How to draw MC NA

By Linda Farmer, CZT ~ July 4th, 2025

Happy 4th of July, y’all!

Barbecues, family gatherings, fireworks to cap off the day … Summer is well and truly underway.

Another fantastic Summer tradition also gets underway tomorrow, Saturday, July 5th: the 2025 edition of the Tour de France! For 184 riders representing 23 teams, this year’s 3,339 km (2,075 miles) flagship professional cycling event begins in Lille in the northeast of France, and ends 21 stages and 2 rest days later on the Champs d’Elysses in Paris on Sunday, July 27th. For an excellent TDF preview of all the various storylines, today’s New York Times article is well worth a read for those interested.

If you’ve been with me for a while you’ll know that every year Robert and I enjoy this wonderful scenic and exciting daily road trip through France from the comfort of our living room. No passports required. If you’d like to check out where you can find your local TV coverage of this year’s Tour, this page lists all the broadcasting outlets. #TDF2025

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Our tangle to tackle for this weekend is Belgian CZT Ria Matheussen’s Mc na, a cool dot grid-based tangle that as she points out could be a relative of the Cadent family.

Ria explains that she went researching the subject of macramé further after the recent success with her Quippu tangle and came across this inspiration, as she explains …

I have found there another pattern that is a real tangle that I never have seen popping up in our Zentangleworld. It looks very familiar and has something equal with Cadent, my own Mazorito and some others… but it is definitely different.

Quippu was named after the first items found in Peru. I could also have chosen an Egyptian name because there were also found items, even earlier than in Peru but I didn’t found a right name.

For this one I chose the name Mc na because, long ago, fishermen called this way of art “square knotting” or “McNamara’s Lace“.

This tangle is a bit more difficult than Quippu. Maybe difficult is not the right word, anyway, you have to focus while drawing, starting with putting fat dots on equal distances… That is really important to make a nice drawing.

In the 4th step I make connections and then I do exactly the same what I did in step 2 and 3 but in the opposite way.

Shadowing gives an extra dimension. Mc na is nice on its own but can be embellished and combined with many other tangles.

Mc Na does require one’s complete attention and evenly orbs/dots. I’m not sure if this is the case for everyone, but I found that for the final step (Step 6) I had to work from the bottom up so some strokes didn’t end up crossing each other. Still trying to figure that one out.

Ria illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Mc na below where she includes a shaded version and a version “embellished and combined with Florz“.

How to draw the Zentangle pattern Mc na, tangle and deconstruction by Ria Matheussen. Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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. “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” ~ Franz Kafka

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Check out the tag riam for more of Ria’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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