Introduction: The use of colored thread as a medium in art has become the source of a whole new wave of craft innovations. This booklet deals with the most dramatic of these recent applications, known as Mandala geometric thread design. "Mandala" is an ancient word from the Far East, used in the context of transcendental meditation. It is vague in meaning, but refers to a visual pattern which draws a viewer's attention into its center. The original mandalas were great paintings of objects arranged in circles, the effect of this symmetry being to minimize the influence of unwanted distraction. This same function is inherent in the patterns shown throughout these pages and is why the name "Mandala" was chosen to identify this new artform. The unique feature of Mandala geometric thread design lies in the fact that each pattern is a set of points, called vertices, located very carefully on a closed conic curve such as a circle or an ellipse. The vertices are then connected with straight lines according to a strict numerical progression, resulting in an impressive finished thread design. The formation of curved lines from straight ones can be understood by considering the idea of a tangent. In the case of a circle, any straight line which touches the circle at exactly one point is called a tangent. A tangent can be drawn at any point along any arbitrary curve as long as the curve is smooth (doesn't have an end point or sharp corner) at that point, this means that any curve may be thought of as the intersection of infinitely many tangents. From this geometrical idea, it is quite natural to see how curved patterns can be defined with suitably arranged straight lines. Let us look at two fairly simple illustrations of this proposal. In the first drawing below, you see a right angle whose legs have been equally subdivided. When straight lines are drawn between the resulting points as shown, a hyperbolic curve is formed. The third drawing shows a circle with equidistant points located around its circumference. If a set of equally long lines segments is used to connect these points, a small circle appears, defined by tangents! Note that it is the placement of the outside points, called vertices or generating points, which determines the contour of the resulting curve.  Notice in the circular example that the generating points could have been connected with a different set of lines. The number of points skipped between connected points could have been four, or six, as well as five. Consider the effect of superimposing different straight line combinations drawn from the same set of generating points, each defining a different inner circle. The separate combinations then become circular Mandala layers.    Blue circle with omitted layers

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