Zensdays Goes Green!

Ah...it's a touch of Irish this week as Laura Harm's challenge #209 is "green up your tile" and of course that could mean a St. Pat's Day celebration OR it could just mean that Laura and her boys are more than ready for Spring to come to Saskatchewan. Actually I think a lot of people are loving the idea of warmer weather ASAP.

My creation for the challenge was worked on a piece of black cardstock that has a "green" core. I ran the pear stencil (LL563) through my embossing machine using a thicker than normal rubber embossing mat (REM) and then sanded the embossed surface of the black paper with a very fine weight sanding block...it gave it kind of a chalky appearance. So my "strings" are the pear and just a couple of lines drawn inside of it. Then I used a Sakura florescent green gel pen from the Moonlight set and as you can tell I was still thinking of cubine (from last week's challenge)...the leaf was done with shattuck and I decided to attempt a new tangle (for me) on either side of cubine called purk. I finished off the border with paradox using the "fan" orientation of that tangle. I love paradox, but it always takes me a bit to get going on it, however once I get into the mode it is very fun and very very relaxing. um hmmmm, ohm...ohm...ohm...zen.

If you want more step-by-step instructions on how to create the tangles mentioned above go to tanglepatterns.com

For Wayne's green creation click HERE and visit his Flickr post. He doesn't tell how he achieved the green...but I watched and it started with a wash of pale and slightly darker greens... mmmm...pretty!! Then what you see as a brighter green and yellow he added with gelly roll pens. Amazing how the original light greens ended up looking gray in the final.

Here is another creation made in honor of this "GREEN" time of year! Yep, it was done with a background stencil called "GO Green" (LX7000) using the same technique of running it through the embossing machine like I did the ZIA pear described above. I tore the edges so you can see that this black paper has a green core.

And if you have a few extra minutes...come by Thursday to see another springtime creation. The Dream it UP team is celebrating Spring early and it's always nice to have a few extra comments for them from people who appreciate the paper arts.

For those of you who might remember I have taken up knitting...I am moving right along and hope to share a picture of a finished project soon...hmmm, as a matter of coincidence it is done in varying shades of green. So maybe I will have it done before the end of this week of green inspirations. Also next week week Stampendous is planning a blog hop with the Woodware design team...their  team is made up of some wonderful paper artists across the pond, just a hop, skip and a jump away. Or rather a grueling 12 hour flight from LAX to London Heathrow, sigh...I do love visiting there but really dislike the long flight. Anyway, I digress, the theme for the hop is backgrounds and textures, can't wait to see what these two teams have in mind. TTFN!!!