Fun... Practice

I have learned over the years that practice can be almost as much fun as actually doing the darn thing. When I was growing up my Mom involved and introduced me to all kinds of things ( Thank you Mom). This included playing several musical instruments, learning to sew, swimming, and lots of cultural stuff. You must understand that growing up in the 60's, in the inner city in the Midwest, a young Black person was not really exposed to a variety of things. My mother, however, was a school teacher and wanted my sister and I to be able to stand on our own two feet. She stressed the importance of an education day after day and year after year. My father died when I was six and my mother had to return to the work force. She was fortunate enough to get a job with what was then Manpower and taught English and Reading to adults trying to get their GED's. She also had her hands busy trying to instill the love of diagramming sentences and using the correct adverb/adjective/noun/pronoun ( you get the idea) into my head. This led to a lifelong aversion to English for me. I do, however, love to read, spell well and sometimes use the correct punctuation. I also feel that I am gramatically correct (to, too, two). My bailiwick was numbers, and I realized laer in life, symbols. This made me good with music, also. I had an innate ability to look at music and recognize the symbology there. I learned to play the piano, violin, trumpet and french horn. I have digressed in my discussion of practice being fun, but it was necessary. While learning to play all these instruments, there were hours and hours of practice involved. Playing the same thing over and over again can become boring. So my mind would say, "how can you change this?, what can you do different?". This led to play. Playing with different rhythms, notes, styles of music. Zentangle(R) is the same way. I practice on different patterns until I feel I have mastered them and then think, "what will happen if I do this?". Looking at the work of others, I feel that they do the same things. Sometimes this leads to an awesome rendering of a certain tangle or combination of tangles. Sometimes this leads to a whole new tangle ( I'm still working on that part). I said all of this to lead up to my post of many practices I have done. I will not label the ones that don't already have one written on the page. Sometimes I have a senior moment and can't remember the name of the tangle right away. So without further ramblings here are my "practices" of the summer. (By the way the last one was what I did today.)

While I was waiting for these to upload, I remembered that I have a Dove Magnum ice cream bar in my freezer. I really shouldn't, but it is calling me.