During December, the Tangle All Around Facebook group that I’m part of has been working on a challenge called The Gift of Tangles. A different design to try every day. They weren’t all Christmas tangles, but some were actually stylized drawings instead of tangles. I decided to try a few tangles that I felt looked Christmasy.

The first is called Florius, designed by Franciska Sprengers. It’s a grid pattern (I love grid patterns!) and to me it looked like four Christmas balls:

This is Bownus, designed by Angie Gittles:

This is Bugle, designed by YuRu Chen. (Another grid pattern!) I saw an opportunity to make a portion of it look sort of like candy canes:

This is Steampunk Star, designed by Tricia Long. I drew it on a black tile with a white Gelly Roll pen:

The final one was not part of our challenge, but inspired by one I saw online. The Zentangle patterns I used (clockwise from the top left) are Purk, Sharalarelli, Random, and Shattuck:

I’m disappointed with the way the Sharalarelli turned out. It’s a new-to-me pattern, so I didn’t execute it very well, and I started filling it in with green, which turned out too dark, so I switched to yellow. It was the third of the designs, and I thought it made the piece a total loss. However, by the time I was done with the last pattern, it didn’t look quite as horrible.

I find that often happens in tangling, in art (and in quilting). Sometimes it’s easy to fix a mistake, sometimes there’s nothing you can do to improve it. But there’s value in calling it practice, and finishing it. Often, the error is less visible when the piece is done. Sometimes it’s even charming.

I wish I had more to show you this year, but it’s been hard to fit it tangling along with all the other things going on in my life. I know it sounds like an excuse, but it is what it is. If you’d like to take a peek at other Tangles for Christmas posts I’ve done in the past, here are the links: from  2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017.