FAL 2016 Third Quarter - First Finish!

Well, here we are...my first and only finish for the Finish Along Third Quarter! I have been working on this for a while during the second quarter and obviously could not make it to the Second Quarter deadline, so here is my long overdue finish of the Mandala quilt I have been working on.

You can find the list of my Third Quarter goals HERE

Our Guild is running a Mandala Challenge  for the 2016 Festival of Quilts. The quilt must be circular with a diameter of between 50 - 60cm. Any quilting technique is allowed! If you want to find out about the design process and how I used Cindy Needham's Ultimate Circular Stencil to draw this design, please go to the Mandala Challenge post.

I was a tad conflicted a couple of weeks ago, thinking that I had made the wrong thread choice as it is not contrasting enough. Was incredibly discouraged but thought that I better finish this off. Looking at it now, I quite like it...I am particularly impressed with how evenly round I ended up, given the challenge this provided with drawing up a perfect circle at this size.

Mandala Challenge finishing up at 55cm in diameter

Close up of the fantastic blue Aurifil colour (#2725)

Detail:

Mandala measures 55cm in diameter
Cotton fabric (Moda Solids) and Legacy cotton batting
Stitched with Aurifil 50/2 thread (Brass, Medium Red, Light Wedgewood, #6728); all the colours are from the Shannon Brinkley Dryad Thread box
Cindy Needham's Ultimate Stencil used to draft this design; Ultimate Background stencils used to fill the outer petal as well as the outer rim of the Mandala.

Very happy with the end result. Now onto the next project!

Linking up to Eleven Garden Quilts for the Finish Along 2016 Quarter 3 Link Up

Karin

Mandala Challenge

Our Guild is running a Mandala Challenge  for the 2016 Festival of Quilts. The quilt must be circular with a diameter of between 50 - 60cm. Any quilting technique is allowed!

Well, how hard could it be to design a Mandala for FMQ?  So I started to consult the internet for ideas and also looked a lots of those popular colouring books and soon was completely overwhelmed with ideas to the point of not being able to get anything much on paper. In the end, I went back to basics...what would I like to do? I had a basic design in my head that had to be in the center, so I started there...

The first attempt was promising, but fell short of any ideas on how to finish it off. Also felt that it needed to be more intricate and creative...

Well, that created another month of utter confusion and inactivity. However, in the end I went back to the original idea and expanded on that and finally finished the design.

Final design...ready for tracing onto fabric

This was incredibly challenging! Not only did you need some sort of idea for design, but you also had to think ahead of how would that play out quilted in terms of areas being flattened or raised. Also, easy enough to do multiple designs in a row when drawing a Mandala, but again, how would that look quilted going from one design to the next. Many a times, I spend more time thinking about this than drawing.
The drawing itself was also tricky as you want symmetry. I used a number of tools for this, starting of with Cindy Needham's Ultimate Circular Stencil. As the stencil is 12.5in, I had to extend it outwards to make it the required size. Now here was the first hurdle...how to make a circle of that size! In the end I used a string attached to a pencil and carefully made my way around it, holding it firmly in place at the exact center.

A few of the other tools I used

June Tailor's petal and heart shapes in 6 sizes...shapes brilliantly aligned themselves into the Ultimate Stencil which has 0.5in markings and allowed me to create the center motif with some precision. Similarly, the bottom of the heart shape gave me that lovely outer ring of petals.

Apart from that I used round and oval templates that we had lying around the house for various things within my Mandala and also used the Anita Shackleford 'Infinite Feather Template' to draw the outside feathers. Looking at the picture now, I feel that they could have been bigger and more lavish (like in the first freehand attempt), however I had run out of room and there was no way  I was going to change this design again. Maybe next time...this feather border will be a bit understated. If anybody asks, then it was meant to be like that:)


I am very curious how this will look stitched out...still not sure whether to use different coloured thread in sections. Again, this seems simple, but if I am going to fill sections or maybe even in-line some feathers, then I will need to backtrack over stitches and doing this with different colours would look messy. The trick would be to think this through and have the stitching you need to backtrack on in the same colour as the filler. Will ponder more on this...

Karin

Quiltshopgal's Bee Creative Fundraiser - Mandala Doodle Along

This month has been Quiltshopgal's Bee Creative #StitchAlong, #FMQAlong, #DoodleAlong and Charity Fundraiser to benefit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. You can stitch along, doodle along, paint along, freemotionquilt along...the possibilities are endless. The only requirement is that it has to have a Mandala theme to it.

To help raise funds for  Cystic Fibrosis the option was there to purchase a set of Mandala templates from Maureen Russell of Beautiful Embroidery Designs. This also gave you the opportunity to be entered in the raffle.

I am working on a Mandala design anyway, so this was a great opportunity as well as benefiting a good cause. Our local Quilt Guild has thrown out a challenge to create a Mandala quilt of about 50 -60cm with any quilting technique allowed.
So, I did purchase Justin's Magical Mandalas from Beautiful Embroidery Designs, however did not use them as yet, as I had started doing my own Mandala design using Cindy Needham's Ultimate Stencil.

The stencil is 12.5in and I think Cindy is now selling it with a transparency to go with it so you can draw your designs on it and just wipe it off. I have a smaller paper master template that I could draw on but given that my Mandala had to be bigger that did not work for me that well. In the end I had to draw it out at the size that I wanted it, about 20in. For this I had to extend the stencil. I dreaded this a bit, but as it turned out this was very easy to do and works well. I use paper from Ikea for drawing...it is nice and thick and comes in a big roll. I drew the stencil onto the paper and then extended the lines out to the desired width. As I did not want to get my brand new stencil dirty I used the blue marker to draw it which was easy to do as the marker pen fits right into the slots...this worked also well for me as the blue lines were not so distracting as I started to draw. When using the paper template I found that I sometimes just get overwhelmed with all the lines. I think everybody has to find their own way of what works best for them with these stencils and the more you use them the easier it gets. They are unbelievably useful and I was actually quite amazed at how easy it was to draw my design.

This is my Mandala design...rough doodle of what it may look like. Started off very disciplined in the beginning, but lost focus in the end and just doodled...

As you can see not totally worked out as yet...I have to find a template for the outer shape to make it consistent and pull it out a bit (at a consistent size!) but the overall theme is there. Maybe a few more lines that set individual sections off and I will also try to make the central flower slightly smaller, I think. 
Actually not that simple to make a design for freemotionquilting...while you are drawing it you also have to consider what areas do you want to recede and what areas do you want to stand out and what that might look like in relation to other elements. I was also thinking that I could use different colours to stitch, but we'll see...as you can see I have started to fill in some areas with some stippling and very rudimentary grids...I think that will work really well. A little bit more work required but definitely stuck on the design.

Linking up to Quiltshopgal's Bee Creative Linky Party to show of my WIP. I hope that other bloggers will consider donating a small amount of money to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation by purchasing the downloadable Mandala collection. Nice resource to have and endless opportunity to fill them in with FMQ designs as demonstrated by Wendy Sheppard this week.

Karin