Happy Lunar New Year 2012, the year of the Water Dragon

The renowned composer Nino Rota collected books and manuscripts on the occult. Rota was a child prodigy who went on to compose ten operas, five ballets and many, many choral and chamber pieces. He is now best known for his multi-award-winning film scores for The Godfather, Romeo and Juliet and Fellini’s 8½ and When Rota died in 1979, a copy of a very strange occult manuscript Clavis Artis was discovered among his personal effects. Rota had purchased this illustrated text from a bookseller in Frankfurt. After his death it was donated to the Biblioteca dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei where it can still be found today. Rota’s copy of Clavis Artis is one of only three editions of the manuscript being currently held in Italy and Germany—only two of which are illustrated. The Clavis Artis is an alchemical manuscript believed to have been produced in the late 17th or early 18th century—though the title page states the book was written in 1236 AD. The text is attributed to “Zoroaster (“Zarathustra”) the rabbi and Jew” who claimed to have written the book over “a dragon skin.” R. et AC Secret key for many covert operations In the animal kingdom,...

I belong to the Calgary Long-Arm Quilting Group - not really a guild, but a growing group of people who do long-arm quilting - some for just their own quilts and some who also quilt for others. We decided to do a wholecloth quilt group entry into the annual Heritage Park Festival of Quilts. So I signed up and spent a bit of time figuring out what I wanted to do and then how to do it (described at the bottom of the pix). Here is my resulting contribution to our group entry: Draco Ostium, which is the Latin for Dragon Door. I didn't want to do a "traditional" wholecloth. I was thinking dragons - we've been watching too many "period" TV where dragons are featured in tapestries, etc. I found a black and white clip art illustration, imported it to EQ7, traced it in EQ7 then printed it out to the size I needed. The thing I like about EQ7 is that once the drawing is done it can be printed to any size and it will automatically tile the printout for 8.5*11" paper. The final size of the wall hanging is 26" * 40". That was the "easy" part. Then I had to figure out how to mark it onto black fabric. In the end I bought some white "carbon" paper. Of course it's not actually carbon, but some sort of white chalk. I used that to trace the design onto the fabric. Because it was chalk it would not last long once I started working with it so the first thing I did once I had it mounted on the frame was to do one stitch line over the entire design. That became my outline. From there I stitched over the outlines 4-5 times in gold. Then I did the background in "mahogany" Glide thread (which is what I use on almost all of my quilting - it runs really well in my machine). The background is a variety of micro sized fillers - pebbles, matchstick, and swirls. I was going for a sort of old leather or wood look and I'm really happy with the way it turned out!

What if what we like to call “true love” is actually an illusion that acts in our ego’s best interest?

Take a tour through the magical world of natural fractals and discover the complex patterns of succulents, rivers, leaf veins, crystals, and more.

I learned how to make dragons boats several years ago at a Winnipeg Embroiderers' Guild workshop, and I thought it would be nice to share ho...

I work best when I'm (properly caffeinated and) avoiding something else I should be doing. Yesterday, this room was a disaster. Major upheaval going on in here. I've got at least a couple of hours of work left to do in it, so naturally, I'm diving into something I would rather be doing, and avoiding the mess altogether. There's just something about procrastination that gets my creativity crankin'. This is a really rewarding artistic exercise for me, taking tangle patterns I already know and kneading/squishing them into something new. The mission: pick two patterns, adopt at least one element from each, and make a new pattern out of the pieces. Like a lot of things I post on my blog, these tangle patterns were more of an exercise in creativity than relaxation. As far as true Zentangle patterns go, these variations are probably not repetitive enough to get fully submerged in the zen. I dunno... maybe I could still lose myself in them for a while. Or if all else fails, I'm pretty sure I could just lose myself in this room. God knows I haven't seen my desk in weeks. Pardon the randomness of the pattern layouts; this post has been in the making for a looong time. • ❃ • ❋ • ❁ • ✿ • ✽ • ❀ • Tangle remix no. 1: Eylet & Ribbon (Lori Howe) & Crescent Moon (Zentangle) Tangle remix no. 2: Assunta (Zentangle) & Paizel (Angie Vangalis, CZT) Tangle remix no. 3: Huggins (Zentangle) & Hypnotic (Elena Hadzijaneva) Tangle remix no. 4: Afterglo (Carole Ohl, CZT) & Cadent (Zentangle) Tangle remix no. 5: Assunta (Zentangle) & Paradox (Zentangle) Tangle remix no. 6: W2 (Zentangle) & Dansk (Margaret Bremner) Author's note: As much as I love the above remix, it's not technically correct. You can go here to see what Dansk is *supposed* to look like. Tangle remix no. 7: Fleuri (Genevieve Crabe) & Veezley (mine) Tangle remix no. 8: Indy-Rella (Zentangle) & Joy (Joyce Block, CZT) Tangle remix no. 9: Sanibelle (Tricia Faraone) & Mumsy (Sandy Steen Bartholomew) And last but not least...Tangle remix no. 10, my FAVE: The basic shape/flow of Prestwood, aura'ed to the nth degree like Cruffle. I love this pattern because it's curvy and flowy, and has natural shading even before the pencil comes along. All of those converging lines naturally darken the parts that would be shaded anyway. Wiiin. The official how-to: Some tips for a perfect Puffle: • Begin and end every inner aura at the same point within each section, down in the 'valley' where all the lines converge. • Sometimes closing the shapes all the way makes that first outline skew a little bit too far in one direction or another. A couple of 'lobes' can always be added to the next section to compensate, as you can see in the examples above. • When you draw that first continuous outline, close the loops as much as possible. The more open that space is, the harder it is to add in the auras so they look right: • As with Cruffle, the step that most determines whether your pattern will look right is the FIRST loop inside the initial outline (shown below in pink). If there is an evenly-spaced gap between the first outline and that first loop all the way around the curve, the rest of the pattern will look fine. Getting that first aura right is like using auto-tune for this tangle (only with less cheating!). Notice that the middles (the last stroke) are not even or perfect, but it doesn't matter because that gap in between the initial outline and the first aura within it are evenly spaced. • ❃ • ❋ • ❁ • ✿ • ✽ • ❀ • Here are my responses to the challenges you left me in the comments: Virginia's was a tough one... ...so I faked it. :oD And here we have Mooka on a stick. This is me reporting live from my couch... sorry this isn't scanned in like it should be. Been sick the last few days, and my camera phone was just so much closer than my scanner. (I'm on antibiotics, and they make me lazy.) Thanks for posting these challenges for me... they were really fun! Here's an updated version of Purk vs. Squid WITH pencil guides... Purk looks infinitely better when you're working within a shape and not just drawing it freeform (like the one above). • ❃ • ❋ • ❁ • ✿ • ✽ • ❀ • come visit me here!