More Ebooks and Tangle Cards

Hello again. I seem to be on a roll. Well, first let me say that this is all Ms Bartholomew's fault. If it weren't for her and her talent, I would not be so inspired to spend so much time playing with zentangle and especially her lovely little Lilah Beans! That being said, I had way too much fun creating my Christmas cards this year. I decided to extend the fun and once inspired it was hard to stop. I ended up making a total of 6 different designs staring the Lilah Beans. You can now find these cards as printable PDF's on my Esty shop CraftyStx.

So the first cards I made were the trees. They were so cute. I couldn't resist. I played with the idea on them for a bit. The Merry and Bright card was bothering me. The original was just missing something. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but it kept me awake one night. Then it hit me, an easy fix would be to modify the lettering some and maybe add a Lilah Bean or a present beneath the tree. The finsihed result was much more to my liking. 

The second cards were the Feliz Navidad and the little Bean hopping out of the present. This was just too much fun to do. They naturally lend themselves to mischievousness and hijinks. But I didn't stop there...

The last set of cards was the Welcome Santa and the Season's Greetings. Once I got started on the little guys wearing hard hats, it was only natural to take a look at them wearing elf hats and reindeer antlers. And the little guy wearing the antlers would not be pleased. Who would want to pull that sleigh? 

The next step was learning my printer. I am so technologically challenged. I only have an ipad and my latest addition was an epson printer. And our internet here is goofy so suffice to say I have to go offline and use a wireless nettwork that isnt' actually hooked up to a network in order to connect the printer to the ipad. Whew, and once all that is done I spent some time learning to scan with the epson app. I printed a black and white copy of my cards to play with on cardstock. 

I pulled out my handy dandy colored pencils and my fine point le pen markers and went to work. The results were just too much fun. It is always a joy when your own coloring work is satisfactory. After all and artist is their own worst critic. 

Another Epson scan and I now had printable color copies. I invite you to take a look at my Etsy store and see for yourself. Just look for CraftyStx and they are the newest listings. 

As far as my daughter goes... she has recenlty been "Bauble Bombing" as I like to call it. She simply can't resist drawing these little trees. My son has gotten in on some of the fun too; however he leans towards simply adding the Lilah Beans into his art. Take a look at the latest escapades....

Should I tell them I recenlty purchased the printable book, "The Tangles of Kells" by Ms Bartholomew? 

Bauble Cards

Ah, yes. So I finally got hold of the book 'The Bauble Tree' and was able to try my hand at this tangle. What resulted was a lot of fun experimentation.

My first attempt was this little card. I colored on it with metallic colored pencil but I thought to myself, can I do more? 

Yes! I did! And I absolute love this little card! 

So how could make this even better? Well, color it in of course. Using my colored pencils I did a color version on a black and white printout. Then I printed again in color. Thankfully, my color printer did a fantastic job so I just had to cut and fold my papers. I now have over 40 of these little cards to send out this Christmas. I don't think I have ever had Christmas cards ready this fast! 

And my daughter even sat down to tangle and color yet again. What do you think of her version?

I also created another card which I didn't care for as much. It just didn't have the same playfulness that the little Lilah Beans added to the first card.