Meeting Challenges

Where do you get the inspiration to create beautiful things?  Do you create as a career, to make things to use for gifts, or just for fun?  What holds your attention so you continue to create?

I ask myself these questions a lot.  Art and crafting use a lot of supplies that can get costly, so why am I willing to make that investment in this form of self expression?  I do not make things to sell, though if someone would ask me to make them something, I would.  I don't even make things to use as gifts.  Honestly, most of the people in my real world don't really understand what I do.  I've gifted a few items but not very often.  I think that I do it because it brings me pleasure and enjoyment.  I find I am a process artist/ crafter.  I enjoy the process of creating something, not so I can have the object, but just so I can broaden my skills and learn more techniques.  This goes for all of the different mediums I have worked with over the years.  This brings me back to my first question.  If I really don't have a purpose for what I do, I just want to do it, where does my inspiration come from?

Challenges - the internet is full of art and crafty challenges.  I love a good challenge.  There are challenges for everything.  So as I go through my projects this week, I will link you back to the challenges that inspired me to create.

#GreatoutdoorsKAL2015 hosted by Emily Snow of the Knitting Butterflies Podcast group on Ravelry

In order to participate in this challenge you need to knit something while in the great outdoors, and what could be greater than my trip to Walden Pond last Sunday.

Knitting my Conjunction Cowl designed by Susie White

The weather was glorious and the area is so full of literary history.  The pond is a public beach area open for swimming and boating.  There is a trail around the pond that takes you to the original site where Henry David Thoreau lived while writing his book, Walden, or Life in the Woods.
My daughter and I went to Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord MA.  We saw a replica of the cabin, walked the trail that led to the original cabin sight where this sign stood with a quote from Thoreau himself.  If you get the chance to visit Massachusetts I would highly recommend this as a destination.


As challenges inspire me and get me thinking and planning, I also tend to see how many challenges I can make a single item fit into.  Here are the list of challenges being met just for this Conjunction Cowl I am knitting.....
1.  #greatoutdoorskal2015 (mentioned above)
2.  PAL/KAL (PodcasterALong/KnitALong)  hosted by Michelle of Actually Kniiting Podcast
3.  Alphabet KAL by Lisa Beamer in the 90%Knitting Podcast
4.  Around Your Neck KAL by Diane of the Suburban Stitcher

It's not just the knitting that has me addicted to Challenges.  There are a lot of challenges out there for the Zentangles as well.  This week I combined a few different challenges into this simple Zentangel design named Bunzo.  You can find directions on how to draw Bunzo here.

Bunzo was designed by Maria, one of the Zentangle founders.  This was a new to me pattern.  I have never used this in any of my doodles before. Bunzo was introduced to me from a Blog Challenge posted on the "Madebyjoey" blog.  She is running an alphabet challenge right now and Bunzo was the Tangle chosen for the letter "B".  Check out these alphabet challenges using the link above.

I also used this Tangle design to incorporate into a couple of other challenges.  Check out these challenges and websites:
1.  IamthedivaCZT - Challenge #222 - this challenge was to use color in your Tangle design.

2.  Twinkle, Twinkle - Summer of Color 5 (SOC) - this meets the Week 1 challenge which was from a week ago.  Here she is pairing up 2 shades of one color with another color. The first week was 1-Blue + 1-Blure + 1 - Green.  This is not specific to any medium or art process.  If you created something, anything, using the colors for that week you can post your creation.
After seeing some of the examples posted, I can see my art journals coming back out and all my paints and stamps.  I put them away when I started knitting and I need to incorporate all my loves back into my life.

Thanks to my discovery of Pen-Pals again, I am also starting to pull out all my paper crafting supplies again.  I used to have a craft table in my basement that is not working for me so in my head I have this idea of setting up a new workspace.  More to come with that later.

This week I want to leave you with a finished knitted object from this week.  Yesterday we drove to NY to celebrate the recent wedding of my cousin and the soon expected birth of their first son.
We also go to meet our other new cousin, Leo.  Unfortunately for the rain and cold he was bundled up all day so we did not really have a chance to see him.  Now that I delivered the present to him I can post it publicly.  I finished a baby sweater for him.

Sweater Stats:
Pattern name and link: Beyond Puerperium 
Yarn:  Cascade 220 Superwash
Colorway:  Summer
                                            Yardage:   226 yards








In closing I would like to leave you with another quote from Henry David Thoreau:

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."