Mandala maker tips

I've been showing you Zendalas that I've made with my new toy. I am not employed by the company but I've been having so much fun that I wanted to show you how this thing works. It's called the Ravensburger Mini Mandala Maker. It's a fun way to create your own mandala with a variety of shapes. And the mini mandala maker works perfectly with a standard zendala tile.

It's a stencil where you trace the shape and then rotate the stencil within the larger circle. There are lots of choices of shapes. Pick one, draw in the outline, rotate the stencil and repeat. You can go for 4 repeats, 8 repeats, or 16 repeats.

This is an extreme closeup to show you that there are arrows on both the large and small circles to help you line up your shapes before drawing them in.

As you can see, the Zendala tiles fit perfectly. You may want to roll up a small piece of tape however and stick it to the base so your tile doesn't shift while you are working. The kit comes with several square sheets of plain paper. You will need to get the Zendala tiles from Zentangle or a Certified Zentangle Teacher,(find one here). Or you can cut your own tiles if you have a good quality paper to use.

The kits come with colored pencils and a marker pen that has a long nib. The examples shown here are ones that have been done with the pen and are waiting for me to tangle on them. Often I prefer to draw the strings in pencil however. I had to hunt around for a mechanical pencil with a long lead however, as regular pencils will not fit in some of the smaller areas on the mandala maker.

These are some completed tiles. If you look back in my older posts you will find larger pictures.

There are also mandala makers that Ravensburger sells that can be used on larger sheets of paper. I've put a link to one of these in the right hand column of this blog. Full disclosure - if you purchase through these links, Amazon will pay me 4%. Not much of a paycheck, but anything helps.

Explore the Amazon site - there are several varieties of mandala makers to choose from.

If you have kids that you need to buy holiday gifts for, I highly recommend these. My granddaughter loves crafts and she is having a ball with hers.