Mandala Love

Over 6 months ago a friend of mine was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. At this moment she is doing relatively well with a mayor operation in her near future. She has all the support of her family and friends.

As she is doing so well, I felt it was a great moment to share with you the quilt that I made for this friend. I have called the quilt Mandala Love. My friend is interested in eastern spirituality and that is why I wanted to have a mandala on the quilt. I looked at the pictures of mandala quilts and finally selected a quilt pattern that I could turn into a mandala with lots of luscious quilting, namely the free Moda Love pattern. I didn’t pick any of the more flower like mandala patterns as I wanted to finish this quilt as quick as I could.

The free Moda Love pattern is based on precuts, but is was easily cut from fabrics I had in my stash. One sleepless night helped decide on the colors and fabrics, with some midnight online shopping.

Can you see the two x-shapes I put in the centre blocks? Add the third big x in the blueish-purples and you get to 3 x’s. These are symbolizing the hugs and kisses we al mean to give her. I also exchanged a square for a Half Square Triangle block (HST).

Early in the construction I was coming up with all kind of ideas for the quilting where I wanted to turn the flower/star into a mandala. I drew the design on a large piece of plexiglass/perspex with a dry easer pen.

I finally decided on using the pink design underneath. Partily ruler work and freemotion peacock feathers and bump-back-feaethers… LOVE!

Before I started quilting on the longarm, I basted the quilt as I needed to roll the quilt back on forth. Some of the feathers and arches are two blocks high and this is taller than the throat space this longarm offers.  (note to self: only do that for people are quilt-worthy, like this one! It is a lot of extra work)

To make sure all of the parts of the pattern were the some all all four sides of the mandala, I made some paper templates that I traced around using a regular chalk pencil. This way all the arches are the same.

The feathers were done freehand.

The measurements for the ‘starbursts’ are marked with a stencil.

The thread looks silver but it is more of a lilac color actually.

It was so lovely to run my hands over the texture of the quilt. It was like I was stitching healing love into the quilt.

Some fabric really showed the stitched well and others made all of the thread disappear.

And of course… Some of the thread misbehaved!

 

No, really, this was user error on the longarm. It did take about quite some time to rip and redo, though.

The backing fabric is this slightly camouflage-like flanel that was so lovely to the touch.

When I took the quilt of the longarm frame, the quilting really started to show up.

Ignore all the fluff…

LOVE!

I just adore this result!

I used the stripes fabric for the binding too, and it pulled the whole quilt together.

I love it… the cat loved it… my friend loved it.

I know that this quilt has gotten a lot of use already and I hope my friend will find it a comfort on cold or hard days.

Hugs,

Esther