December

Frequent posting is aparently not my forte. But fear not, a new block of carefully proofread text has arisen from the depths.  And since I last posted, something great has happened:

I won!  With a total of 50034 words, I completed a barebones novella.  It's going to need a lot of work, still, before I could even consider letting someone else see it, but hey, I finished NaNoWriMo for the first time in four years.

What's more, today I sent off the last of my Christmas cards, which is momentous since I started working on them in October.  After making about twenty cards, I sent them off to friends and family, keeping one for myself, and giving one to the Paper Source for their card contest, which I may have mentioned previously.  The two people who were there when I submitted it were pleased with my card, although I don't think they would have let themselves come across as anything but impressed.  I meant to mention that the vellum paper is supposed to represent parchment paper, but it didn't occur to me until afterwards that it might not be obvious.  In any case, I thought that idea was brilliant.

Since Saturday, I have found myself to be in temporary possession of a sewing machine. My ultimate goal is to create a Christmas advent calendar, which I'm working on for sure, but this is what I spent most of my Sunday doing:

A tea cozy! I followed a pattern I found on the Rusty Bobbin, which worked extremely well.  Materials I used:
 - iredescent flocked taffeta (fabric.com)
 - cotton batting (also from fabric.com)
 - beige broadcloth for lining, which I found in the remnants bin at Jo-Ann (I'm finding lots of useful bits of fabric in there)
 - baby blue piping

I only bought half a yard of the taffeta, and I have bunch left over, so I'll have to make another tea cozy for the next teapot I want to get (a smaller pot for just me).  The one pictured above also fits right over my glass tea kettle, so I might make a third to cover that and keep it clean.

So far in my advent calendar, I've made up to 10 bags.  The idea is to have 25 little cloth baggies that we can fill with goodies, and put up one every day.  This project is on hiatus until I can get new thread, however, since I've just about run out.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing--bags 1 through 10 have been made using blue thread on white cloth.  I don't think anybody is going to complain.  I should be done before Christmas, at least, but we'll see about my speediness in posting about it on here.