Tangling in 2019

Last year I joined the Its’s a String Thing community and created a tile for most of Adele Bruno’s weekly challenges hosted on her site Tickled to Tangle. It was fun. here is one of my favourites for that year. They are posted on Instagram.

I enjoyed learning new tangles and being stretched by working within the parameters of the challenge. I am grateful to Adele for her commitment to posting weekly challenges, and impressed with her skill in combining tangles and a string that can evoke such beautiful and inspiring tiles from the contributors.
This year I am not going to contribute to the challenge every week. I’ll continue to check in and see which tangles are included, and also to view everyone’s contributions for ongoing inspiration, but I am going to play with tangling in a different way this year.
I started by making an analysis of all the tangles I have learned, from multiple sources, for which I have noted the step-outs – 433 so far. I do not record the step-outs for every new tangle that I come across because some are so similar to ones I already know – perhaps with just an extra line, a spiral detail, or an aura, or so on. It was noticing this that made me understand that new tangles arise from playing with known tangles. I can do that!
From my analysis I have identified some personal categories:

• tangles that grow and/or are random
• tangles with a spiral element
• ribbons and borders
• motifs
• grid tangles
• striping
• radiating
• overlapping
• optical illusions 

There are many tangles that fall into two or more categories. For example, border tangles often work just as well in a grid, and vice versa; radiating, overlapping and motif tangles can be combined or changed by putting them in a grid or a border structure, or letting them grow. The point of doing this analysis was to develop my artwork and move beyond the domination of step-outs. I had needed that guidance and stage in my process, but now I am ready to stretch in another way.

This is my analysis of the elements of border patterns:

I was surprised at how few basic elements there were. I may not create this type of analysis for each category, but I hope to create an exercise for each. I have completed the first one so far, a border tangles exercise:

It was great fun to create. I’m working on a second exercise based on motifs at the moment. It will take a while, but I’ll post it when I’m finished. Bye for now!