FEE NEE

Woo Hoo! Happy Dance! I finished "Strawberry Garden" on Friday evening. I'm not sure about the "2009"...methinks it might be a little LARGE, but Aunt Chrissy said she thought it was just fine. She also said that this piece reminds her of Mom, which made me feel very good. As you can see, I did decide to put the letters on at the last minute.

On Saturday I had what can only be described as a Stitchy Epiphany. There I was, sitting in my happy chair minding my own business, when POOF!...a vision flashed before my eyes. Now if this has ever happened to you, you'll know exactly what I mean. If it hasn't, just chalk it up to me being a stitchy freak of some kind and move on.

Years and years ago I bought a painted canvas of "floating hearts". I think this was the second painted canvas that I ever bought, and I just HAD TO HAVE IT the very moment I saw it. Then it went into the studio and never made it out again. I even went so far as to put it into the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" basket.

Well, I'm not sure if it was the Laura J. Perin Valentine or what, but I suddenly "saw" this canvas in my head...all stitched up. The little hearts were "puffy" and the larger hearts were all stitched in very intricate, very compound stitches using Watercolors. I don't think I "saw" the background or the border, but given the fact that this was my first stitchy apparition, I figure I was pacing myself.

So I went upstairs and pulled the canvas out of the basket and decided to start rummaging through my thread stash to see if I could figure something out that would approximate what I had in my head. And that's when it happened:

Not only did I have threads that would work, I had THE EXACT THREAD THAT I SAW IN MY POOF! As I opened drawer after drawer looking for a particular color, I found myself saying "Oh look, here's the purple in Flair. Oh, and the yellow Splendor. Wow, amazing how these Watercolors are all exactly the right blend of colors."

By the time I got all of the threads pulled, I was totally freaked out.

So I ran downstairs and called Aunt Chrissy and told her (quite breathlessly, I must admit) all of the gory details of what had just happened. She was totally unimpressed and reminded me that I had colorized this canvas at least nine times in the last three years, so I was probably just finding all of the threads that I had purchased over and over again.

Then, when she came over later in the evening for dinner and stitching, she took one look at my "revelation", went over to her side of the table and muttered "dumb ass" under her breath. I don't think she was impressed by my new-found talent. At. All.

I played around a little bit with this yesterday and almost finished the puffy hearts. Now all I have to do is figure out what the heck to do with those larger hearts. I thought that they should be done in really complex stitches using the Watercolors, but now I'm wondering if maybe bargello would be cool? I love me some bargello, that's for sure, so maybe THAT'S what I was really seeing instead?

As for the border, I'm thinking WAFFLES! (Funny, but as I just typed that, I could hear the voice of Eddie Murphy playing Donkey in Shrek...."Tonight we'll do some manly bonding and in the morning, I'm making WAFFLES!)

Maybe I should switch to decaf?