July 03, 2022

Zentangle® – June 2022

July 03, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

30 Zentangle tiles for June; it was challenging find the time to make tiles in June with the crescendo of activity for our move to Missouri…but very worthwhile to help me decompress.

I found myself enjoying new Sharpie Ultra Fine pens and savoring some newly discovered gel pins; both provided the smooth glide of color onto the variety of tile materials during the month. The paper coasters (round and square) were in the box I carried with me on all my travels. I rediscovered an unopened box of the round ones as I was packing…will return to them in the months ahead.

My favorite tiles are probably the light brown ones made from recycled lightweight cardboard or old file folders. Both square

And rectangular.

There are still a few tiles made from old pocket folders saved my daughter’s K-12 days; I found more of those folders as I packed to move…will cut them into tiles as some point.

I had a few tiles that were a narrower rectangle…the back of pads of paper I used up….and then had the cardboard left to repurpose!

The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. “Zentangle” is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

June 01, 2022

Zentangle® – May 2022

June 01, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

31 Zentangle tiles for May. It was a little more challenging to do one a day with the flurry of activity getting ready to move….but I did it (although with fewer extra tiles than usual). There were more rectangular tiles in May because I was at home; the rectangular tiles don’t fit as well as the square tiles in the box is take when I travel as happened in prior months…and will happen in June too.

May 01, 2022

Zentangle® – April 2022

May 01, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

30 tiles – because April has 30 days.

It seemed like there were more tile shapes this month – rectangles of different sizes, foot shaped (created on cardboard that held footies I bought for summer) and round.

Many of the tiles were made while I was travelling. I had a box with blank tiles and a few pens that was easy to pack; the color selection was limited. The box was just barely large enough to provide support for a tile as I drew patterns and finished with colors.

I’ve already planned to only create square tiles for the next month so that I can use my phone rather than a scanner for the May post…I don’t want to delay the post because I am between houses (i.e. without the luxury of my full home office)!

April 22, 2022

The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (eBook)

April 22, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

Internet Archive has the 3 volumes of The Early Christian monuments of Scotland by John Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson published in 1903 presented in two volumes: The Early Christian monuments of Scotland V1-2 and The Early Christian monuments of Scotland V3.

I enjoyed browsing them (particularly volumes 1-2) from a Zentangle pattern perspective. The patterns looked familiar with many variations of several presented in the book. Now that I am looking at the book again as I write this post…if feel a Zentangle project calling…maybe several. First up – tiles prompted by the ‘spiral ornament’ pages!

March 02, 2022

Zentangle® – February 2022

March 02, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

Even without the Valentine tiles I posted about on 2/14, I still had plenty of tiles to choose from to make the 28 for the February Zentangle post! The square tiles include 2 made from a purple folder I found while cleaning out my office; the color is very dark…requires gel pens for the patterns. There is a square coaster (rounded corners) in the group as well; I found a stack of them that I had forgotten about so there will be more in March.

The rectangular tiles are probably my favorite shape/size. The color of the lightweight cardboard varies slightly. I like the more golden color (the one with cut corners) the best.

The last 4 tiles are on black paper (it is a pad that my daughter bought back in in high school…well over 10 years old)! I’m savoring the black background and the different weight of these tiles…still have more than half the pad left!

February 14, 2022

Valentines!

February 14, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

I used Valentines Day as a prompt for some Zentangle® tiles. At first it was all about heart shaped patterns and red coloring.

My fascination did not last long with the shape…but I did like the red coloring. I started another project with everything the same except for the ‘string’…keeping the red coloring for Valentines Day. It is surprising how different the tiles look with that one change in the frame – string – patterns + coloring - appreciate process.

February 01, 2022

Zentangle® – January 2022

February 01, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

31 days in January…31 Zentangle tiles selected from the ones I created during the month.

I made a commemorative Zentangle tile on the back of the card stock rectangle that was my name plate from the door of my hospital room. The nurse handed it to me just before we headed down to the area where my husband was waiting to take me home….and I covered the back with my patterns a few days later.

There were various types of card stock and cardboard for the square tiles…all reused materials that would have otherwise been recycled. The lighter ones are from decades old file folders from my sister’s clearing out old files from my parents’ storage; some of them were over 50 years old! The darker one was more recent…from boxes of canned soft drinks. In both cases – I use a paper cutter to create the 3.5-inch squares. The limited color palette is caused by me trying to use up older Ultra Fine Sharpies before I open a new package.

The rectangular tiles are all made from light weight cardboard inserted as dividers in boxes of small cans of cat food. There are several kinds…varying shades of light brown. The texture also varies. I used the paper cutter to make them 3.5 x 4.75 inches tiles. Most of the time I prefer the rectangles over the squares – not sure whether it is the larger size or the textures or the colors that are the greatest appeal (probably it is all three!).

January 02, 2022

Zentangle® – December 2021

January 02, 2022/ Gwen Morrison

31 tiles for the 31 days of December….

In the first few days of the month, I continued to use my old pens…but then switched to red (with black…sometimes white) and some Christmas themed patterns. There was a skew toward square tiles rather than rectangular this month…just as there was in November.

I enjoyed the red pen…will return to it for February (valentines). Maybe in January I will pick another color to feature in most tiles….and strive for some very different patterns.

December 01, 2021

Zentangle® – November 2021

December 01, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

30 days in November…so 30 Zentangle® tiles to showcase.

There are a few ‘special’ tiles this month:

This one was started as I was leaving Texas and I took the glittery orange gel pen with me to finish it since it was about out of ink. It ran out before I finished all the fill I had intended….but I still like the tile.

Another special tile is one of the first tiles I made after one of my aunts died suddenly. I acknowledged my preoccupation with her death by using the first letter of her name (L) as the string. There were many other tiles made this month that provided me quiet time to grieve…and remember happy times with her.

And now the 28 other tiles for November 2021!

November 12, 2021

Snapshots of Indigenous Decorative Art in the early 1900s

November 12, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

This week the two books-of-the-week are about decorative art published in the early 1900s about native cultures on opposites sides of the world: The Huichol in Mexico and the Amur tribes in Russia/China (along the Amur River). Both have a relationship to clothing ornamentation.

The sample image from Decorative art of the Huichol Indians by Carl Lumholtz (1904) has a pattern called ‘double water-gourd’ in a ribbon and girdle.

The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes by Berthold Laufer(1902) also included designs in metal and ceramics. The designs are common in the broader Chinese decorative arts showing the long-term exchange and cultural linkage with these tribes to the rest of China…at least in the early 1900s. The sample image I chose includes a boot – showing how clothing items incorporated decoration.

I like browsing the books and letting the designs prompt Zentangle tiles. I am reminded that art is not static. It is a representation of the moment it was created – a communication through material culture into the future – different but as potent as the written word.

November 01, 2021

Zentangle® – October 2021

November 01, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

31 days in October…picking 31 tiles. They are all rectangular ones this month and all done with old pens…saving my new ones and the square tiles for my road tip. I found myself in so many varying moods during the month and the variable density of the patterns reflects that. There is one tile done entirely in white highlighting pen! Enjoy the Zentangle tile mosaic for October!

October 21, 2021

Cancer Diary – Entry 3

October 21, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

There were two weeks between my cancer diagnosis and the appointment with the surgeon. It’s a time of waiting. The challenge is to stay focused rather than anxious. I kept to my routines that have been honed over the years to keep stress productive rather than destructive:

Writing things down…and letting them go. Setting a goal of journal entries of about 2,000 words per day…documenting whatever I am thinking about.
Creating Zentangle tiles as islands of calm that result is something of beauty.
Sticking to routines of life like grocery shopping and a haircut and yardwork…savoring the activity and the results.
Browsing at least 4 books per day. Internet Archive makes it easy and costs nothing. My interests are broad so there is always a good supply on my ‘to browse’ list.
Staying in touch with family. My daughter calls 3-4 times a week. I talk to my mother once a week. Texts fly almost daily with my sisters and daughter.
Volunteering is more limited with the pandemic still impacting it…but it did resume this fall and I count it as a ‘routine’ even though it didn’t happen last fall or spring.
Making a daily blog post…building up the posts to come out in the days ahead like I always do before travel. Now I am doing it so that I don’t have to worry about appointments or the surgery itself making it difficult to get posts ready to go.
Exercise….sticking with the 12,000 steps per day and the 30 minutes of mindfulness/yoga. I feel better physically and mentally with this sustained routine.

There have also been special ‘projects’ undertaken during this waiting time…keeping myself busy -

Day lily photograph – both zoomed and high key. I recognized the opportunity as soon as I saw the stalk of buds in my front flower bed.
Day trip to Longwood Gardens. Getting out and about on a beautiful fall day in a relatively safe way as the pandemic continues.
Savoring seasonal food – replacing salads with soups on cool fall days and enjoying the combinations of flavors. Green salsa is my favorite condiment right now.
I continued my quest to lose a few pounds – watching my calories and nutrition (Cronometer app). My goal it to be in the best possible health I can be going into surgery.
Getting trees trimmed. Our sycamore is brushing our roof and a skylight. It is so tall that I’ve arranged for an arborist to trim it and our plum tree; it was about a 3 week wait between getting the estimate and the work being done. Hope the weather cooperates!

Overall – the two weeks has been a time for me to Internalize the new reality…and anticipating a new normal after surgery. I’ve also gone from 1 medical related portal to 4! It would be great to somehow have them all consolidated but medical care in the US is often fragmented along specialty or provider network lines rather than focused on integrated patient care.

October 19, 2021

Cancer Diary – Entry 2

October 19, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

The appointment with my doctor was at 8 AM. I had printed out my list of questions and walked outside to see how cool it felt before I got in my car. There were two surprises near the driveway: a stalk of late season day lily buds that the deer hadn’t eaten and the Virginia Creeper on the oak beginning to turn red. I unplugged my car…and set out.

Since I was the first wave of patients at the medical building, there were still places available close the building in the ‘fuel eff low emit parking’ lane. I was a few minutes early and noted that the landscaping around the building has been transitioned to native plants.

It was so quiet with no one else around that I heard water burbling just before I went into the building and looked over the railing to see a shady rock garden with water coming from one of the larger rocks at one level down from the main entrance. I hadn’t noticed it before.

It was a pleasant way to start the morning – noticing the beauty in the natural world. Even so – my first blood pressure reading of the appointment was a little high; I was relieved that after my conversation with the doctor (getting all my questions answered and a plan for what I should do prior to my appointment with the surgeon), my blood pressure was well within the normal range. It was an indicator that, for me, being armed with information is an important way to reduce the stress of the situation….also an indicator of the skill of my doctor which is also reassuring.

Later in the day, I called my parents to share the cancer news (made sure one of my sisters was with them when I did) and to delay my road trip to see them until at least after my appointment with the surgeon…and maybe after the surgery itself. It was not an easy conversation but necessary; there is a history of sharing health situations within the family that guided me. A part of every cancer journey is taken alone…and part is shared; for me, the shared times make the part walked alone easier.

Overall – by the end of the second day into my experience, I felt more knowledgeable and optimistic about the eventual outcome. I was also beginning a conscious effort to keep my normal positive mental attitude over what might be an extended period.

October 15, 2021

Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat

October 15, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

Internet Archive has quite a few of the Junior Press Books published by Albert Whitman & Company (Chicago) in the 1930s. Sooty – An Aristocratic Cat by Ambrosina Hurcum (1935) is one such example. Kittens and their antics must have been as popular in the 1930s as they are today. Like the other books…the story and illustrations are dated but they are interesting to browse keeping in mind when they were published. I wondered how realistic the illustrator captured clothes for children during that time. Did socks not have elastic in the 1930s? The illustrations look that way.

It was a stressful time in America with the Great Depression and so many people transitioning from the countryside into the cities for work. My parents were born in the early 1930s….a bit too young to read when this book first came out. I wondered how many children had access to books like this. My mother’s family moved from a rural area to a small town after she started school. Did the school have a library of books like this? It seems unlikely. My father grew up in the country and went to a small school of other farm children; it seems even less likely that he would have had books like this.

I’ve become a fan of absorbing history via books written in an earlier time. The authors were writing about their present and for a current audience (in this case in the 1930s and for children) without the hindsight employed in histories written about the same period today. The older books offer a way to step back and observe the author’s perspective…how it is the same or different than would be observed today in a similar situation.

October 01, 2021

Zentangle® – September 2021

October 01, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

In recently months I have produced a lot of Zentangle tiles….not in September. I needed 30 to meet normal the one-a-day goal; there were only 39 to choose from rather than averaging 2+ tiles per day as in previous months. I put away my white highlight pen for the month as a challenge and discovered that I miss it too much; I’ll be using it again in the October tiles!

The September tiles were dominated by rectangles…only two squares during the entire month!

September 19, 2021

Macros – September 2021

September 19, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

My smartphone, a clip on macro lens, and Bluetooth shutter control were the gear I used for the macro photos feathered in this month’s post. They are all from a short walk in Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant from the parking area and into the Honors Garden. The set up works very much like the bridge camera (with lens, diffuser, manual focus) in that I must get close to the subject and move the phone to get the focus perfect. It has the advantage of being a lot more compact than the other set up!

The rain from the night before had left everything with a sheen or droplets of water. Often the wet increased the richness of the colors…and the shine. The thin clouds provided good, diffuse light – a good day for smartphone macro photography. The cedar was on my way to honors garden.

The seed pods on the magnolia were not flat enough to be an easy shot! The depth of field is very narrow with magnification.

I experimented with different perspectives of cone flowers

And asters. In the last picture, the depth of field gave me the blurring around the edges than I wanted.

The birds nest fungus was in a mulched area near the parking lot. Some of the cups seem to hold water!

20210909_091438 clip.jpg — Even grass seeds take on a different perspective in a zoomed image.

…And these are the best of the rest (note the insect hiding inside a flower)!

September 01, 2021

Zentangle® – August 2021

September 01, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

The August Zentangle tiles include some from the end of July – made after I had done the post a little early for the July tiles while I was still in Texas…and then making the road trip home. There are tiles made in Texas, Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland in this batch!

Making tiles is a calming activity before bedtime or while I am watching a burst of news. A variety of pens were used this month: Ultra Fine Sharpie Markers, Fine Sharpie Pens (new), various brands of gel pins (some with glitter…in Texas), Sakura Pigma Pen 05, and Sakura white Gelly Roll for highlighting.

It seems that doing something creative like making one or more tiles every day helps me be creative in other areas of my life. This month I’ve been breaking some of my dietary bad habits (dramatically reducing refined sugar and eliminating soft drinks) and tightening my personal actions re climate change. Those are significant changes for me….and require creativity for the actions I take to be as effective as possible.

August 16, 2021

Macro Photography Practice (1 and 2)

August 16, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

My husband got me started on a more advanced form (for me) of macro photography by sending me some YouTube links (this one from Micael Widell was the first) and identifying the gear that would work with my Canon PowerShot SX70 HS. After talking to me about the possibilities with my camera and sending some sample images he had captured with a similar set up on his more substantial camera to encourage me (posted a few weeks ago here), he ordered the filter adapter for my camera…

I used the same diffuser that fits over the front of the camera as he used with his camera (we got another one since we will be going into the field together once I get enough practice).

The new gear purchases were about $100. Here’s the way my camera looks ready for my practice – from the front and back. The idea is to be able to hand hold the camera (i.e. no tripod) – often with one hand – when in the field.

The technique works best with manual focus and flash…two features of my camera that I haven’t used very much. The idea is to set the manual focus to a particular distance and then leave it alone in the field and simply move the camera to get the focus desired.

It was easier for me to start with plants in my yard in my first sessions. I found that I could get reasonable results with autofocus (still having to move the camera to get the focus on the part of the image I wanted) for plants…but it takes more time than manual focus….which would be problematic for insects that are more likely to move.

Here are the collection of my best images from my first two practice sessions.

Black eyed susans

Mint flowers

Lichen and moss

Ninebark leaves

Bush cut branch and water droplets on leaves

Wild strawberry

And finally – an insect during my second practice session.

The image below is cropped from the image on the left above.

Overall I am pleased with my first attempts…but still need more practice!

August 01, 2021

Zentangle® – July 2021

August 01, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

The July Zentangle tiles are neatly divided by shape and where I made them. The rectangular tiles were made in Maryland and finished with Ultra Fine Sharpie colored pens that are running out of ink. I’ll buy some new pens for the August tiles.

The square tiles were made in Missouri and Texas…finished in Texas with gel pens left over from my sister’s teaching years. I had a few instances of smeared ink (the gel pens don’t dry as fast as the Sharpies). But it was fun make selections from a largish box of pens – riches of glittery color.

At home or traveling – making Zentangle tiles is something I manage to fit into almost every day!

July 24, 2021

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 24, 2021

July 24, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Night Sky Celebrations Across the National Park System – We’re not doing this kind of traveling this summer….but maybe we’ll do several of these ‘star parties’ in summer 2022.

Tooth loss associated with increased cognitive impairment – Another reason to not neglect going to the dentist! It’s not just about preserving cognitive impairment either….quality of life is a big motivation as well.

Top 25 birds of the week: Seabirds – From around the world…a few I’ve seen in North America.

Mucus and mucins may become the medicine of the future – There is still a lot to learn about how this might work….but it appears that this is an opportunity to treat disease by enhancing the mechanisms already used by the body. Maybe one of the first uses will be for eye drops to treat eye infections rather than the antibiotics used today.

Protect Pollinators – reform pesticide regulations – Hopefully the action requested by these scientist from around the world will happen…our ecosystems are having enough challenge dealing with climate change. Many pollinator species won’t survive the continued threat of status quo pesticide use.

Keeping your composure: Creative Ways to Compose Your Photographs (part 1, part 2, part 3) – Always good to browse through these kinds of tutorials…pick up some new ideas, celebrate the things you are already doing.

What to do with food waste? – It doesn’t appear than there is any one strategy that will work broadly. I’m glad I have already dramatically reduced food waste and then have a large enough yard to have a compost bin.

Waterfalls of North Carolina – A few years ago, my husband and I made a waterfall themed trip to New York. It seems that North Carolina would be another state that has a lot of opportunities for waterfall photography. Maybe next spring?

Creativity Myths – A recent ‘letter’ on The Painter’s Keys website. I enjoy the twice-weekly blurbs that appear in my inbox (free subscription) and often follow the ‘click here to read more’ link.

Exposure to light with less blue before sleep is better for energy metabolism – I already change the color balance on my PC screens to ‘nightlight’ between sundown and sunrise. Maybe we will do more eventually based on this and subsequent research. It is probably true that no one should be watching a television screen just before going to bed!