Hi folks,

A few weeks back, I showed you some yarn I dyed with natural dyes. Today, I have one of the pieces I made from that yarn to show you. This is In the Weeds:

I made a large mandala from my yarn. It is earthy and muted and I am quite happy with it.

I started my mandala on the computer. I drew a chart for several rounds of the piece, but I wanted to get to crocheting, so I didn’t draw out the whole thing, and even the part I did draw, I didn’t make a full 360-degree chart of—just the parts I needed to get me going on each round.

I made it six or seven rounds in before I started deviating from my chart. I love the look of the bullion stitch when made with a chunky yarn (those are the coil-looking stitches in light yellow in my mandala), so I made a bunch of them. This gave me a bit of waviness in my piece, which is not usually something you want in a mandala or doily, but in this case, I thought it worked, especially since I knew I was going to be mounting my piece so it could hang on the wall.

My finished mandala is about 16 inches across, so I got an 18-inch square canvas to attach the crochet to. Mounting crochet to hang is something that I am still getting the hang of, but this piece was fairly easy to mount. I dyed some wool felt with tea to get my tan background color, then stretched it around the canvas and stapled it down with a staple gun. I had to put the canvas on the floor to do my stapling. I needed the support of the floor on the base of the stapler to work against as I squeezed the trigger because I don’t have the hand strength to just go shooting off a staple gun willy nilly (probably for the best).

Once the felt was attached, I stitched the mandala to the felt with beige all-purpose thread.

I loved working with these natural dyed fibers. I’ve dyed a few more yarns since, and I have almost completed another piece with those yarns.

Until next time,
Annie