Hello Dalai (Lama)!

Stephanie's Pocket of Quotes book is already bursting at the spine!  Just about everyone that has gone before me has created a pocket and filled it with quotes for her book.  I wanted to do something just a little bit different...

I am not a big quote collector, but I did recall having seen the Dalai Lama's Instructions for Life not too long ago.  Those were sort of quotes, right?  And there were 20 of them.  How to create a pocket for the Dalai Lama's instructions?  Does his robe have a pocket?  And if so, what would it look like?

Then it hit me.  I had seen prayer flags.  I dug out the ones I had picked up at a local thrift shop to study how they were made.  To my surprise, these were hand made in Tibet.  Perfect!  I needed to create my own set of prayer flags that would be big enough to display all 20 Instructions for Life.

I used handmade mulberry paper cut into 3" x 3.5" squares.  I printed out the 20 instructions onto red tissue paper using the freezer paper technique (that was a whole other story in itself!) and then affixed 4 instructions per flag.  I attached the 5 flags to a piece of string.  Now what?

Next I found a beautiful illustration of his Holiness and decided to cut out the outline of his body and use that as a "pocket" to house the 5 prayer flags containing the Instructions for Life.  The only thing left to be done was to figure out a background.  When I saw a picture of the Tibetan flag (see a theme here?) I knew I could re-create the flag using red, blue and yellow markers.  This is how my spread in Stephanie's book came out.

I have to thank my husband who affectionately titled to my page as "Hello Dalai!"