Current and Future Challenges

I'm continuing to participate in the Holiday Paint Out on Facebook.  This week's challenge is the word "JOY", and  I'm still trying to think of a way to represent it in a painting.

For next year, I've joined Take a Stitch Tuesday (TAST) which will be a year long challenge devoted to learning and using different embroidery stitches, as well as seeing what varieties we can come up with.  It's my hope that I'll not only learn from the challenge, but it will also inspire me to finish a large crazy quilt that I have in progress.  The crazy quilt blocks are finished, but need to be put together into a quilt, which is not as easy as it sounds, because they are very heavily embellished, and I know it all needs to be stabilized with more than the usual tacking stitches that crazy quilters use.  I'm thinking I need to be untraditional with it, using batting and hand quilting to hold it all together (machine stitching just wouldn't be right, and there is no way a machine could quilt the blocks anyways)!