**More WIP Progress**

Thanks for visiting here and thanks for all your comments. Your words mean a lot to me, it's great reading them.

First of all, Happy Mother's Day to all of you celebrating it today. I hope your day is wonderful. We celebrated last night with our children, and we will again tonight with my parents. I received some really great gifts, including a book I've really
wanted that's called "Sublime Stitching". I really should whip out some surface embroidery projects again. They're fun as they go fast compared to this counted stuff! I also got a great book all about backyard birds and how to create a great environment for them. I am truly, as we say in our family, a "bird nerd". My children also bought me some other nice gifts, but the best gift of all was spending time with them and being together.

I have been working on my sampler and have now finished the sixth house, in the top right corner. It's my stitched version of our little house.
Here's how it looked after that house's finish:



Here's a close-up of my stitched version of our actual house (It's not very accurate, just sort of the 'jist' of our house...):




Here's a photo of our 'real' house next to the stitched one:



A better photo of our house: (As you can see, I left off the detached garage in the stitched version.)



After adding our 'real' house, I decided to sit and plot out the next house on graph paper. I wanted to add a home directly below my version of 'our house'.
I first added a really large saltbox house on graph paper, but I decided it was too large for that area. I erased it all and added a smaller two-storied home that I found in a very old issue of Cross Stitch and Country Crafts magazine. I changed the colors just a bit, and worked on it quite a bit yesterday. I first placed it too close to the next-door house, but it was easy to move it to the right as I'd only done a tiny portion before seeing my mistake.
I will add a tree between this house and the house on the left, but I haven't decided yet what sort of tree to add.

Somewhere in the sampler I must include a jacaranda tree. Every year I look forward to seeing them bloom in the spring, and right now they're blooming in our area. There's a large one blooming down our street right now. I guess I should take a picture of it, shouldn't I?

Enjoy your day, and thanks so much for visiting here.