Playing with the mandala

I think I've done enough embroidery and beading on the mandala, but sometimes it's hard to know when to stop. So now I'm playing around with possible border fabrics.
 

It's amazing how many of my commercial prints have exactly the same colors as my hand-painted fabrics that I used for the mandala. My stash is heavy on orange, turquoise, light greens and purples.

This Kaffe Fassett stripe has lots of possibilities, depending on how it's cut and pieced to give different directions to the stripe. I'm also getting distracted by the leftover pieces from the mandala:

This is the book that inspired it all. I didn't plan to duplicate the colors on the cover -- I just picked some favorites from my stash and they turned out to be the same!

Here are my daughter's latest doodles. We live hours away from each other, and without realizing it we were both doing mandalas at the same time. Bunners gave her stamp of approval when we visited last weekend.

Well, I haven't made a decision yet on the borders, and if I don't give myself a deadline this project could go on for years. So I think I'll tell myself (and all of you) that I'll decide tomorrow on borders and sew them on by the weekend. Then I'll do the quilting and then maybe some final embellishing with beads in the borders. 

Have a colorful day

 

p.s. Hop on over to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday to see what other quilt artists have been doing this week: http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/2013/02/literally-off-wall-friday-birth-of.html