Sampler Sunday: New England Style

I made some progress on Whale Hunting this week, although I'm still working on grass. Because I'm tired anyway and the grass is boring to work on, I found myself falling asleep over my needle more than once. But, still, it's progress, especially since the left edge is actually the margin of the picture.
Yesterday was fun; my sister came to visit me at the new house. In the spirit of things, she wore a jacket color-keyed to my kitchen rug! Hi, Sis!

Most of you, like me, have probably looked around that the newest designs from Nashville. I liked a couple of them a lot including Mermaid's Folly (I think it's called) from the new designer, Courtney Collection. But here are two new ones (not part of the Nashville group) by Brenda Keyes that I stumbled on when I went onto Em-Li's site. I love shopping at Em-Li's--a nice lady in North Carolina (who volunteers her age, which is something north of 65) answers the phone in person and takes your order and ships out the samplers to you quite promptly. Anyway, these samplers are in the style of the Plymouth Sampler and Providence, which so many stitchers like and are working on (I'm doing Plymouth myself). It's kind of funny that a designer from the U.K. creates the quintessential New England Sampler. The top one is called "Puritan," and the one on the bottom is called "New England." These pictures are borrowed from Em-Lis's website. The only thing I find jarring is the flame stitching around Puritan. I think I'd substitute something else for all that zig-zagging which gives a nice 3-d effect but makes me dizzy.