How to draw MUSUBI

Greetings y’all and happy Friday to you.

Our weekend tangle is named Musubi and it’s from Japanese CZT Noriko Kikuchi. Musubi is her first tangle on the site.

Noriko introduces her tangle:

I love Japanese traditional crafts. This “Musubi” is based on the mizuhiki motif that is attached to celebratory envelopes. Mizuhiki is a thread-like material made by twisting Japanese rice paper into threads.

I was wondering if it would be possible to break down this Mizuhiki item into a tangle. This is because items made with mizuhiki are also similar to one stroke.

The name “Musubi” means knot in Japanese. It also means connecting with important people.

One of the things made with mizuhiki is plum blossoms. Plum trees are the first flowers to bloom in spring after enduring the cold. In Japan, it is often used as a motif as something auspicious.

The completed “Musubi” can be used to add many lines to the inside or to create reticula.

Mizuhiki knots are a fascinating rabbit hole to delve into if you’re interesting in learning more about this special type and variety of beautiful knot tying. Here’s a wee taste …

I admit to a fair few trial runs for this one. For some reason I had difficulty getting the “arms” evenly spaced in Step 3 and was ending up with lopsided shapes. In the end I took a little different approach and used 5 dots placed around a center orb, in the way we were all taught as children to tangle 5-pointed stars. The dots gave me something to land on with a “take off and land” from the orb. I’m sure Noriko’s pentagon (Step 1) will work for most, but I needed another way. Sharing just in case it helps anyone else like me 🙂

Noriko illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Musubi below. Her sample tiles include a Musubi monotangle, a colorful ZIA with some organized Hollibaugh (or rice paper threads) and accented with Tipple, then a monotangle with a Musubi variation created by stopping at Step 7 and adding shading for dimension.

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. For more information, click on the image for a discussion entitled “Artists for Respect” by several prominent artists. “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” ~ C.S. Lewis

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Check out the tag norikok for more of Noriko’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

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5. 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.
6. "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.
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