Almost Finished!

Oh wow! I actually can show you something I finished on this post. But first let me tell you about my almost finished quilt that I have been piecing most evenings after I come home from work. I started this quilt a couple of months ago and I posted it here. I have never made a simple or quick quilt. Even though I would love to, my quilts always end up complicated and seem to take for ever to finish! This one is no different. The blocks are just simple 6.5" x 6.5" squares so what is complicated about that? Those star cornerstones are taking me forever to piece. If you look carefully the star points are different sizes. Why did I decide to do that? I don't know. I just thought stars are not the same size. I'm glad I decided to do that because it makes the quilt look a lot nicer! 

If you have read how I started this quilt you would know that most of the fabric came from Sally Cutting, a lovely lady I met on Instragram. Sally used to be a rep for a quilting fabric company and a terrific quilter herself. Because the star cornerstones take a lot more red fabric than I expected, Sally sent me more of them. They are such gorgeous red prints that I found it hard to cut them into small pieces. Thanks again Sally, you are so generous. 

I have finished piecing the quilt top and only have the border to go on next. A lot of the fabric in this quilt has water themes printed on it so I am calling the quilt "Star Fish". I have a reason to get this quilt top finished before the end of June because we are going to New Zealand for a couple of weeks. I need to take this quilt top with me to get it machine quilted by Donna Ward, the fantastic machine quilter that has been quilting all my quilts for over 10 years. 

Here is another water theme printed on this piece. It's a Tsunami wave (great wave). It is a replica of a painting  'The Great Wave' by Hokusai . You will be hearing more about this quilt when I finally get the border on. In order to complete the star cornerstones I need to piece the border with only stars on one end of the sashings. I'm excited because I'm almost done!

Now I can show you a FINISHED project, yeah! I started this in October last year. We went through summer and it was not the weather for weaving, so it sat and sat on the loom until a couple of weeks ago when I found a buyer for my floor loom. So that was a push for me to get my scarf off the loom! 

I hemp stitched the last row and contemplated for a little while before I cut the warp threads off the loom. Not having anybody to ask I felt a bit lost. It had to be done so I took the scissors to it.   

I spun the weft yarns for the scarf and I used commercial yarns I found at an op-shop for the warp threads. To my surprise it didn't need as much weft thread as I thought to complete the scarf. 

It was a great feeling wearing my woven scarf for the first time knowing that I wove every row of this scarf from the beginning to the end. It's magic! I signed up for the next-step weaving workshop starting June 29th. The workshop runs for 16 weeks - one workshop every fortnight. My friend Jeannette in West Wyalong gave me a table loom to take to class. It's not as small as I thought but it will be fine in the back of my car. I am looking forward to this new set of workshops. Weaving is a life-long lesson and you have to keep doing it to remember all the steps. 

Until next time

Nat