Sedona, AZ

Traveled to Sedona, AZ to pick up donations for the Arizona Quilter's Guild annual fall meeting. Our chapter, Prickly Piecers, is hosting the meeting this year, along with the members-at-large. One of our jobs is creating raffle baskets to raise money to help pay to bring in national quilt teachers to AZ for workshops for guild members. I had an individual and a couple shops that said they had donations if they could be picked them up. My husband was game, so we made a mini-vacation out of the trip. Sedona is one of the most beautiful places in God's creation. The red rock mountains just glow in the sun. We were treated to a rain storm our first night and got some gorgeous photos with storm clouds against the red rock glowing in the sunshine!  We stayed in Cottonwood, a small town about 15 miles from Sedona. It's not as expensive as Sedona is.

Driving along the road from Cottonwood into Sedona. 

Storm clouds made a beautiful sky.

Heading into Sedona. Photo taken from the side of the road.

Pillar backlit with stormy clouds close to sunset.

Golden sunlight striking the mountains.Taken from a pull off at a trail head 

north of town.

As the sun set, the red rocks just glowed orange as they were hit by the sun.

 It was beautiful to watch  as section after section  of rock formations lit up 

and glowed. What a way to spend the evening.

Closer view of the rock pillars (from photo above), also showing the clouds from

the stormy evening.  I enjoyed the contrast of colors between the yellow, orange,

and red rocks to the dark blues, turquoises, and grays of the sky and clouds. 

Heading back to Cottonwood to our hotel. The sun hit the mountains in the

distance making them glow. 

Zentangles from Seashells

I was looking at Michele Beauchamp's tutorial on spirals for Zentangles on the Tangle Pattern website. Spirals reminded me of nautilus shells, so I started making a few sea creature zentangles. The first couple,  a nautilus and a scallop, are shown on July 2, 2013's blog. I've created a couple more sea creatures.

Fish Zentangle. 6"x6" on mixed media paper with a pencil and a Sakura 0.1 micron pen.
I used a new tangle, that I call Barscroll, on the front part of the body. Instructions
will be posted in another blog.

With the beginning of fall, I was thinking back to last year when I went to Ohio during the height of the fall colors. I brought back with me a couple of hedge apples, hoping to use them to dye fabric, after finding out that they can be used for that purpose. However, the hedge apples didn't hold up well enough in Arizona's warmer weather and had to be thrown away. But I had made some sketches of their skin, as the texture intrigued me. They were so rough, similar to an orange (another name for a hedge apple is Osage orange), but with greater dimpling. I created a tangle called HedgeApple. Following are the instructions. I apologized for the writing not being blurry. I'm not sure why the red pen isn't showing much contrast from the black one.  I'll try to get a better photo and re-post it.

HedgeApple tangle instructions. This can be made to fit any shape.

Jellyfish. 6"x6" mixed-media paper using pencil and Sakura 0.1

micron pen.  I used the HedgeApple tangle for the tentacles in the

front and several other tangles for the rest of the tentacles.

The umbrella of the jellyfish is done with the Angle Fish tangle.