Adding Garden Elements and Disorganized Floss

I decided that instead of stitching and deciding upon the final house I would instead add some garden elements around this lonely house:



For a better look, it's the one in the middle row, on the far right:


Doesn't it look bare around it?

So I sat down and pulled out lots of books and patterns, and came up with this:



I've added a fence, some flowers, a dog, a cat, and several trees. Most of the elements came from this June's Just Cross Stitch Magazine, but I had to scale it down considerably. I changed the flowers to fit the design, and I also added a few small trees, too.

Here's another view of the entire plan. As you can see I've haphazardly taped together the different large sheets of paper, which is my usual style:


Next comes the hard part. What do I do about thread colors? I tend to only slightly change from the designer's colors, but either way it's hard to find threads in my very disorganized storage of floss. I'm amazed at how organized some people are, and I wish I were one of them. Anyway, I've been collecting these threads for over 25 years so it really gets to be a pain to find colors. Yes, I should get them all neat and perfect, but I just don't want to take the time to do that.

One summer when time was long I even bought those little preprinted labels for my floss cards. I didn't manage to do all my thread, just a small portion. Sadly, today I found that some of the labels CAME OFF of the floss cards so that left me with floss cards without numbers! That's not something any stitcher wants to find, ever.

So I trudged along, looking for colors. I also have a DMC color card that I love and use for each of these 'design' sessions. Here are the threads boxes I had to look through to find the colors I needed:



In the far upper left corner is my Summer Queen box. You can see the box I have for Fruit Bellpull, too, in the front center area, to the left of the baggies. At the right bottom corner is my box for this sampler.

Here it is, up close. I'm sure you'll see I don't have all the threads properly organized. It just takes too much time.



The label is nice, isn't it? My husband bought a much longed for label maker, and he made me up a cool one for the box.

Here's a peek inside the box:



Some of the floss colors are missing. They're resting on my sampler as part of the latest 'floss toss' for the elements I'll be adding soon.

Here is the 'floss toss':


The blue is for a flower, as are the golden colors. The dog and cat will be brown and almost black, and the fence will be a little darker than off white. The leaves and trees will of course be green.

I'm excited to get started on some elements in this design besides houses.

Thanks for stopping by today, and thanks for all your comments as I continue working on this sampler.

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