A Winner and Whatnot

Say good-bye. The time has come to announce the last winner of the NewFO Challenge. Mr. Random has spoken, and he has selected:

#10--Vivian!

Congratulations, Vivian. I've sent you an email, so check your inbox.

Ordinarily now would be the time for me to tell you not to despair if you didn't win, but this time, I'll forgo that cheery advice and tell you to go ahead and cry. The NewFO Challenge bites the dust for the last time. I'd be lying if I said I had no plans to bring it back. Actually, I don't, but you never know. I actually have some other ideas about games for the blog, but 2015 is going to be the year of catching up.

That said, I've been luxuriating in the freedom of a day at home this morning. I spent a couple of hours doing embroidery. The Gingerbread Square piece is about 1/3 of the way finished now. As long as I was unrolling it to move my hoop, I decided to iron it and let you see.

It's a fun piece to work on with all that color. Given that I'm going back to the gun metal gray of Vintage Tin when it's finished, I'm basking in the color while I can. And now it's hooped and rolled and ready for me to continue.

A couple of days ago, I gave you a peek at my quilt for the January doll quilt swap. After giving it some rational thought, I decided it was okay to show you the whole thing. For one thing, I'm reasonably certain my partner doesn't read my blog, but also, this quilt kills two birds with one stone because I'm also using it as my piece for the first project in Season 6 of Project Quilting.

Even though it's Season 6, it's only my first time participating. The theme of "Trees" caught my eye since I had already decided to make a tree quilt as my quilt for the doll quilt swap. The theme for the doll quilt swap this month is "A Good Book". After giving it some thought, I decided to use A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson as my inspiration. If you've never read any of Bill Bryson's books, you are missing out on some seriously entertaining reads. A Walk in the Woods is one of my favorites. So all of that to introduce my little 16 x 16 quilt, which is sort of a take off on a little quilt created by Jacey of Jaceycraft. You can find her tutorial right here. 

This has been on my list of quilts to make for a long time, and mine ended up looking quite different from hers. It's also a take off on my own Shine On quilt since I added the moon up there on the left.

That background fabric is some my daughter-in-law gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago. This seemed like a good time to use it. Yesterday I sandwiched it and let my applique top-stitching serve as the quilting. Here's how it looks from the back.

The moon is pebbled to give it some craters. I used a pearlescence thread that would have driven me crazy if I'd had much to stitch. It was a cheapy thread, and it kept unraveling and causing me grief. We got 'er done, but not without a little bit of swearing thrown in. This being such a small quilt, I decided to go ahead and do the whole thing on Big Bertha, but I covered her ears before I started swearing.

Then this morning I used an image from the book cover to create the label. I'll print that off in a little while.

Now that the NewFO Challenge has ended, of course the first thing I'm going to do today is start a new project. You knew I couldn't resist, didn't you? It's actually a small little thing...a gift for a friend, and so I won't be able to show it to you right away. In any case, I might actually finish the whole thing today. With that as my goal, it's time to get sewing. I need to fill the bird feeders, and I have a couple of housekeeping chores on my to-do list.

What are you doing today?