I finished this project a few months ago, but it has been placed in the closet and forgotten. I have a few other projects that suffered the same fate, so I decided to use this time of rediscovery of my mostly forgotten and abandoned blog to post about each of these projects while the weather is still rainy and cold here in PNW and the gardening is on hold.
As mentioned in one of the previous posts, I wanted to try the draw-sew-trim technique as shown by Katalin Horvath and I gave it a try. It turned out to be a fun experiment, and a way to use the tiniest little scraps of fabric that I had left over from previous projects. I made some simple mandalas in Illustrator, printed them out, traced them on fusible interfacing with micron pens, fused that onto the fabric, and then started sewing the scraps of fabric along the drawing lines.
The trick here is that the drawing is on the wrong side, and the stitching needs to be done on the wrong side, yet the piece of fabric to be added needs to go on the right side. The way around that was to hold the work against the light, be it a window or a lamp, to see-through the drawing and place fabric piece, affixing it with a pin or two, then sew it on. This way I can make best possible use of small scraps, as they only need to cover the shapes without any seam allowance around them. Alternatively, the drawing can be also traced against the light onto the right side for the ease of placement, but it worked well enough without that. The stitching was done in free motion with quilting / darning hopping foot. After each piece was sewn on, I’d take small scissors and trim around the shape, then after all the pieces are sewn and trimmed, I’d swap the presser foot to the “default” one, and zigzag stitch along all the stitch lines on the right side. This worked well in most cases, except where I had a very tight curves and couldn’t see very well where I was stitching – it got quite a bit tricky to do it right. The next step was to put back the quilting foot and add free style embroidery inside the different patterned shapes.
I ended up with four mandala appliques, and wanted to do something more with them. Should I stitch them onto a shirt? Combine them with some crochet? Well, that seemed like an interesting idea. On one of them (the first in line in the photo below) I used crochet thread to blanket-stitch by hand all around, at which point I figured I could simply crochet onto the blanket stitch, which worked out pretty well. Then I thought I would make some crochet pieces and tie them all together Irish lace style, which then led me to crochet a bunch of colorful mandala motifs. The first one I did was after a video on YT, and this was not only the first mandala piece for me, but also the first time to actually follow spoken instructions in English, since I have only been following crochet tutorials in Russian. This is because Russian crochet vocabulary is less confusing to me, having learned to crochet from charts and written instructions in Serbian, which calls double crochet ‘a post with one winding’ (столбик с накидом [Ru], stubić s jednim navijutkom [Sr]), just like in these two languages the first floor of a building is called a ground floor and the floor above is first story/floor and not the second, while in English it would be referred to as a second floor and ground floor would be first. Half-double crochet in my mathematically indoctrinated mind translates to just one crochet, but in Serbian and Russian it is called polustubić / полустолбик с накидом (half-post, or half-post with single winding). Anyhow, after having fun with that first mandala (it’s the second one from the right in top row), I went ahead and made a bunch more, coming up with design as I went along and adding beads. Most of them are eight-sided.

With all that done, I still wasn’t sure what the final project is going to be, but I desperately wanted to turn it into something and call it done. I thought some more about the prospect of Irish lace to tie it all together, but I quickly remembered that my previous Irish lace projects took me two or three months to complete, and I just didn’t want to spend that much time on it. It just so happened that I had several brand new hoodies that I thought of embellishing, and so that’s what happened. I stitched the mandala appliques with a machine, and crochet mandalas by hand, and then added some crochet and embroidery swirls and lines and beads. The overall design is not really my favorite, but that’s what happens when I start with experiments instead of an idea of what I’d like finished project to look like. It still was a lot of fun to do, and didn’t take months but barely two weeks all together.


