Twelfth of Twelve

I had so many ideas for this piece—too many really. I couldn't settle on one for a long time. One of my ideas was to show a glass slipper lying on pavement, next to a pumpkin. Would you have understood that one? It would represent the events of TWELVE o'clock, midnight, in the story of Cinderella when she dashed away, losing one of her slippers and her coach turned back into a pumpkin. My enthusiasm for that idea faded as I pictured what my piece might look like—a child's book illustration that we have all seen all too many times. I really did like the idea of a dozen eggs in a big bowl, all in pale egg-y hues. Maybe I'll do that someday. I thought of a clock face with the numbers 1 to 12 and that led me to my final plan.

A number of years ago I made a series of quilts with mandala themes. Classic Tibetan mandala designs are circles that are typically divided into 8 segments, but for reasons I don't even know, I created all my mandala designs, starting with a circle divided into 12 segments. Here is one of those quilts, called Earth, Moon and Sun. It was published in a book of mandala quilts called Within Sacred Circles.

When I remembered this, I also remembered that I learned that mandalas symbolize wholeness. This twelfth quilt, in a series of twelve would complete the group, making it whole. Once I hit on that idea it occurred to me that the parts that make up the mandala design should be elements taken from each of the previous 11 quilts. If you look carefully, you will see elements from each of the 11 pieces I made as my part of the Twelve by Twelve project.

I used Photoshop to isolate elements from the 11 quilts, then began moving them around on a 30° wedge, drawn in Illustrator and imported into Photoshop. When I had a design I liked, I copied and rotated the wedge to form a circle. Every other section was flipped so the sections seem to be reflections of each other, much like the images seen in a kaleidascope. Then I printed twelve individual wedges on treated fabric, which I put together on a fabric background. The green circle in the center is the green ball that appears in my "chair" piece and is the only element that is not repeated twelve times.

I am very disappointed in the quality of the prints that I got from my printer. The color looked so rich on my monitor that I was very excited about this piece. The resulting color is a letdown, though I still like the design. Below is my Photoshop design that I printed from.

I actually love it most, from across the room, where you can't see what the individual elements are.