This week, the challenge was to work on a ‘globular grid’–which brought me around to the conundrum of fitting a square peg into a round hole. A grid on a globe does not have the neatly aligned spaces typically found on a grid–in fact some of my spaces are triangles!

On Saturday, I was fortunate to attend Tangle on the Bay–a day long workshop with other CZTs. One of the sessions centered on how to make tangles flow more seamlessly one into another so that there is a coherence throughout the piece. With this in mind, I chose to use the tangle Bales on the whole circle. In some ways, I was reminded of how it is to sing a ’round’ as the song of Bales stopped and started at different times and overlapped with itself in the myriad grid shapes. I then added to that tangle and used Printemps and Flux as accents.

There were different times throughout the process that I nearly scrapped the whole project. I couldn’t see where I was headed, or how to bring everything around to make sense in the squares, circles, and triangles on my grid. And, I stayed true to the eight steps. I concentrated on one section, and then the next, and then the next. The mindful choices in each section of the grid and the shading and highlights brought everything together–and I am, as is usually the case, glad that I stuck with the challenge.

The background for the photograph is the top of my laptop. It is a solid color. I did not notice the yellow to blue gradation until I imported the photo. I like it. The dark to light speaks to the journey of the tile–and of the day as I fill in each moment–be it square, circle, or triangle–and wait for the overall pattern and beauty to emerge.