A mash up finish to share

Oh my word do I feel gross and disgusting!  Dan and I have been in the basement all day cleaning the craft room and getting Christmas boxes put away.  I planned to sort through crap and throw things away and organize other things so I knew it was going to be at least an all day job if not more.  I also knew it was going to be a dusty dirty job since it hadn't been cleaned since Fall Retreat.  So I didn't bother to shower this morning and now I just feel icky!  Soon as I finish this I am hitting the shower!  I don't care that it's 5 o'clock and I'll get up tomorrow morning and shower again.  I'm one of those people that has to shower and wash their hair every day or I just feel disgusting.  So this will be a quick post but I did want to show you another piece I just finished.

When Little House released their Sheep Virtue series I thought about stitching them up separately and making the pillows out of them as shown.  But I also thought it would be cute to do something different.  I wasn't sure what at the time though.  Then last summer Connie and I were going through charts in the shop pulling things out to put in the 50% off bin and I ran across Country Cottage's Sheep in the Meadow chart.  We still had all 4 of our original order of these charts so into the sale bin they went.  And then I had a thought...what if I did a mother/daughter mash up?  I could use the virtues from Little House and the Sheep in the Meadow in the middle!  Well of course it wasn't that easy.  I had to make some changes to Sheep in
the Meadow so it would fit in the center and I am not a lavender lover so I had to change some colors on it too.  But after working on it for a few days I finally got it all to work mathematically, at least I  hoped.  Math is not my strong suit so the only way I was going to know for sure was to stitch it!  But then I encountered some layout issues with the sheep.  By this time I think there were 6 of the 12 charts released and I discovered my original plan to stitch them in the order they came out wasn't going to work for me without some tweaking here and there.  For instance, some of the sheep in the series were whiter than others.    I didn't want 2 blocks in a row to have white sheep so in some cases I had to switch sheep colors.  I also didn't like the blocks with lavender in them so I changed color on those.  I wanted the blue color to be in all 3 rows so I made the bird house in the bottom row blue.  Nothing major but I did have to think some on how it was going to work before I stitched it and then I never knew what the next block was going to look like either so I had to be prepared to rip some stuff out too.  But in the end I think it looks pretty good.

Sheep in the Meadow by Country Cottage

 I stitched this piece on 40 ct. cocoa fabric using DMC floss.  It measures approximately 15 x 9. OH...and those 4 unsold charts I told you about earlier?  After I had my epiphany I pulled them back out of the sale bin and I am happy to say that they are now all sold.  When people saw me stitching this piece and were asking for my changes I had them purchase the original chart first.   It wouldn't be fair to Country Cottage otherwise!

Now it's off to the shower and then stitching time!  I hope you all had a great weekend and thanks to my followers that are still following and commenting!  I appreciate the loyalty!

Take care till next time!

Julie