cblong03 Herbie, Howie, &Henry, Welcome You to Our Home - I belong to a guild that does what we call Brown Bag Booty. You put some fabric/scraps/embellishments/whatever in a bag with a number on it, with your name inside the bag. After we turn them in, the person running it picks names and numbers, matching them up. We all get someone else's bag and have a year to make something for that person, using as much or as little of what we received in the bag. I received a panel with chickens and had no idea what to do with it, as I'm not really a chicken person. I loved what Luann Kessi did with the chickens in the tall grasses, on the bottom of her sunflower quilt, and received her permission to use this as the inspiration for my project. I pieced the background from fabrics in my stash, which were the same colors as were in the panel. I fused the applique and thread painted the dickens out of it (thanks to Melinda Bula for her Renegade Thread Play class), and microstippled the background with Monopoly. I had a terrible time getting my Bernina 820 to sew with the Monopoly, and had the machine in and out of the shop for about a month, trying to get it to work. They finally gave up, after giving me some hints they received from someone who was able to get it to work. However, thanks to internet research (Yahoo Groups), I found the solution and brought it to my dealer. They were thankful for information and now know how to handle the problem for others (rivets on the back of the bobbin case stopper catching the ultra-fine threads --_ they changed it out).