Sampler Houses

I noticed when I was shooting Christmas pictures last week how many houses in Fredericksburg would serve as perfect models for sampler houses. I'd love to see the inside of this place--it looks somewhat unimproved, in possibly a good way. Or at least unembellished. There is a simple wreath on the door--no bells and whistles or bows, which makes me think that whoever lives there is a minimalist. Note the really nice weather vane on the house next door. Also note that the unwhite-washed bricks are the "weather" side of the house--we get most of our weather from the west, and the whitewash on that side may have been scrubbed off. I have a sampler in my WIPs that has a house that has bricks like this.

It looks a little like the house in "Meeting House Hill" (Carriage House Samplings). There's an interesting aspect to this sampler: some (the grass, the sea and larger items) is charted over 2, and some (the houses, sailboats) is over 1. I'm doing it on 32 count so I can see it.

I took this out of my stash. I'm fond of the simplicity of it (and the fact that it's a fairly quick stitch). This is a Sheepish Designs chart (also done over 32 count). I'd like to do a series of these, and although the designer has retired, there are still a lot of them around. I'd like to do 8 or 10 and frame them all the same and hang them in a row along one of our hallways. I don't like the flatness of the DMC for the large-ish blocks of color, so I've substituted GAST from my stash. The colors are a bit different, but I think that's ok.


Here's some progress on Dorothy's Garden: I managed to stitch most of the big flowers in the urn motif during these last few days.

Here's Buckaroo napping alongside some of my kitted up projects. I did a lot of shopping from my own stash while getting organized. I cannibalized HOHRH to kit up two other projects. At $4 a skein or so, it doesn't make sense to have all that AVAS just sitting there in a bag. If I get around to finishing HOHRH, I'll buy it again, block by block if necessary; I'd like to think of it as a just-in-time-inventory system. Some of the designs I've kitted up this weekend include Janet Gibson (in the bag--NPI silks that I've gathered as I've gone along) and True Virtue (the loose skeins of AVAS). I also went to the library and got a half-dozen books I've been wanting to read. I work just 3 days this week and don't start new courses at school until the first week of February. You'll probably be relieved that there aren't so many pictures and I'm not so long-winded when I get back to "normal!"

"Don't you guys want to do something other than nap? I'm booooored."