Mandala

So I finally started on my Mandala.

Bought some Bella Solids fabric and ended up with the same colour that I usually choose... a sort of burnt orange. Took me ages to select, there are just too many choices. Whether this was the best choice to make for this project remains to be seen. I marked the fabric using my light box and the trusted blue water soluble marker. Was not as bad as I thought and I even managed to not mess it up too much...except for the grid. For the live of me, can never get the orientation  of the grid right first time around, so need to re-mark this when I get to it.

My thread choices seemed great. Used the new Aurifil thread from the Shannon Brinkley Dryad box. Chose a nice watermelon colour (#5002) as my base and added some accent colours (#2975 and #6728). For the center I chose a brilliant blue (#2725). Not sure about the result as yet...at the moment I am thinking that I should have selected stronger colours, but we shall see...bit hard to tell as you go along.

Funny (not) thing happened when I started stitching this...the machine did not behave itself and it felt as if I was having two left feet. The speed was doing something funny, i.e. I did not seem to be able to get into any sort of rhythm. I kept looking at the stitches and everything seemed fine. The back also seemed fine except after a while I kept noticing a few 'fuzzy' stitches. Weird! The other thing I noticed was that I was absolutely not getting any body in the quilting...even weirder as I was using the same cotton batting that I had used for my other Wholecloth. Thinking that it had to do with me somehow I continued and put the inner frame down...
When it was time to change the needle, I realised what happened...I had taken the wrong needle and was stitching with a 60/8 needle. Duh! Now looking a bit closer at the stitches in the back I could see what the machine was doing...given the needle was a tad too small for the 50/2 thread it did 'nick' the thread every now and then while forming the loop on the back creating this somewhat fuzzy appearance. Overall though, I had done really well considering that I  had stitched this with the wrong needle.
The perfectionist in me (of course) needed to fix this, so today I re-stitched the inner frame and yes, with the right needle I now had the right amount of structure or puff in the piece. So obviously the whole tension was not right with the smaller needle even though it looked perfectly alright from the front.
Anyway, so this is what I have been up to...
My white Wholecloth is nearly finished...taking a bit of a break from it...looking very pretty draped over the table

When these two are finished I really need to clean up my sewing room...it is a complete mess.

Linking up to Let's Bee Social over at Lorna's blog.

Karin