And the winner is . . . . .

Don't you just hate it when they drag this out on tv shows then break for a commercial?  Very annoying.

Here's one of the Halloween ornaments finished that I want to show you.  I think it turned out kinda cute:

I have another one almost done but it needs a couple little finishing touches before the unveiling.  Plus I finished stitching the Summer Holiday Exchange piece but I can't show that one until the exchange is over. It was an interesting piece to stitch.  The blended threads were fun to do.  I'm still thinking about the actual finishing of it.  I like the pattern so much that I started stitching one for myself.  I was going to wait and do it later but I figured it would never get done if I waited.

And that's the end of our commercial break, now back to the program in progress . . . . .

I wasn't sure how to go about picking the winner at first but after some thought, here's what I did. There were 23 people interested in Quaker Moon.  I gave them each a number 1 through 23.  Then using some old Dungeon's and Dragon's dice back from my college days, I took a 20-sided and 6-sided dice, rolled them together, totaled the roll (6+5=11) and subtracted 3 to give me 8.  Can you tell I work with numbers all day??

Anyway, the winner of the Quaker Moon traveling pattern is Giovanna.  Congratulations!  I will email you for your address after I finish here.

This was fun and brought back some memories.  First, digging out my old dice reminded me of all the good times I had playing D&D with my friends in college.  We would get together almost every weekend, drink beer, eat junk food and have a blast killing orcs and other nasty imaginary creatures in our pursuit of wonderful imaginary wealth.  Second, the bowling case I keep my dice in is OLD.  My grandmother gave it to me when I was probably in 2nd or 3rd grade, making it about 45 years old.  She used to belong to a bowling league and either won or bought the little leather case and gave it to me.  It came filled with some of the nastiest smelling hard candy, which I promptly threw away.  I can still smell it - yuck! - being made of leather, that scent lingered with the case forever.  It was the perfect size for my jacks and ball (do they still make jacks??) and stored them until I needed something for my D&D dice.  And then, of course, the jacks remind me of the summer my brother broke his leg playing baseball.  He couldn't do much that summer but he became a super jack player sitting on our kitchen floor.

Isn't it funny how memories are triggered?

And how odd am I for keeping a little leather case?

I'm glad I did -- this was fun :)