Cruze - A New Pattern

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts."   Aristotle

Last month my husband and I went on a cruise to Norway. We've been on several cruises in the past, so I knew that the ship would be a mecca of patterns, and I wasn't disappointed. Patterns on walls, floors, furniture, lights. In other words, everywhere you looked there were patterns, even on the water in the North Sea. Walking through the ship taking pictures of walls and floors and furniture....I can only imagine what the other passengers must have thought! It took a few weeks, but finally I got around to deconstructing some of those patterns to come up with the step-outs for new tangle patterns.

But before I get to that, I wanted to share a few of the patterns I saw that I did not try to pick apart. This first one is a light hanging from the ceiling of one of the lounges. Does anyone else see Mooka in there?

Here are two more - the one on the left was on a wall, and the one on the right was a floor which reminds me of Dex. 

This one is an etched glass door with a wall of different colored lights behind it. Zendala?

The next one was a fabric covered wall (with metal strips dividing it into a grid, just like a tangle pattern).

These two were taken in a store in the town of Bergen.

      

When I took the following photo I wasn't really focusing on the water, but once I put it on my computer I was immediately drawn to the pattern that the water made in the wake of the boat going by.

And I couldn't resist taking a picture of the roof on this building next to where our ship docked in Eidfjord.

Last, but not least, is this photo of a tiled border going around the pool deck on the ship. This is the first one that I have deconstructed (at least a part of it). 

 

I have named the pattern "Cruze" in honor of where it came from. 

You start with "blocks" of 5 lines forming a diagonal. At first I tried very hard to get the lines to form a square block, but realized it really doesn't matter if they are squares or rectangles, or whether each one is the same size as the next one. Once you get the flow of the curved lines connecting those blocks, it really isn't hard. You go down one side (step 4) then turn and go back up the other side (step 5). On the last step you cap off the two ends. 

I enjoyed playing around with this pattern, but got really excited about it when I created the following variation. If you place the blocks of lines in a skewed manner like shown below, you get a really interesting variation that has a lot of movement. The top section is unshaded and the bottom one is shaded. 

On the following Zentangle I used the original pattern, but added a little bit of black fill, and really think it makes the pattern pop. I turned the picture 45 degrees to post it here because as I was looking at it I tilted my head and liked what I saw. It looks to me like a hanging basket of flowers.

Then I used the Cruze variation to design the following piece. I just LOVE the way this one turned out. This is definitely one of my favorite Zentangles ever.

Stay tuned for more new patterns coming soon. Maybe one will be called Norway.