Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Mandala Quilt

Here's an idea I had a little while ago. One of the things I've been making for a while now are photo mandalas. Basically you take a photograph of something, open it up in Photoshop, then take a pie-shaped slice of it, which you then flip, merge down, copy, paste, turn, &c., until you have a mandala, the number of segments depending on the angle of the original pie slice. To wit:



(From an original photo of autumn sumac leaves and berries.)

Mandalas, kaleidoscope patterns, quilt blocks... hmmm, all very similar, aren't they?

So I thought I'd design some blocks with this mandala method.

This wasn't real high-tech, mind you; pretty much I just scribbled for a while on the 45° pie template in Photoshop until I got something, or rather, several somethings, I liked. So these are the 'quilt blocks' I eventually assembled together:



Now interpreting that out to quilt blocks is a little trickier than I thought, but I managed to get one done. From this sketch



I made



I've changed the colors around, since I'm making it in shades of green, with autumnal sort of accents in red, orange and yellow. Sort of the old M&M color scheme, but with an emphasis on the green (Eddie van Halen would be proud). The block is fifteen inches square, and sewn by hand.

1 comment:

  1. Hello! This is very cool. I am trying to start a mandala quilt project for an orphanage in Siem Reap Cambodia. They have 29 kids between 7-14 years old and my idea is to have people from all over the world send the material for each of them to have a square. Do you think you could translate one of your mandala into a pattern that would be simple enough for a child of that age to sew? At the end we would put them all together into a large tapestry to shade their kitchen. If you are interested in designing a pattern please visit 1mandala.org or email me. Thanks! Megan

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