Yellow Floral Mandala Quilts...finished!

What an interesting exercise this turned out to be.
The same set of photographs produced two very different quilts. The silk satin and the silk broadcloth gave me such varied prints. The former had sharper edges and more saturated colors than the later.
But because the broadcloth print was so indistinct, I decided to play with it awhile (try and salvage it, to be honest). This led to some pleasant discoveries.
I was primed to experiment after reading Sharon B's post of May 13th about how she builds up her imagery in layers, no matter what medium she is working in. I figured this indistinct and rather washed out version of the yellow mandala quilt needed some development, one "layer" at a time.
It ended up with several:
--the photo and print
--the pastel "enhancement" of the print on fabric
--the close machine quilting
--hand embroidery with hand-dyed silk floss and silk ribbon, lace, and a few (just a few) beads
--Prismacolor pencil work directly on the fabric to bring out the colors a little more, and even to make some of the embroidery stand out a bit more.

I have never put a lot of handwork on a quilted surface. I don't see it done that often in a way that appeals to me...but beyond that, I was hung up on not "messing up the back" of the quilt with all those extra knots and threads that come from embroidery. This was a result of entering too many quilts in too many "sane" quilt shows.
Finally I just said "the heck with it" and messed up my back anyway. I wasn't going to bury all those knots and threads, that's for sure.

Really, this felt good. Eventually I just used the "envelope" method to finish this quilt, so now nothing shows on the back at all.

Heavily quilted, close-weave cotton--referring to the backing here--isn't that much fun to stitch through, but in spite of myself I like the look of this.

Here's a little detail. If you look closely you can see the green pencil marks I made between the light green fly stitches...just to give more contrast. A neat new little trick....

Here is the silk satin mandala, just quilted in the ditch, which took all of ten minutes. The photographs of the flowers do all the work, and pretty nicely too, in this one, but the other one gave me more to think about.....