An Adventure with Making a Spiral Mandala Quilt

In January, of this year, I had the pleasure of taking a workshop with Renae Merrill. Renae Is a self-professed “spiral-maniac” who has written two books about making spiral quilts; Simply Amazing Spiral Quilts and Magnificent Spiral Mandal Quilts. I bought Magnificent Spiral Mandal Quilts many years ago and never got around to trying it out. Then Renae came to our guild to give her Magic Mirror Mandala workshop.

I prepared for class by putting together a palette with gradient values from light to dark. I started by finding an inspiration fabric. This could also be considered a theme fabric but there is no guarantee that it will be included in the final piece. It was simply a crutch for putting together a cohesive palette of colors.

During the class we used the clockwise and counterclockwise spirals supplied to us to draft a wedge. This wedge represents one eighth of the whole pie.

Next we placed the wedge in a plastic sleeve and used dry erased markers to flesh out a pattern from the units. After you colored in your pie slice, you place a mirror on it to see what the whole thing will look like. At home I would load an image of the wedge into my kaleidoscope program so that I could see what it would look like as a whole.

At first I tried to match the markers to the fabrics I had. This strategy didn’t work for me as they were not exact matches to my fabric colors. The marker colors were too bright. Also I planned on using dark to light values with the color and I found this hard to convey with the dry erase markers.

After my first three attempts with bright markers I decided to try toning the colors down and reducing the number of colors. This helped me to see how they related to each other better. Another issue was that I couldn’t find a yellow dry erase marker and I felt that the orange marker was too bright. It was competing with the other colors in my marker palette. The other colors should appear darker than the yellow/orange. That’s about as far as I got in class. Later in my sewing room I decided to leave the parts that were to be yellow blank. This helped me to conceptualize it better. I was very satisfied with the result. But I had other “quilting” fish to fry so I had to set the project aside.

Recently I was able to make time further the progression of this project. Now that I had decided on a layout, I used colored pencils to make a colored draft that would include the gradient values for each color.  It took three tries before I came up with a design that I liked. Then I realized that I had included a green/yellow in my green palette to represent the lightest value. This was a problem because I don’t have any yellow green fabric in my palette.

So I made one more version that used a very pale green tor represent the lightest value. I also changed which purple I was going to use in the center. After I finally had what I thought was an awesome sketch it was time to make it in fabric. This took some time as I had to be careful not to mix up the little pieces. After a week and a half I had finished my wedge and I love it! Again, I loaded an image of the wedge into my kaleidoscope program so that I could see better see what it would look when finished. I think it looks awesome.

I have to put it away for a while and work on some other things. But now that I have the one finished wedge for reference the other seven will go much quicker. It may be a while but I definitely plan on finishing this project.