She Seeketh Wool and Flax Worketh Willingly With her Handth: Thampler Thunday

This is the sampler for today: "She Seeketh Wool" from Purely Samplers of Homespun Elegance. It's likely a quick stitch, and it has some added interest in the form of little buttons in the tree and a blob of wool roving (sold sometimes in yarn shops, online or as doll's hair for doll crafters) for the sheep's body. The verse has me lisping though--not sure I could look at it day after day without doing the lispy thing mentally--kind of like your tongue playing with a loose or jagged tooth--so I'm setting it aside for now.

I didn't work as much as I'd have liked this week on Whale Hunting, but I did make some progress, working on house and tree details. I'm anxious to move on; with the completion of this section, the sampler will be only half done. Fortunately I have the four-day weekend coming up, and other than trying to remember not to burn the Thanksgiving meal, I have no obligations other than to stitch and stitch some more. I'd so much rather buy the meal prepared by Whole Foods to just pop in the oven, but I won't get away with that--I can't express what a dismal waste of time and energy I find cooking to be. Unfortunately, BF's mother always worked herself into a frenzy, baking multiple pies, two kinds of stuffing, and baking both a country ham AND a turkey, so BF is wistful about his mom's meal and while I'm not foolish enough to reproduce it, I at least try to make it special. (The country ham thing, by the way, is a southern thing this Yankee had to get used to. In fact, I had a BF a while back whose family slaughtered a hog the week before Thanksgiving so that we stood around elbow deep in sausage-making ingredients with a hand-crank meat grinder piloted by yours truly so that we could stuff the turkey with sausage dressing, making what came to be known in my mind as the grease bomb turkey.) Under the circumstances, although I never much appreciated my X-MIL, I still laugh when I remember the satisfaction in her voice, some time after her husband died, when she announced that the kitchen was forever more closed). Two years ago I got my wish to have Thanksgiving at a huge Dim Sum place, where they motor by with carts loaded with different tidbits: Chinese buns stuffed with barbecue, pork dumplings with garlic sauce, chicken wings stuffed with crab, pieces of duck with dipping sauce. I'm the only one who really enjoyed it, I think--everyone else thought it was weird and mourned their dried-out turkey and sticky sweet potato and marshmallow concoction. Jeez--a trip down memory lane with 2 boyfriends and an X-DH in one paragraph--quite the checkered past--hopefully you all don't think I'm a thlut. Every single one of them wanted a homemade Thanksgiving dinner, though. One of my friends is entering into her third marriage (at 60!); remind me to ask her if she served all her husbands the same meal, giving a new definition to the word "tradition." I can report that I have tried to vary mine!

And of course, as usual, we devoted some time to looking at houses yesterday. We looked at a new model home that blew us away. Among other things, it featured a fully built-out and staged "hobby room." The builder has it as an option for some ridiculous amount of money. It's a room on the lower level with built-in shelves, cabinets and a work table. The designer had placed fabric, a sewing machine and craft books around the room to suggest the happy crafter's life. I'm a sucker--I was so enthused that I didn't even remember to take a picture. It doesn't make sense, of course, because aside from the cost, what every crafter needs is abundant natural light, not an interior room by the furnace and storage rooms as if sewing, stitching and crafting were a dark and shameful secret. I think I would just seize one of the bedrooms and turn it into Stitcher Central. Still, it was a lot of fun to see it set up, and the design of the room was worth copying.