Voila ... It’s finally ready to wear. Here is my new tasseled hip scarf.

This is another one of those projects that didn’t take very long to actually make up but a very long time to get around to.

The fabric is intended for dressing up chairs but I kind of liked it when I saw it last summer so I got half a metre. I got the gold tassel fringe at the same time with the idea of making something kind of tribal for dancing. I don’t know how I picked how much fringe to get but it was just enough to go around the bottom of my scarf with two left over tassels (which Zeke stole off the sewing table and chased down the hall) and a bit to turn under at each end.

The final prompting to actually make my scarf came when I discover a skein of acrylic yarn fallen out of my give away pile. It looked like just the right colour for my fabric so I made up a bunch of big tassels (70 turns crosswise around a DVD case if anyone is curious). I think it turned out beautifully. The colours go together well (and work with my usual practice skirt) and the tassels really fly when I move around).

I have quite a bit of the brocade left and I think I will have to make up a vest to match (this will mean having to get some more of the tassel fringe so don’t expect any quick results). I will need to make a choli to wear with it too. The top I’m wearing in the pictures is just a blouse rolled up to tie under my bust - it was the only thing I could find in the right colour. I’ll have to check through my fabric cupboard but I think might have enough of something to make a matching skirt or harem pants as well.

An update on current projects, some are relatively new while others have been on the go for months.



The picture above is of the smaller pieces so far cut for our quilt. The orange pile of triangles make flying geese with the smaller dark blue triangles and fly toward the bright orange squares. All of the geese and squares are cut but due to shear numbers I’m cutting the little blue triangles in batches as I need them.

This is one of the projects which has been going for months ... in fact this has been on the go since last July when we first moved into our current place. My goal is to have the entire quilt top finished and ready for show-and-tell at the June Guild meeting.

... then I’ll have a basting party and get everyone to help me put the sandwich together. Yes ... there will be cookies provided :)

The pattern is from Batik Beauties by Laurie J. Shefrin and is called Mystique of Bali.


We added another row of squares to the bottom and side to make it considerably larger so that it will fit on our bed when finished) the original is a wall or lap quilt). Rob worked out a template in Photoshop so we could play with colours until we found something we liked. After that we just had to redo the math to figure out how much fabric I was going to need.


Picking the actual fabrics was a lot of fun. The batiks have such wonderfully saturated colour and there were many to choose from. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to make up this quilt so we decided to get all of the quilt top fabrics at once so that we didn’t risk not being able to match a fabric when I needed it.

These are the colours we ended up with. The blue grey is the background throughout the quilt. The textured black is the narrow border and the striped teal is the large border.


Progress so far ... I have one hundred and ninety geese finished and only sixty left to go (and they go pretty quickly when I sit down to it). The geese are the smallest pieces of the quilt so progress seems slowest while I am working on them.




I’m happy to say that my mesh triangle could now pass for a shoulder shawl and not a kerchief. I’ve still got a long way to go though - another one and a half balls of yarn before I start the top border pattern.

... and I was worried my smaller gauge wouldn’t produce a large shawl!



I worked up the swatch for my pattern last weekend and, to my great surprise, it was perfect. **This never happens.** Seventeen stitches to four inches - what a funny number.


I’ve been working on it a little each evening this week and I now have just over four inches of hat finished. I’ll be able to start the decreases for the crown soon and when I’m done that I can try it on! This is the first thing I’ve done in seed stitch and I really like the way it looks.


I love the feel of this yarn. It is Mission Falls 1824 Merino. If feels beautifully soft and squashy and is even washable!



I started renovating the coffee table on Labour Day weekend ... it’s still on the go. It turns out the paint takes longer to dry than I had anticipated and I don’t like painting in the dark - it’s to difficult to see where you’ve missed.


Once I’m finished painting (I’ve got about two coats left) I’ve got some fancy shelf brackets to secure the legs to the table top. The table is a bit rickety and I am hoping the shelf brackets will give it more stability along with looking interesting.

I made myself a new Hallowe’en costume this year. Twelfth century instead of my usual nineteenth.

The costume has two parts - an underdress (chemise) and an overdress. The underdress is plain muslin with a high neckline and close-fitting, extra long sleeves that cover my wrists. The overdress is dark green cotton with lighter green cotton lining in the sleeves which are close around the biceps but flare dramatically from the elbow. There was also a cloak of wine coloured velour stuff. It looked pretty cool but was kind of annoying as the velour was stretchy and didn’t want to fit together with the lining fabric very well.

The back of each dress laces closed. The pattern instructions used cross-lacing (like a corset) but since I am a bit of an armchair scholar for history and fashion I used spiral lacing. This also required less actual lace which was handy.



The dress was pretty easy to sew for the most part. The only really tricky thing was putting in the under arm gussets but I decided to do it by hand so I didn’t have to wrestle with the machine. I did come across a few weird things in the pattern instructions. First the neck line is supposed to be gathered - this works with the lower neckline where it accounts for a bit of bust space but on the higher neckline the pattern designer seems to have forgotten that most people have a collar bone. I ended up picking out the neckline for my underdress and re-sewing it without the gathers - it fit perfectly. The second strange instruction was to under-stich the lining in the sleeves of the over dress. This seemed perfectly normal until I actually got to that step and realized it would be next to impossible to under-stich the edge of the sleeve through the space at the arm hole. Apparently no one tried out the instructions after they were written.

I asked Rob to take a few pictures of me in my costume when we got home from work. Zeke was happy to join me and can be seen here in his favourite position looking over my shoulder.