First Mandala Series

These are the first mandalas that I made for the Mandalas for Marinke project. Marinke Slump (Wink) was a popular crochet designer who committed suicide in June 2015. I found out about her while looking for a flower pattern, and I decided to participate in a project organized by Kathryn Vercillo to honor Wink's memory and raise awareness about depression. You can read about the project here.

This is the first mandala that I made. It is Wink's picots and petals pattern. I sent it to Kathryn Vercillo right away, along with a note about who I am and what the project means to me. I flattened it with a damp cloth and a hot iron, which I won't do again. I used the colors of the botanical granny squares, and added blue to the edge.

I made this simple mandala next, loosely based on a colorway that I saw on instagram.

Next I made the picots and petals mandala using some of my favorite colors.

I made two of these so I could keep one. The colors are the colors of the front flower garden this year, which was really beautiful.

This mandala was made from one skein of Vanna's choice yarn, variegated. The name of the yarn was "Peru." I cut the yarn where it changed color, and you can see in row 12 that I had to use what was left of the variegated orange and green. There was very little left over.

I had been haunted by a vague idea of how red and yellow could go together with some other colors to evoke something like a 1920s feeling that I couldn't really put my finger on. This was my first attempt. It didn't do what I wanted, but it's pretty cool.

For this one I wanted to use a lot of the cream colored yarn, because I had a giant skein of it. It was a little boring so when I got to the shells on the border, I used a colorful variegated yarn that was an impulse purchase.

This is a combination of the previous two mandalas. I used light blue as the repeating color. I was trying to get that 1920s look, but I also really wanted to use the brick red that I put on the border. Closer to my vague idea, but still not quite. But, time to move on.

Here are the five simple mandalas that I made in this series, ready to ship to the MandalasForMarinke project in San Francisco. I mailed them at the end of August, together with the other two picots and petals mandalas.