10,000 Projects Finished One By One

   Hello! It's been quite a long time since I've posted on this blog. Almost five years, actually. It is time for a new focus. My original idea was to post one unfinished project each day, but that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. I've found that in this life, you get what you think about; you get what you focus on, and I was focused on the UFO (unfinished object) status of all my creations. Now, I'm not going to say that I never finish anything, because that is simply not the truth; but I did find that my start:completion ratio was climbing. If any of you have read my first post from late-2012, you may remember that my premise was if I posted one UFO (unfinished object) each day, it would take 27.4 years to get to 10,000. My new premise is to present only completed projects, but I don't think I'll go for posting every day; that would be simply nutty, or at least might drive me nutty. I will say that I'm still into many different types of projects; lately I've been very much into crochet and also lace knitting. There's a lot of painting going on in my life, but not the artist type on canvas; this has to do with fixing up our little "palace," humble as it may be.
   Today I will share a project I completed last summer that ranks up there as one of my all-time favorites. The pattern is Mandala Madness by a wonderful woman named Helen Shrimpton (Check out her website: www.crystalsandcrochet.com). I've been crocheting on and off since I was six years old, which was a looooooong time ago, but this project really helped me to enhance my skills. The various stitch combinations were so interesting that I thoroughly enjoyed the entire four months it took to complete.  So here it is:

Actually, that's what it looked like when I started writing this way back a few months ago.



Here's what it looks like now, after I added the Mandala Madness Squared addition: