I've Started My House Sampler

I really shouldn't have started another WIP before finishing a different one, but I couldn't resist!

Yesterday I bought my fabric, and this past week I've been madly plotting out various houses onto graph paper. I've also looked through every issue I have of the old CS and CC magazines, and I've found some great stuff that I can use for this sampler.

Here's another book that I'm using. I'm actually using the house on the cover's sampler, and many of the motifs inside of it. My son bought it for me for my birthday, in fact. It's written by Jane Greenoff.

Here's a photo of my graph paper scratchings. It's very messy and rather random looking, which is just my style of doing something like this. It's also inaccurate at this point as I've lengthened the individual areas for each house from 60 stitches to 80 stitches. (The width was already at 80 squares.) So the center house is actually going to be stitched further down and to the right from how this paper shows it to be.

In the middle of my sampler is a design from an old CS and CC magazine. I'm going to use the two homes, the tree, the birds, and the flowers below the houses. Here's a photo of the finished design as shown in the magazine. Excuse my terrible flash reflections, please!

I had quite a time finding the right colors to use. I couldn't use the ones called for in the original design as the fabric I chose is too dark for them. I spent a lot of time this morning looking at my DMC color card, and going through my boxes and boxes of floss. I wish they were organized better, but what can I say? The DMC color card helped immensely in that I could find colors in the same color family as in the original design.

I managed to start my project, and just did a few stitches on it. I did a bit of the center branches between the two houses as that's the center of the entire design.
Here's my small start along with the floss colors I will use for the tree, flowers, and birds.

I still have to choose colors for the houses as I'm not sure the suggested ones will work with this fabric color. We'll just have to wait and see! For now, it sure is fun to plot out this project and see where it goes. I may end up changing it completely in the end. My way of viewing it is a "planned chaos" sort of way.