Welcome back my tangling friends!
Lovely to see you again for another week of creative inspiration 🙂
Recognizing all our tangling friends and CZTs in India the Far East and around the world, today we celebrate the first day of the Diwali festival for 2022.
When you learn what is being honored in this important festival of lights holiday — it “transcends religious lines” — it sure seems like we all could use a little Diwali in our lives:
Diwali is a Hindu religious festival of lights and is one of the most important festivals within Hinduism. The festival usually lasts five days, or six in some regions of India, and is celebrated during the Hindu lunisolar month Kartika (between mid-October and mid-November).
Originally a Hindu festival, Diwali has transcended religious lines and is also celebrated by Jains and Sikhs. It is a major cultural event for the Hindu, Sikh, and Jain diaspora.
One of the most popular festivals of Hinduism, Diwali symbolizes the spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance”. ~ Wikipedia
In the lead-up to Deepavali, celebrants prepare by cleaning, renovating, and decorating their homes and workplaces with diyas (oil lamps) and rangolis (colorful art circle patterns). During Diwali, people wear their finest clothes, illuminate the interior and exterior of their homes with diyas and rangoli, perform worship ceremonies of Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and wealth, light fireworks, and partake in family feasts, where mithai (sweets) and gifts are shared.
By Subharnab Majumdar – originally posted to Flickr as The Rangoli of Lights, CC BY 2.0.
So yes, celebrating the spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance” seems a very worthy practice for everyone.
Okay, so what do we have for our first tangle of the week …
Desert Flower is from Australian CZT Sue Bailey and it’s her fourth tangle on the site. Sue became a CZT since her previous tangles were introduced.
Sue writes that Desert Flower came about as follows:
[Some time ago] I commented on my friend Anita Weston CZT’s mixed media artwork that it looked like she had added a Sturt’s Desert Pea to one of her pieces. She naturally then wanted to know what that was, and when I sent her a picture, commented that she could see a tangle waiting for deconstruction.
Photo by Sue Bailey. From Wikipedia: Swainsona formosa, Sturt’s desert pea, is an Australian plant in the genus Swainsona, named after English botanist Isaac Swainson, famous for its distinctive blood-red leaf-like flowers, each with a bulbous black centre, or “boss”. It is one of Australia’s best known wildflowers. It is native to the arid regions of central and north-western Australia, and its range extends into all mainland Australian states with the exception of Victoria.
Sturt’s Desert Pea is one of my favourite flowers and it has a lot of emotional connections for me. It reminds me of where I grew up (a town in outback New South Wales called Broken Hill) and the wonder and hope of such an extravagantly beautiful flower appearing in the dry arid outback after winter rains.
Desert Flower is largely composed of orbs and S strokes and has some interesting configurations as Sue demonstrates.
Sue illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Desert Flower below. Sue includes three Zentangle® tiles showing several ways to explore her tangle including “in the round” and ribbon-style versions.
Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These images are for your personal offline reference only. Please feel free to refer to the images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to the images and they must not be publicly pinned, altered, reproduced or republished. (Small side note: if you look at the legalese in Pinterest, you are legally responsible for obtaining permission to post every photo that gets ‘Pinned’. Giving credit or sharing the source link doesn’t count.) Thank you for respecting these rights. Click the image for an article explaining what copyright means in plain English. “Always let your conscience be your guide.” ~ Jiminy Cricket
As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please leave a comment of thanks and encouragement to show the artists you appreciate them for sharing their creativity to inspire yours. Your thanks helps motivate them to continue to share! And please share a link to your favorite tangles on social media. Thanks!
Check out the tag sueb for more of Sue’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
Related Links
- Looking for tangles by Artist or Type? For details visit the ABOUT > HOW TO FIND TANGLES BY ARTIST OR TYPE page on the top menu bar of any page on the site.
- What is a Zentangle? — if you are new to the Zentangle Method, start here for the fundamentals.
- Zentangle terminology — a glossary of terms used in this art form.
- How to use the site — an excellent free video tutorial showing how to use the site as well as pointing out lots of useful features you might have missed.
- Linda's List of Zentangle-Original Patterns — here is the complete list of original tangles (aka "official tangles") created and introduced by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, including those not published online. If you are new to the Zentangle Method I highly recommend learning a few of the published Zentangle classics first.
- "A Zentangle has no up or down and is not a picture of something, so you have no worries about whether you can draw a hand, or a duck. You always succeed in creating a Zentangle." Thus patterns that are drawings of a recognizable naturalistic or actual object, figure, or scene, are not tangles. A pattern is not always a tangle — here's what makes a tangle. TIP: tangles never start with pencil planning.
- Un motif n’est pas toujours un tangle — Qu’est-ce qu’un tangle ?
- Un diseño no es siempre un tangle — ¿Qué es un tangle?
- How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
- For lots of great FREE tutorials on TanglePatterns, click on the TUTORIALS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page.
- Strings! Have we got STRINGS! Click on the STRINGS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page for 250 different (free) Zentangle-starters. More than enough for any lifetime!
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October 24, 2022 | 
More like this: 
Sue Bailey, this is a great tangle with so many possibilities! Can’t wait to play with it.
Thank you!
Thanks for publishing this tangle – the more I use it the more versatile I realise it is. Enjoy ??
How cool is this?!! I love learning new tangles, expecially those that have a story behind them as this one does. I love flowers and I’ve never seen this one before… and it’s from Austrailia, which makes it even more special! Thank you so much, Sue Bailey and Linda Farmer, for sharing it with us and for providing a tangle that will always make me think of the “Sturt’s Desert Pea.” I can’t wait to start “tangling” it!