Knitted Mandala Picture… Finished!

(YES, THE SIGNED ARNE AND CARLOS GIVEAWAY IS COMING, NEXT POST!)

Right now, my grin would make even the Cheshire cat look surly.

I’ve finished the ****ing, ********ing, ******************************ing knitted mandala picture! Wa-hey!

You know what? I gave up on the gold embroidery, because although it was lovely and glittery close-up, it just looked messy when viewed from across the room. So I unpicked it. But that meant that I’d, er, finished the mandala. At last. It’s come a long way since this:-

All that was left was to mount it on to a canvas block, pop it on the wall, and hope that the Stoic Spouse didn’t dislike it too much. But canvas blocks are expensive, I discovered. And they’re rarely available in the exact size I wanted. So I sauntered over to www.getcanvasplus.co.uk and bought four 36-inch mitered strips of wood.

They slotted together pretty easily, with the enthusiastic assistance of a hammer, some pliers, and some choice expletives, although one of the strips was a little too curved. Then I fetched a large, mean, staple gun. Staple guns are scary*.

(* Yes, I do scare easily.)

I chopped up a cheap old table cloth, stretched it across the frame, and stapled it to the wood at the back. Hey, you at the back! Stop daydreaming and pay attention: this is about to get more interesting! So then I had m’self a blank canvas.

Hmmm. Minimalism not being my ‘thang’, I stretched the mandala picture over the tablecloth, pinned it to the frame, stood back to look, frowned, swore, and adjusted the pins (repeatedly) until it was more-or-less central and more-or-less circular.

Then I apologised to the knitting before brutally stapling it into place.

DISASTER!

The staple-gun was a nasty beast (told ya), and the sheer force of its stapling ripped the knitting in a couple of places. Look! A hole!

There were a few of these, ripped open during my frenzy of over-zealous stapling. At least they were at the back of the panel, so I found some thread and darned the hole. Then darned it some more. And then, frankly, descended into a little frenzy of darning, just to make absolutely sure that the hole would not spread. Come the nuclear holocaust, the only things left on earth will be cockroaches and the darning on my mandala, and the beautiful but rather over-engineered wood-store that the stoic spouse built in our garden.

Anyway, it’s done now:-

 

It’s not going to hang where I’ve photographed it, because it’s too big for that space and also because it looks rubbish there, but the redecoration of the living room is a work of glacially slow progress, so the mandala’s intended destination wall currently remains a tad…. blotchy. If I hadn’t been so damn busy with the mandala, I might’ve finished painting the living room, a fact that I suspect has not gone unnoticed by the Stoic Spouse. (What he doesn’t know is that I’m also working up to crocheting a rug for the living room floor. Heaven knows how many hours that’ll take.)

So. There y’are.

• Approximately 60 000 stitches in DK yarn.
• The green is Fyberspates Vivacious.
• The cream is Wendy five-ply.
• It took a while, knitted stranded in the round, then steeked, yes steeked.
• Steeking is easy.

And if you’d like, I’d be happy to share the pattern for free, just so someone else can suffer the hours of pedantic stitching that went into this thing 😉 I just need to figure out how to transfer it from pencil scribbles on giant paper, to a snazzy modern e-pattern that you can download in a moment.

Hmm…

Wanders off to ponder….

And now, to celebrate this thing, I’m going for a run.