When we get on a roll, we go with it. That's been the case lately with all of our flower petal and contact paper suncatchers. We've made nature suncatchers in the past, but have never quite gotten into it as much as this past month with the flower petal art box, the flower stained glass door, and subsequent flower mandalas. And we're still going strong!
This time I cut some frames out of paper plates (the centers will be used for spin art) and then cut circles from contact paper to fit over the opening (overlapping the paper plate by about half an inch).
Maia and I arranged flower petals, petal pieces, and leaves in outwardly concentric designs on the contact paper to create our mandalas. (Daphne worked on one, too, but mostly just explored the sticky nature of the contact paper and eventually crumpled the whole thing up.) When our mandalas were finished, we added another circle of contact paper over the top to protect and hold it.
We hung Maia's (for me) in the living room window and mine (for Maia) in her bedroom window. I love how well these circular frames hold the mandalas, perfectly, in the center! And I also love some of the meaning that has historically been connected with mandalas.
Here's a description (found on The Mandala Project's website) that I especially like:
The word "mandala" is from the classical Indian language of Sanskrit. Loosely translated to mean "circle," a mandala is far more than a simple shape. It represents wholeness, and can be seen as a model for the organizational structure of life itself--a cosmic diagram that reminds us of our relation to the infinite, the world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds.
There are so many examples of mandalas found in nature: daisies, oranges, onions, the iris of the eye, starfish, and snowflakes just to name a few.
Not to get to woo-woo on you or anything, but I'd love to learn more about mandalas. More about them as an art form. More about the meanings associated with them. More about how they've been used in cultures around the world.
Have you ever made a mandala, yourself or with your kids?
