5/27/2006: All done!
It only took 22 months from start to finish for this project. Actual crafting time was closer to 22 hours! Here's the finished runner - I decided the purple side would be the "right" side, as it's reversible but the binding still needed to be hand-tacked to the "back".

This picture shows some of the detail. Which do you see, tumbling blocks or stars?

And this picture shows the reversible nature of the runner. One of the nicer side effects of the fact that the center panel is woven instead of pieced is that nothing actually needed to be quilted on this quilt!

This is definitely a neat pattern. The tumbling blocks pattern itself is a common quilting pattern, but this is entirely woven - and because of that, it's reversible. The bad part was making 45 tubes, each 44" long and 1 1/4" wide. This involved some serious creativity, because I didn't find out until I got to the class (where all of these needed to already be done) that there is a special tube-turner tool to do this with. Figures.

The class was completely taken up with the weaving part. Now I have to baste it to get it off the ever-so-charming bright pink beach towel, sew on some borders, and bind it. Did I mention it's reversible? I can't wait to see what the other side looks like! (It should look exactly the same if I did all the weaving right.)