if you could see my WIP

you would be breathless!

I know, stop exaggerating. But it really is beautiful. I think I have made my most inspired stitching choice in months. This is gonna be gorgeous for the fair.

I decided to put Monkey Sampler aside. Just briefly though. I am waiting on a skein of silk I need for it. For some wierd, most likely undiagnosed OCD, issue, I can not stitch around an area of floss I do not have and so it was making it very difficult to work on. That and the fact that I can pretty much sum up working on it as, "I stitched a monkey's navel" sorta made it an easy choice to take up that gorgeous fabric and work on Sheep in the Meadow. And I am making decent progress on it for only working on it a day. I was baking last night for once, and til I got that in the oven, did the dishes, and fed the boys (my nickname for the pitbulls), I didn't have a lot of time to work. Michaels didn't have one of the colors I needed when I was kitting this up, so working around the unavailable area was difficult, but I persevered and watched it during CMT's "My Big Redneck Wedding," which, as a country girl, horrified me in ways I don't know how to explain.

If you have not seen any of this series, they are very informative, but not in the good way. For example, I didn't know there were so many things available in camoflauge, including wedding veil material and a ONESIE FOR A GIRL. I did not know this, did you? And I also learned there are people who think a used push bar for a truck or a hog-butchering set is an appropriate gift to give your spouse on a wedding day. At this point, I turned to my SO, who is my expert on matrimonial things as he was previously married, and asked him what he purchased his bride-to-be, if he did purchase her a gift. He advised me it was not an item like that. I breathed an inward sigh of relief over that one.

I really love how this fabric looks. It looks like the way the light looks when it falls on a hilly pasture on a nice summer day. I am hoping that the judges get that feeling when they look at it. I was a little bit worried last night when I was working on it because I know that someone is gonna enter something stellar and huge in the fair, and I won't win first place in that special S contest. And then I sat back, breathed (this is a new thing I am trying to do as SO pointed out with good reason, I tend to go from zero to hysterical in 3 seconds, which tends to impede my problem-solving skills), and decided that, as I have said before, it is not the size of the project that is being judged at the fair, nor the complexity. It is the skill with which the stitches are executed that counts. So, as long as I am careful and thoughtful, I should be OK. And if I don't win, really, my life will not end. At least I am not deciding, a week before the fair, to enter the contest though, in fairness, my last-minute efforts last year got me 3rd place with my cute Dragon Dreams ornament, which is not too shabby, considering that others probably carefully invested time in their projects and got lower than me.

That said, if I want to get this done and get the other stuff on my plate done, it's time I get off the computer and get to stitching