Today is Whitsun day (Pfingsten in German) so I have a little holiday. My mother visited with friends a nearby monastery to attend the service, which was held outside. And for us – being Protestant – it is always impressing to observe all the rituals and elaborate garments (the Bishop of the next big town was visiting) of a catholic service.

You noticed the beer truck? This is Germany, church service and beer :-DDD

So, today I write about a needlework which is a bit more contemplative and perhaps appropriate for such a day:

Weaving a mandala

I had a stressful week with many visits at the hospital and often grief has stopped me from being productive and coordinated. My head was (and is) full of sewing projects I want to try out, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to choose one over the other. With knitting it was the same: I hopped from project to project accomplishing only some meagre stitches. Therefore, I decided to put all this away and try something fresh. I stumbled over a weaving kit at a bargain shop and thought this the perfect project to get my head into stillness….
Yeah, so I thought 😀

The kit consists of a wooden frame and some raw wool and acrylic yarns. It has no explanation, but the cover photo shows an example of the finished mandala, so I had no problem to set this weaving loom up.
I decided to follow the example exactly and started with the darker blue for the centre. After two rounds of fickle yarn-under and yarn-over I was sure that this loom is not a device for meditation, but a devilish test invented by aliens to examine humankind’s patience. Result: Humankind has no patience. And with humankind I mean me ???

But I persisted and grabbed this fluffy pastel blue yarn and was again thrown back. It wasn’t enough. Or better, the cover photo showed a voluminous yarn, but the thingy I held in my hands was considerable thinner. And it got even thinner by weaving it and pulling (perhaps I overdid it). My day was done, and the meditative mood crawled defeated out of my kitchen.

Next day same story only I used the thick beige yarn. This yarn came in one thread but was shown on several rounds on the cover photo. No idea how this small amount of the beige yarn could suffice to work the mandala on the cover photo… Spoiler: it did not.
This process dragged out over the whole week and only today, on #needleworkmonday I finished the mandala.
My summary is, I love how the mandala looks on the cover. Loved the thick and fluffy wool and I was a bit disappointed that I could not reproduce it. Also, weaving does not calm me down – oh no – if I ever want to speed up my heart rate, I will grab the next mandala weaving kit.
And this – please don’t laugh – could happen faster as I originally thought ? I decorated the mandala at our entrance and I definitely need three more of them, to create a nice overall look.

I hope you all had a nice week and found time to relax ?

PS: I cheated and bought a second kit to finish my mandala.

Thank you @crosheille for iniciating and @muscara, @shanibeer, @marblely for hosting the #needleworkmonday. If you want to see more beautiful projects with yarn, fabric and most of all needles, follow @needleworkmonday on steemit. Or even better grab your needles and keyboard and join the #needleworkmonday community. You can read more comments on this post on my steemit blog.