Sunday Samplers

It was an especially nice Sunday; I finished my homework early and took the afternoon off. We went to Target and bought new bath rugs for the bunnies, then on to Petsmart for cat litter, then to Booth Feeds for timothy hay. We drove through the bright chilly afternoon into Fredericksburg to check out the LNS, purchase a book at the used book store and look at Christmas decor (doesn't it seem EARLY? And yet, I'm somehow ready to decorate even though I'm generally a bah-humbug kind of person about the Christmas season). Then out to eat in a nice seafood restaurant with a real wood-burning fireplace. I ate the shrimp sampler, and now my fingers, despite several washings, smell shrimpy. (I want to do the "six things" meme, but haven't had a chance. Here would be one of the items, though: I hate eating food with my fingers, so I eat fried chicken with a fork and knife, which makes BF laugh. I also eat messy sandwiches with utensils. My shrimp came in their shells, so I had to grasp them to pull them out--worth it, even with the sticky fingers that resulted. The worst meal for that ever was a lovely and very fancy white-tablecloth Chinese restaurant in Vancouver where I ordered some sort of crab claws. You had to break the claw to get at the meat, but the claws were covered in some sort of sticky, slippery buttery sauce. Awful, and while the meat inside was great, it just wasn't worth it, in spite of the nice warm finger bowl.)
Here's some progress on Dot's Garden. Michelle, I'm doing it over two; I think the days of doing an over-one project of this magnitude are over. I'd love to see her new design--I don't think I've seen it anywhere. And when you see her, would you please tell her that her charts are literally the best and clearest charts I've ever worked with. Such a pleasure to see what you're doing!

Here's a sampler I bought on ebay. It's from The Essamplaire, and it's a reproduction of an antique. It's to be stitched on 35 or 40 count with AVAS silk or DMC. Stop me before I do this again. I saw the picture and loved it (sorry for the funny angle; it's the best I could do with evening and the flash) but several things make it more of a challenge (the Essamplaire is similar to Scarlet Letter, if you haven't seen their designs): first, the fact that it's an antique repro. means that the charting and stitches are somewhat more random than precise. There are a lot of stitches other than cross, some of which--herringbone and queen stitch--are a royal pain. Some of the architecture and the animals are in a style that might be considered "naive." And it's hand-charted and therefor a tad more difficult to read. It's the same problem I'm having with the Pets sampler that I started last summer--a beautiful design but harder work than a contemporary interpretation of an historic sampler might have been.

Here are the bunnies playing around the dresser. They like to get under there and tear at the carpet, so we try to block it off and it's great bunny fun to pull back the covers (or in Peaches' case, to zip around the side because she's so small).

I've been so busy that I neglected to thank each of you who gave me an award or tagged me for a meme. I haven't had a chance to follow the directions yet, but I will someday soon--the semester's over in three weeks, and there's the long Thanksgiving weekend also. Happy week, all!