Another weekly update on my current Works in Progress 🙂

Sandy Orton Summer Sampler

Talk about a throwback WIP! To give some background, let’s flash back to a post I wrote in 2010 when I was still living in MS:

I have written before about my beloved grandmother’s cross-stitch, her only “win” ever, which now resides in my bedroom.  Several months after my grandmother passed away, we received another piece of her sweet spirit, the outcome of her will.  With five children, ten grandchildren, and more than nineteen great-grandchildren, recognition was the last thing on my mind.  But my sweet grandmother left every grandchild $100, to spend on something unnecessary.  That was her stipulation.

I knew right away what I wanted, and in my mind it would somehow be dedicated to her.  I had long coveted the four Season Samplers by Sandy Orton, but just couldn’t justify purchasing them on my college student budget.  Now, I have them.

They will definitely take months, probably years, to complete because of my limited time and attention span.  But I look at them as one tiny way I can honor my grandmother and remind myself that it does not take grand ambitions or actions to be remembered; a loving person will always be remembered by her most important legacy: family.  And even though I am a long way from the kind of life my grandmother lived, I do hope I will be loved the way she was.  She really was the center of my family’s universe, and I miss her a lot.

So if, when, I begin one of these samplers, I’ll keep you updated on my progress!

That was seven years ago… and progress never happened. I stopped cross stitching for a couple years, and when I started again I mostly worked on smaller projects. These samplers were always in the back of my mind, and I carried the kits with me from Mississippi to California to Tennessee. They’re not exactly my style anymore, but they’ll always remind me of my sweet Grandmother… especially those “Irish eyes” in the Spring sampler.

I don’t know what sparked it, exactly, but recently I was in the mood to start a big project; time is fleeting, in a year I’ll wish I had started today, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and all that jazz. At one point I had opened the Summer sampler and organized the hanks and even stitched a couple rows, so that’s where I started. I’m so used to digital patterns that I copied my quilt guild friend Stefanie’s idea of scanning the paper patterns so I can view them as digital files on my iPad (and zoom in!), which helps a lot.

This will be certainly be a long-term WIP to work on in between other projects, so I still expect it to take a long, long time to finish even one sampler. I don’t usually work on such big projects but hopefully that mindset will help me make keep at it… and actually have some progress to share!

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Sweet as Pie Cross Stitch

The June pie was just released: Key Lime pie (yum!). The pie is stitching up quickly and I’ll continue working on the border until the end of the month. Maybe I’ll even utilize the included recipe since a certain pie-loving father of mine is visiting next week!

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And that’s about it!