Molly Bee's Attic

I was looking at my Christmas tree (or what remains of it after the force which is Hurricane Cooper) and noticed an ornament made out of sewing thread spools. I thought it might make a good tangle. I see lots of potential with this one! I hope you enjoy it! If you use it, please drop a link in my comments so I can see your creativity!

I can't believe it's been a month since I wrote an entry. Life has been going one hundred miles an hour and things slide. I'll have to be better about updating in 2014. Can you believe it's just around the corner? We put up the Christmas tree last weekend. This is really an outside decoration. I put it up inside for the first time 5 years ago as a kind of joke when I didn't have the spirit or inclination to go get a real tree. I kind of liked it because it's clean and simple yet cheery and you can see all of the ornaments.  But when I posted this picture on Facebook when we first put it up, it was met with resounding snickers and name calling. The 'Charlie Brown Christmas Tree' was referenced several times.  After dark I took another picture to try and convince  folks that it was better lit up. Let's just say people were still not convinced.  But once the ornaments are all on, it 'lights up like a Christmas tree' I think. We ...

A lot of people have asked me about my 'artistic process'.  How do I come up with the ideas to draw?  I laugh...to myself so as to not be rude of course. I don't consider myself an artist. I don't have a process. I learned about repetitive drawing by reading about Zentangles online. My process is this: I have a head full of mind monkeys, swinging from the mental chandeliers and flinging their own poo.  I draw repetitive patterns to lull them into a banana-sated siesta in their little hammocks among the limbs, twigs and branches where they otherwise spend their time maniacally jumping to conclusions and teetering precariously the edge of reason. That's my  entire 'process'-monkey anesthetization! Case in point, I've been more than a wee bit angsty over the last week or so, so I wanted to start a project that would take a while. It should be repetitive but not too repetitive, large but not too large, detailed but not too detailed, difficult but not...

My daddy loved money and the art of the deal. There was nothing he liked better than buying something, and reselling it for a little profit. It was his hobby and his joy. He also collected coins. When he passed away on April 1, 1999, my Mum gave me a bank that he had received for a gift many years before. It is a plain wooden box, but the front has one of the old fashioned post office mailbox doors that had the little dial combination lock that is all letters.  Spin the lock to letter G, reverse direction and pass G stopping on letter B.  Now forward until you get to the space between L and M.  It's pretty awesome and reminds me of Daddy every time I see it. As soon as I received it, I started hording all of my change and putting it in there. I go to the bank on November first (Daddy's birthday) and April 1st (his death date) and turn it in. The combination bank is pretty full by then, but the night before bank day finds me scrounging for every ...

Made the annual pilgrimage to Pewett's Nest on Sunday. It was an amazingly beautiful day. The trail was perilous. Good thing I had friend, Scott, along to clear the way!  We hiked into the lower falls first.  I could listen to the sounds all day long.  Then we went to the upper falls. I've never seen the water this low and we were able to hike in the ravine bottom right up to the falls themselves. Here is Scott after he bullyed a rude and surly photographer out of the way. (People were lined up to take a pic of the falls and he was standing IN it, taking close up pics of leaves for over 20 minutes!) It was about 2:30PM-ish and the play of light through the trees was magical Deep reflections....  and sunbeams abound.  Beside the still water. It's one of those mystical places that always restores my soul to visit. On the way home, we went to apple orchards and snacked on cider donuts. All and all it was a beau...

While I was home this time, I noticed the pattern on the chenille bedspread that my Mum had on the guest bed. Below is the pattern. I called it Hastings because I wrote it down on the day that my cousin, Rhonda and I slogged through a muddy woods road and ATV trail to get to Hasting's Falls in the northern Maine woods. I've included pictures of the falls afterward. Totally worth the slog! Enjoy! Hastings  Hastings and variations Upstream from the falls-stair steps! Hastings Falls-at the top  Hastings Falls-over the edge! (25 foot drop) I might be biased but I think there is no place more beautiful on the planet that the lands in the shadow of Mount Katahdin!

This week's Diva Challenge was to look around our immediate area at things that have borders or can be used as ideas for borders and use them in a tangle. Each of the coils has a border that's in my living room.  From the upper left and going clockwise: The wooden beading around the edge of my telephone table, the grill of my heat vent, the design around the top of a pottery piece, the border of a pillow on my sofa, the edge of a piece of  pre digital era film, My guitar neck and the middle one is a hank of beads I'm using for a knitting project. Fun and great to do while watching Bones, Sleepy Hollow and Castle! Thanks again Diva! Yesterday I volunteered to help the animal outreach volunteer at Heartland take animals to Primrose Lutheran Church for a 'Blessing of the Animal's service. It was an amazingly incredible experience. I wish our church had done it. I would have been all over that! I loaded Ricky and Fonzie the roosters into my car... And Fay...

This week's Diva Challenge was to use two patterns "Knightsbridge (checkerboard) and Tipple (bubbles). I had to do it rather quickly but I kind of like how it turned out! Thanks for another great challenge, Laura!

Given my last post, this week's Diva Challenge is especially apropos.  It's about the meditative process of Zentangling, more than the design.  This is one of the things I did on Saturday. I drew the piece below purposefully, slowly and mindfully. It took a long time and I enjoyed every single moment of it. It's amazing how much you can clear your mind and relax by just putting pen to paper  and drawing one stroke at a time. I actually did this before the challenge was issued but only by a couple of days. Since it matched the criteria and it has lots of 'Tipple' (the pattern that looks like little bubbles) I decided to submit it. I hope that's not cheating I apologize because I can't remember who recently posted about exploring Maori culture and their tribal symbolism.* I was very intrigued by that and based this design loosely on that idea. It was created on a piece of  12" x 12" scrapbook paper that has a neutral dot pattern on the background...

I've had a string of bad days lately.  Sometimes I forget to take care of ME and get so worn down that I forget that it's my choice to NOT wallow in self-pity and loathing. I can let go of the angst and anxiety, and walk away from the drama of others in my life...and my OWN self-created drama.  I forget that I can CHOOSE to be happy. On Friday I suddenly remembered again and pulled my head out of my butt for the first time in quite a while. I decided to get up extra-early and bake some lemon bread since I haven't baked in forever and I love it. I decided to enjoy my work instead of slogging through it, and I set aside an hour to read in the garden in the evening.  I ate healthily and sipped tea all day. It was glorious! It was a conscious effort and there was a lot of redirecting my monkey-mind, but as the day went on, I started to relax. Saturday, since I was on a roll,  I decided to play hooky all day . I  decided to read,  knit, draw or whatever else...

I'm in one of those phases in my life where I have  some of decisions to make; hard decisions. And I don't like it one bit lemme tell you. In order to settle myself and sort through the pros and cons, I've done a couple of larger doodles lately. I uploaded pics of them from my phone to Facebook. I save them from there and transfer them here. For some reason, when I send from my phone to my email, the picture gets partly eaten on the way. Great! Another hard decision! What new phone to get! Anyway, a dear friend who is like a sister and just moved to Texas, saw them and named them for me: Too High Falootin' To Be A  Lone Star  (Apparently, to move to the Texas, you must memorize the fact that a  Lone Star has EXACTLY 5 points. Not  3 or 4....and definitely not 6 like the abomination above. Then they beat it into you that all stars must be  the State Approved 5-pointed Lone Star. Any doodler who attempt to doodle a star other that the official ...

Just a quick drive by before I turn in for the night. Here is my Diva Challenge entry for this week. The task? To use only one tangle-Dex.  It wasn't a hardship. It's one of my favorites. Especially when I can draw it in space! 'Night All!

We were having a bit of a problem at our house with Cooper climbing the screens to catch his favorite crunchy treat, the Musca Domestica . That's the common house fly for those of us whose palet isn't as cultured as Cooper's. It's all cute-like now that he's only 3 # but will become a problem when he gets bigger. A friend told me to get a squirt gun and squirt him with it whenever he starts climbing. Didn't sound wrong. So I went to Farm and Fleet and bought the only squirt gun they sell, a little hand-held number, felt good in the hand, good grip, good trigger. $3.49 and it was all mine. I got it home, loaded it up and lay in wait for the first signs of screen climbage. As luck would have it, I didn't have to wait long. In my defense, regarding what happened next, when I was a kid (in the before times) there was one kind of squirt gun.  It was a little opaque-colored plastic pistol-usually blue or red. It took approximately 36 hours to get enough water th...

Bid'ness first. Here is my Diva Challenge for this week. The challenge was to use the tangle 'Henna Drum' by Jane MacKugler.  You can see the basic tangle here .  I usually don't like my work while I'm doing it or right after I'm doing it. I will go through old pieces later and think 'Hey, I kinda like that', but that's after my knowledge of the mistakes and things that didn't go like I thought they would have faded. This one I actually liked while I was doing it! I'm not sure why my camera makes my backgrounds have a bluish tint. This design is much more striking on the white paper it's drawn on.  Oh well. Last week was a pretty stressful week, it was nice to sit down with this and relax. Once again. The Diva ROCKS! Exciting news! Tonight I am meeting with some Madison Zentanglers in what I hope will become a regular monthly group. One of the artists will be Diane Knauff from Stone Art Angels , who I was lucky enough to have as ...

Belleville Park Bridge Dam! Damn! Big waterfall Wee Waterfall I know nothink! Geese, eh? There's one in every crowd. Goosed! Down by the riverside My brown eyed girls Sea Urchin fossils Barnacle fossils (Or as some have suggested, Reeses' Mini Peanut Butter Cup fossils! What did you do last weekend?

This week's Diva Challenge was to use a specific string (the foundation line to use as a guide to fill in the tangles).  The String looks like this  picture (which I shamelessly stole from the Tangle Pattern site. If I'm in trouble, please let me know and I'll take it down and apologize!) Anytime a string has those little loopies in it, I see 'Purk'.  They look like seed pods to me and are one of my favorites.  So I put them in both loops. I decided to 'theme' the rest of the tangle with nature designs-Sanibel in the lower right (and Purk) for plants, Rikpool by the amazing Neil Burkey, for the sea, Vauche for the animal print in the lower right hand corner and for the life of me I can't remember the one in the upper left for the stars/sky. If someone knows and could leave the name in the comments, I'd appreciate it. It's a new-ish one for me and I've been adding it to a lot of tangles lately. I also made this hummingbird on a T...