Thursday, August 07, 2008

Mandala Series






I have decided to create a series of Mandala. I need to think about where I'm going and what I'm doing as a textile artist so I thought a Mandala series might help as I meditate on this. I started the first one today. First I used CorelDraw to create a semicircular grid so that it fit on A3 paper. I printed 2 copies and taped them together to get the full circle. I traced the grid onto lightweight interfacing and pinned it to the back of the fabric. I stitched all the lines using a thread to match the fabric so that I could see the whole grid from the front. I have started to couch some metallic thread on the radiating straight lines from the front using a narrow zigzag stitch. I am a little worried that this circular quilt will become dome-shaped as I stitch but we shall see what happens.

1 comment:

Cinzia said...

Hi Liz,
possible suggestion... buckling could be due to the different amounts of quilting/sewing in different areas .. to counteract this you could try starting some of your radiating lines further out rather than starting all of them from the middle.

Also you could make a sort of wooden frame .. light weight that is the size of the outer border and staple the fabric to it.. this would hold it taunt...not sure though how that would go for manipulating it under the feed dogs etc.

good luck with it .. looks like a good project ... I tired a similar thing with piecing (that's where the different starting points idea came from:)