Happy Birthday Mom!

I'm on a roll ... sort of! My mom's birthday was this week and we're heading off to her party this afternoon. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to try another flourish. I really had fun doing this. I started with a banner from Ames Compendium and then just wung it.

I got a little carried away on the upper part of the banner when my husband came in and offered me a lick of chocolate frosting (since I haven't had any goodies since I've been on WW for 6+ weeks). I nearly fell off my drafting stool and then blobbed the card! So I tried to cover the goof by adding some thicker leaves. (It's was worth the lick of chocolate by the way).

I obviously still need to work on overall shape and getting down the stroke shapes. Looking forward to having something new to practice. I did the original with walnut ink on Fabriano Medioevalis. The web version is scanned and reversed. I'm including a photo of the original, too.

Thanks all for the great encouragement! Spark is lit again!!! :-)
Truly,

Erica

Something new...flourishing

I had a request to create a flourished banner for our guild's newsletter. Since I was unable to attend IAMPETH this summer, I missed Heather Held's flourishing class (much to my dismay!) and I have never done any kind of off-hand flourishing other than flourished lettering.

I was tempted to say I can't. Lately it seems I can't do calligraphy all that well. (And in my head I hear my husband saying, "Can't lives on Won't Street. :-) It must be lack of practice but some days it just feels like the paper is too scratchy, the nibs all skip, and the ink constantly bleeds. Nothing seems to flow. When this happens, I think the best thing to do is get back down to fundamentals. So I thought I would teach myself how to do the flourishing. Why not try, now is as good a time as any, right?!

So I dug out my binder with Heather's instructions and pulled out my Ames Compendium and had a go as they say. It was *really* fun! It's as addicting as zentangle that is for sure. They are very much the same process. You continue to build on the design using different patterns.

This is my first attempt so no laughing. Everyone has to start somewhere! Hopefully a year from now I'll be sharing some better attempts! :-)

Truly,
Erica
P.S. This was done with McCaffrey's black and a Nikko G nib on copy paper, scanned and then reversed. Also, I borrowed the banner design from Ames' Compendium and then wung the rest. I can see some gaps now where I could have filled in more. But I reached a point where I was fearful to screw it up!

Introducing Zentangles

I was asked to introduce Zentangles to the Coastal Calligraphers Guild during our last meeting. I had soooo much fun! I am not a certified zentangle teacher so I did the best I could using the information from the zentangle's website. Thankfully Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts, the creators of zentangle, encourage others to share about zentangles.

We reviewed several patterns and then did a few projects. The first project was a tag necklace which can be used as a name tag, necklace, or gift tag or... For our second project, we tangled a copper colored leaf. I drew the leaf pattern and cut out the shapes, used black eyelets, and put black string through for hanging. Being from New England, I'm missing all the beautiful fall colors right now so I thought this would be a fun way to bring them to Florida!

I figured out why I love zentangles so much and why I think they are so popular. There is a youtube video which shows a vibration table and each time salt is thrown on the table, a pattern is created from the vibration the frequency creates. It's amazing to see all the different patterns created and they look just like a zentangle pattern.

Many of you know I am also a homeopath and homeopathy is vibrational medicine. Each remedy is a vibration/energy of a substance such as a plant or mineral. People also have a vibration. The vibration of the remedy is matched to the vibration of the person (based on symptoms) so that healing can occur. So zentangles is like homeopathic medicine in a way since people are resonating with certain patterns.

Fascinating to me - perhaps boring to others! But I think it's wonderful! Now if I could just figure out how to determine the pattern of each remedy to the pattern of each person, I could heal the world! But for now, I'll just have to be happy tangling!
Truly,
Erica

Using the chalkboard to demonstrate zentangles.

Loving using stencils!

The blank silver rimmed tags before the class. I glued charms to the bottom of each one to weight.

Our copper leaf!

Wishing for snow!

My tag examples.

From the class - they did beautiful work!

We worked through the same patterns - love how they all come out different!