This quilt had no purpose other than to get me to quilt one of my own hand dyed mandala fabrics. Like a lot of people, I avoid using “special” fabrics and once I do I want the resulting project to be perfect. I knew that I needed to get over all of that so I picked a pink mandala because that’s my least favorite color. That helped me not worry about perfection but wasn’t much for motivation! I was an admirable procrastinator with this quilt.
But from a purely education point of view this was a really valuable quilt. I learned some things about design and committing myself to task.
Even the thread was a lesson. The only pink threads I had were some acrylic embroidery threads that I bought from Lunn Fabrics when they closed their hand dyed shop. They are beautiful threads but didn’t run well on my APQS. I’m happy to discover that they run just fine on my Innova.
I started with the 4 center sections that are cross hatched and regretted it immediately. I knew that I had to repeat the crosshatching somewhere else. I eventually settled on the corners. For the rest of it I built the “frames” for each section and figured out what to do as I went along. I really was a good exercise and now I’m looking forward to doing another. But the next time I will do better planning.
I even took the bold step to use white for the back, which I love. I also love the blue binding.
This quilt isn’t perfect and I don’t have any immediate use for it but I’m glad I did it. It has issues and it really needs to be blocked again but it’s done and it met my one goal: to get over my fear of quilting the mandala fabrics.
