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
Copyright image courtesy of about-france.com.
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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“.
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.
Related Links
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- 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." 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?
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July 4, 2025 | 
More like this: 
Ooh, what a wonderful tangle, I do love a dot grid. I can’t wait to finish work and have a try. Thank you for sharing.
This tangle can be combined with many others inside, f.ex. as I did with Florz. You can work with different colors, f.ex. one row in a special color and another one in a different color.
Very import to place the dots on the right place on step one. Step two, three and four are easy. Step five is more difficult and step six asks really attention. I admit that I had to exercise a few times and than all of a sudden you’ll “get” it!
Thank you very much for your comment and I wish you succes!
Thank you.
Thank you for contributing this interesting Tangle. Loved both versions.
Thank you very much for your kind comment and I hope you will have succes. Please take attention for the first, the fifth and sixt step. Mc Na is not so easy as it looks. Of course I like this pattern but I needed some time to do it in the right way and made some mistakes in the beginning (step 6).
Dear Ria, you’ve done it again!! I LOVE the look of McNa! Will play with it today! Hugs ~ Jan
Such a beautiful pattern! This one will fit in with everything! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you very much Sharon for your nice comment. As I wrote in reply to the others it is a bit a tricky pattern and needs attention to finish in the right way but after a few exercises you ‘ll succeed and you ‘ll get a nice result!
Many thanks dear Jan for this nice compliment. Maybe you’ll find another way to form Mc Na but this is my version. It was a real challenge for me to deconstruct this one. It is not so easy as it looks and the tangle needs concentration to draw it right but I’m sure you ‘ll master this one! Wish you fun and succes… and of course hugs too!!!
Many thanks for adding Mc Na on this tanglebase. As I wrote, it is a tangle that needs concentration but the results can be very nice and will give satisfaction. I wish everyone succes!!!
I grew up playing around with macrame thanks to my mum, and just picked up a kit recently to see if I can remember the techniques haha So this is a great tangle for me to play with, as much as I’ll really have to concentrate on the spacing since I tend to wind up with wonky patterns haha
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you very much for your kind comment, it is always pleasant to know why someone liked a perticular tangle. Mc Na can be very nice, even as a little piece of a background but yes, I agree, you need concentration. Wish you succes!
A very attractive link design. I’m working on it.
That’s wonderful Tomàs, thank you very much.
Maybe there is another way to draw this patterns, who knows??? Kind regards from Belgium
No. Same step out and variations and derivations. Fun.
Thanks!