…and as the life goes on, the giveaway winner too! 🙂

This is the season with so many additional joys in our lives, we count our blessings a bit more carefully, we think of distant friends, we cook, decorate, shop, wrap presents….and then last Friday happened.
 I just can’t stop thinking about it all and whatever I go on to do in this busy holiday season, I feel somehow guilty that I am doing it…I feel incredibly blessed to have my family and so very helpless in effort to DO something for those families in Newtown that feel that unimaginable pain now. I know all of you share these feelings too and here is few good links with information:

Help for victims of Sandy Hook Shooting

And something closer to our, stitching hearts, here is a blog entry of creative Maureen Cracknell of Maureen Cracknell Handmade with instructions and information on making pillowcases for kinds in Sandy Hook Elementary. Hope to finish and mail mine by tomorrow.

But as so many said on TV during these few sad days – life must and will go on and we can not let these events define us – lets honor all those amazing lives with getting to be better society. 

It was the weekend to decorate the tree in our neck of the woods. We have this little family tradition: my obsession and job is lots and lots of lights on the tree  – takes me about 3 hours to wrap it nicely with total of about 8-9 strings of lights – then we all decorate it (kids doing the most part) and at the end dad gets to put the top on. With our children being all grown, I feel so grateful and lucky that they still indulge me with making an effort to all gather and do this, continuing the tradition. This year we even had couple of old friends joining – such fun! Here they are, caught by me in the midst of hard work:

 

And here we are:

Camera wasn’t quite cooperating this time (must have set something wrong..) and pictures were a bit blurry, but from left to right it is: our wonderful, beautiful daughter-in-law Lauren with her husband, our oldest son, Stefan, the youngest son Vuk, the love of my life, my husband (probably caught talking but we all agreed he looks so cute!), me and our amazing, beautiful daughter, Jelena. Did I mentioned how lucky and blessed I am? 🙂

Speaking of lucky – yes, it is also a time to see who is the lucky giveaway winner, isn’t it?
First – I have to express my deep and profound gratitude for all of you visiting my blog, following and leaving all these beautiful comments! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! I feel really humbled that you find the time in your busy lives to visit and get in touch and I hope and promise to keep sharing all my creative adventures with you! Some of you said how very generous is my giveaway – thank you! – but I also want to let you know that I am only sharing the abundance:

 See all this? That would be a bin full of Cherrywood fabrics, three different, beautiful shades of gray yardage and in front – not one or two, but THREE new grab bags I just got!! 

How can not share some! 🙂

By the way – I am still dreaming and doodling potential ideas and projects to do with these…stay tuned for results!

So just to remind you and just because I took a better photo, here is the giveaway Grab bag with ALL the fabric showing:

    And the Random Number Generator says that lucky winner is:

COMMENT NUMBER 188: Mary Marcotte!!!!!