Ed090 Flower Mandala

Stitching with beads.

Just love making this card, you see it grow and keeps surprising you. It's a card for any occasion.

Used rice-, glassbeads and pearls.

This beautiful intricate design lends itself to so many colour combinations, style, size and type of beads as well as carefully thought out swirls with an amazing eye catching centre piece.

I have used a combination of teal blue, sky blue, royal blue and dusty pink for the stitching.

I have used pearls, silver, pink, blue and teal for the beads, and the pearl lustre finished sequins, which I have used instead of spacers.

I copied the design onto 120gsm white matte card cut at 13cm square, which after completing the stitching, I later trimmed down to measure 11.5cm wide, but kept the height of 13cm.

I used 2 strands of sky blue embroidery thread to complete stitching the main central circle.

I used the same thread to then stitch the 9 circular star shapes. I then used the royal blue polyester thread to complete the 9 swirls and their tails on the outer part of the design.

I began attaching the beads from the centre of the design using a matching coloured polyester thread for each different coloured bead.

In the very centre there is a sequin with a teal coloured pearl attached, and around this centre there are 12 teal coloured 6mm metallic rice beads.

In amongst the pale blue stitched next section I have paired 12 silver 6mm rice beads with 12 pale blue glass seed beads with pink centres pointing towards the centre.

The 12 metallic 6mm rice beads and 12 blue seed beads, I have stitched into position next, making sure each pair pointed outwards from the centre.

The 9 pearl beads stitched into place in the centre of each of the 9 blue star shapes, each have a blue seed bead with a pink centre attached.

The 9 sequins in the open white area each have a single pearl attached.

The 9 clusters of pink flowers, I have stitched using the dusty pink thread for the stamens while I was attaching each of the sets of 3 pink glass tube beads each with a pink glass seed bead attached.

The last beads I have attached are the 18 teal metallic 6mm rice beads that form the leaves for this design.

I trimmed the main completed stitched and beaded topper down to 13cm x 11.5 and used a teal metallic pen to define the edges.

I attached a plain piece of white copy paper to the back of this work using red power tape to secure the stitching and beading.

I made a 1.5cm x13cm strip of white card to edge with the same pen, and coloured the vertical Happy Birthday with the same pen before attaching it to the very right hand side of the teal coloured 14cm square backing sheet.

I attached a silver ribbon across the front and secured it at the back 8cm up from the bottom edge before then attaching the finished topper, Making sure all top and bottom edges were level with the sentiment tag.

I used red power tape to attach the topper teal backing sheet complete with the topper to the gloss white 200gsm 15x 14.5cm white card front.

I used silver peel off strips as embellishments around the teal backing sheet, and attached the silver bow before attaching the silver insert with the edges defined with the teal pen, and added some peel off embellishments.

I have achieved a very rewarding result with this project. Pamela Horton. The whispering Platypus.