Challenging ...

As I was lucky enough to win the last challenge set by the Wire Goddess Team on Etsy with my Harvest Moon pendant, I got to choose the next theme.  As it's *cough-cough* days till Christmas, I couldn't resist a seasonal theme, so I went with Midwinter.  I had an idea in my head, that I sketched and pinned it to my noticeboard (had to unpin it to photograph it, because the light's already rubbish).

So far so good.  And that was when the challenge began.  I made the window frame first, then got on with the fiddly job of making the fir tree branches.  I always knew the moon would have to be suspended from a thread, so using a piece of Fireline was fine.  But that pesky snow that was meant to nestle so nicely in the window frames ... grrr!  I stitched some lovely little units from seed beads (no mean feat for me, I struggle to follow a pattern, never mind come up with something all by myself!), loved them:

decided they were too large, and would obscure the picture, so I made some smaller ones:

These were just what I wanted - they looked perfect in the window frames.  BUT!  I just could not come up with a way to secure them that didn't look completely hideous.  So, after wasting absolutely ages messing about with them, I decided to just wire some beads on and have done with it.  And here it is:

The snow was not quite what I was aiming for, but I'm reasonably pleased with it - at the very least, I'm pleased it's finished at last!  Maybe I will now be able to track down my mojo that seems to have done a runner while I was wrestling with the snow problem!

When it's available, I'll post a link to the voting page for all the entries - let me tell you, there is some seriously beautiful work in the running already! :)