Today’s contribution to the Mandalas for Marinke project is a set of two beautiful crochet mandalas along with a handful of adorable yarn poms. This contribution comes from Steph of My Own Beautiful Mind.
These two crochet mandalas are made using the Picots crochet mandala pattern from Simply Crochet Issue 7. Each is made using a sunny yellow and white combination; one also has a great shade of light blue incorporated. I love them both! I immediately thought of sunny skies when I saw them and it turns out that’s what Steph was thinking, too, which I learned from her blog post, where she wrote:
“I wanted them to be about blue skies and sunshine. To focus on the light, that was Wink.
I’m probably projecting. Where I live, I get hardly any sun – or see the sky much.”
Those words reminded me of a post from Wink from May 2013, when she wrote:
“Does the sun shine where you are? (and if it does, could you maybe send a little this way?)”
Steph added lovely tags to each of them, which, as you can see she has dedicated to Wink and her family. For Wink she wrote:
“One of the sweetest flowers that ever grew. Rest in Peace.”
For Wink’s family she adds:
“She was loved, she will be missed. Know that her work will shine brightly for generations to come. My condolences.”
The front of each tag reads “remember”.
Steph shares that she loves to crochet while watching love, loves to read and drink coffee and enjoys Pinterest as her favorite social media site. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter. And I also recommend reading her sweet blog post from when she started these mandalas.
I love this set of cozy poms that came with the contribution. Steph used them as packing material, which I love, but I don’t want them to go to waste and am going to find some kind of interesting way to arrange them into their own little mandala pattern for the exhibit.
For today’s depression awareness portion of the post, I wanted to address something that comes up a lot when I talk with people about depression, which is the question of why some people who go through identical circumstances experience depression and other people don’t. The answer is complex, and it begins with the fact that we don’t actually really know the reason. What we do know is that there are some factors that make people more likely than others to experience depression.
Nancy Schimelpfening, depression expert for About.com, shares 10 such factors:
- Neurotransmitter issues
- Genetics
- Hormones
- Early trauma
- Drugs including prescription medications
- Pain and illness
- Grief and loss
- Personality traits
- Interpersonal conflicts
- Life stressors
These things can compound one another, meaning that someone who experienced early trauma and also just had huge hormonal changes due to something like pregnancy may react to a life stressor, pain or illness with depression, whereas someone without those contributing factors may or may not respond that way. These aren’t “causes” of depression per se, but they can be factors that influence the risk of experiencing depression.
