Mandala

Mandala is finished, bound and labeled!  I had a beautiful sunny day for photographs in between snow storms.  It's just taken me a while to write this blog post.

The original idea was to make this a scrappy quilt, but as I settled on a layout (which was a long process because of all the possibilities!), I limited it to seven fabrics.  I was afraid that all these curved pieces would result in a lot of waste, but it turns out Flowering Snowballs can be cut with just slivers of curved pieces left over (but big enough to go into my crumb quilts).

My biggest problem with piecing it together was joining the pieces wrong-way around.  I had to rip out several of the orange-peel pieces before I got the hang of it.  I did fairly well at keeping the blocks square, even with all the curves.

I pieced some of the extra dark blue pieces for the back.  It's a great design all by itself!

The quilting was mostly outlines of the pieces - ovals and what looks to me like old-fashioned pen nibs.  I picked out three different threads:  a gold, a silvery blue and a cream.  The cream thread just about ran out before I finished all the orange peel pieces.  I had no idea I'd go through that much thread.  I love the effect on the backing.

I had one small tuck on the back that I had to pick out and restitch.  There were also a few repairs where the machine skipped stitches.  I've been fighting with lint build-up in my bobbin case in addition that the newer bobbins aren't perfectly straight.  I suspect some thread is more sensitive to a bent bobbin than others when it comes to free motion quilting.  So I cheated and stitched the short repairs with a regular foot instead of free motion quilting it.  

The quilt remained almost perfectly square and true through the quilting.  How nice!  I bound it in a dark blue that had bits of the light and medium blue in it (little polka-dots - more circles!).  The finished size is roughly 45 inches square.  

I love how bright and cheerful this is.  I hung it on my wall for a few days before sending it out.  I hope my cousin-once-removed gets lots of use from this.

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