I can sew. I can knit. I’ve done macrame. And I can do lots of other things.
I suck at crochet. I’ve never had anyone around who could teach me.
So I have decided, since I’ve seen some cute things, (not grandma doilies,) that I would like to be able to make, to try to actually learn how to do this.
I have a few books with cute patterns, and of course, there is YouTube, which can be a good teacher. I hope I can find someone I can ask about confusing things over the internet.
Recently, there was a little discussion among myself and some artistic friends about which way animals face when you draw them. Apparently, different people draw them predominantly one direction or another.
Perhaps, handedness plays a part in which way we draw them? It was also mentioned that, psychologically, animals facing left appear as more threatening than those facing right.
In this little page from my sketch book, I have animals of several kinds. Some face right, some forward, some up and one left. I don’t think I generally have a preference.
You saw the new Swing Dress that I made for Tuna last week.
It still needed a pair of shoes and possibly some leggings or tights to go with it.
I wanted to make a pair of t-strap style shoes, a bit on the dressy side, since her dress is a bit fancy.
These are what I ended up with. I’m not sure I’m too thrilled with them. It turns out that having black shoes on a leg that is grey doesn’t really provide enough contrast.
Huggins and W-2 have appeared in the Entanglement library! Huggins and W-2 both look like they have been woven but are really just shapes on a grid connected by lines according to a few simple rules. The difference between them is that Huggins connects circles with curved lines, while W-2 connects squares with straight lines.
In this post, I’ll talk about how I built Huggins (once you build Huggins, W-2 is pretty easy to add) and show some examples of how both are used.
Today’s post isn’t about Zentangle.
It’s not about art.
It’s not about sewing.
It’s about REAL LIFE.
On Wednesday night, our water heater, which is in the garage, had a blowout. Water came spewing out of a small hole.
The tank is very close to the surrounding wall. The water was under a high amount of pressure. That pressure created a hole in the wall right next to it. The beginning of a disaster.
Since it’s the start of the school year, I thought I would make Tuna a new dress to celebrate! It’s not that she’s going anywhere, but any excuse is good for a new dress, right?
This is the “Swing Dress” from this set of patterns. In keeping with Tuna’s color theme of pink and green, I decided to use this very special fabric for the skirt.
The fabric features little figures of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in black, green, pink, and purple. It is at least 65 years old, and possibly even older. It came from my mother’s stash and I remember it from when I was very, very young. I was fascinated with it because I recognized the storybook figures, yet they were the “wrong color” in my mind.
I want to make a pair of shoes to go with the dress I showed you last week.
I would like them to be “dressy” and give the illusion of fancy heels.
As a quick trial, I used a scrap of fabric and folded it in half. Then I marked where I thought I should sew to make it fit. After tackling the stitching, I trimmed away the excess and tried it on her foot.
The Entanglement library has a very few (so far) tangle patterns built in which can be used to create Zentangles. New ones get added to the library as I get to them, but you (yes, YOU) as a user can create them too. Warning! This post is mostly Javascript code! If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes now! You need version 0.0.5 of Entanglement to follow along:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tektsu/entanglement@0.0.5/dist/entanglement.js"></script> In this post, we’ll create a simple grid-based tangle pattern, then use it in a Zentangle. The tangle we’ll create is not particularly interesting, and is not a “real” Zentangle (as far as I know.) It’s just an example to show the process. The Entanglement library only supports two general kinds of tangles so far: a pattern of tangle elements placed randomly on the canvas, such as Aah or BoxSpirals, or a grid with some kind of pattern, such as Ambler or Emingle. We’ll create a grid tangle in this case. We want it to look something like this:
I made this doll quite a while ago. The pattern is from the MadeByMiculinko Shop on Etsy. She’s a 27-inch, Tilda-style doll.
I wasn’t completely happy with her, but I did start a dress from the Little Black Dress pattern from the same store.
It ended up taking much longer to complete than I had initially planned because I ended up doing quite a bit of handwork on it. The dress is completely lined.
These are little finger puppets that I made many years ago.
Still cute!
I’d like you to meet the newest addition to my collection of Tilda Friends. Her name is Bessie. As you can see, she is a cow.
I was a bit worried about sewing on the horns by hand, but they turned out to be much easier than I thought they were going to be! I think she needs a nose, but I’m still playing with the idea and haven’t come up with something I’m happy with yet.
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ […] I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)
In my first post about generative art, I dumped a lot of Javascript on you with only a basic explanation of how it works, and more recently I have given up trying to explain it at all under the theory that most of the people reading these posts are more interested in the art rather than the programming behind it. Also, including a Javascript course here would make for some very, very long articles!
Progress is being made! This all-American friend is coming together!
Stay tuned!
I’ve been working on a new friend while watching TV.
I’ve had this fabric for quite a while. And I actually have quite a bit of it. I like using it for this one, because this animal will be a midwestern, all American type girl. The red, white and blue spots will be perfect.
I think I’ll name her Bessie.
Today, you get to meet Katie Yoté. She is a coyote character, based on the Tilda Friends Fox pattern !
Her body and limbs are the same shapes as the cat pattern, with a different shaped head and ears. This means their clothing will be interchangeable.
At first, I just painted her eyes. But she didn’t look quite right. After a bit of looking at photos of real coyotes, I decided to paint her nose, also. I think it made a world of difference in her appearance.
Up until now, the Entanglement library has provided a few tangle elements and a few tangles, which you could draw onto your canvas. But real Zentangles have a border, and might be round or triangular instead of square. To make this easier to do, Entanglement now has the Zentangle class. This is the top-level class you should use to define what your Zentangle should look like.
Here is an example using it. This program drew the image at the top of this page: