Wednesday 8 April 2015

2 mangoes, 1 stone

Orey kallu le erandu maanga! I know this will bring a wistful smile to Tamil speaking readers as they fondly remember their childhood summers spent pelting stones at unripe mangoes on the neighbours' trees in an effort to knock them down for a bitter-sour-sweet treat with equally mischevious friends ! The line when transliterated means knocking down 2 mangoes with 1 stone, meaning getting two jobs done with the effort of one. Which is exactly what I have done with this block.

This is a block, the Fractal Mandala, I tested for the insanely beautiful MMDQ BOM (Madhu Mathur-Desi Quilters Block of the month) series, designed by the beautifully insane Madhu, a dear friend and quilter par excellence. You can find complete instructions to the other blocks here.

It involved a lot of paper piecing, like all the other blocks in the series, but the end result is striking. I chose a soft palette as these are not my usual colours and I did want to do something different. It so happens that we are having a medallion quilt swap on my FB group 'Desi Quilters ' and this block would be perfect to pass off as a medallion center with a 4 sided border ! So there, 2 mangoes with 1 stone, see ?!





Apart from a half a dozen points that don't match, I am pretty pleased with it. Here it is under different lighting...

Actually this isn't the first time I've done this whole 2 for 1 thingy. One other MMDQ block, the Evening around the Pond, that I made earlier got converted to this cushion cover for another swap :-)


 


And these are the 2 other MMDQ blocks I have made so far..the gorgeous Dahlia and its ribbon version..



Do hop over to Madhu's blog 'Betukbandi' for a lot more eye candy. I shall go and enjoy my mangoes :-)




8 comments:

  1. Clever Tina:)) Bu I am in a fix:((

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  2. Thank you for all the nice things you said, Tina! Btw, I like it even better in the other light!

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  3. So happy and Surprise to see how cleverly you use maths in real time.

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  4. So pretty in the pastel colours! We have a similar expression but not so nice:

    Killing two birds with one stone (I think it refers to crows eating corn in the field) . We use it, but would often just say "ahh, *two* birds" or maybe "two birds one stone" as we would never actually throw stones at birds!

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