thought to the things that trouble me on a daily basis. And yes, I think it has helped me to get a little bit excited about starting something new and more challenging, creatively speaking, over the next few weeks.
So, anyway, today I did my final letters of X,Y and Z. And then worked on trying to arrange my 36 tiles onto a piece of black mount board – which was not quite as easy as I expected as the board would only accommodate 5 tiles across and 8 tiles down – so I could not carry out my original plan of 6 tiles by 6, or even 4 by 9!
So this is my final arrangement…
… although I think I will create two narrow border pieces to run alongside the bottom 4 rows, perhaps with my name and the date worked into it somehow, and this will create a neater rectangular shape before sticking everything down and framing it.
Putting this together made me think of the samplers that ‘young ladies’ created in centuaries gone by where they displayed their prowess with their repetoire of embroidery stitches creating a needleworked alphabet…and how like embroidery it is, creating patterns one stroke or stitch at a time.
And so I have met the Thing-a-Day challenge, one day at a time, and hope that everyone who participated enjoyed their month of creativity too, and hopefully we will all be doing it again next year!!