For the Love of Nature – Finished

Yes, for real! It’s finished . . unless someone tells me something I’ve missed. I finished it just before midnight on 12/29 so it’s now 12/30 and I am tired and have not even looked at it so, really, please tell me if I’ve missed something. I will not be surprised. I did change some of the stitching below the house/deer. It looked too cluttered to me. That’s a shadow at the very bottom. The fabric does have some splotches and I think it was this piece of fabric that made me fall in love with XJu Designs’ linen.

You will see the initials “JS” and the date 1888. The design is charted with the date 1822 and, I may be wrong but I think someone asked Teresa Kogut about the date and it had no significance. That bothered me just a bit so I was going to leave off the year and put a moth or something there but I was procrastinating because I didn’t want to have to chart something. I am not big into geneology but many years ago, I did a little research on Ancestry so every now and then I get a “hit” and even though I can’t see much of it because I no longer pay for the service, I will look at whatever I can see. Whatever I saw that day caused me to get out the notebook I have with the info I’ve discovered and I noticed my great grandpa (my mom’s dad’s dad) was born in 1888. Most of you will know Lori Holt either through quilting or cross stitching and Lori, as well as Sheri from Colorado Cross Stitcher, have done, and are continuing to stitch pieces in memory of family members. I had thought about doing something like that but haven’t put much effort into it. I have started a piece for my aunt who passed away in 2017.

But, the lazy girl in me said . . 1888 doesn’t require any charting because there’s already an “8” in there . . just drop the two 2s and add two 8s. I added his initials. He passed away in 1961. I was 7 when he died and I only remember him being sick and pretty much bedridden, though he was only 73 when he died. Nothing like admitting my age! 🙂

Since I didn’t know a lot about him but they lived way out in the country with no running water, no indoor plumbing, no heat except for a fireplace in one bedroom and a big wood stove in the kitchen, and lots of wildlife around, so I’m decided they lived pretty much “back to nature” so this would be a good remembrance sampler for him. His wife, my great grandmother, passed away in 1979 at the age of 87. I have way more memories of her but my main memory was her tea cakes. I’ve mentioned that on here a few times. I loved her tea cakes! They lived just down the road from my grandparents. Back in those days, even when I was just a child, they would let me walk down there. I’m guessing it was half a mile one way, no other houses along the way, but it was dirt roads and not much traffic. I can remember waking up at my grandma’s and asking her to take me down to “Maw’s” to see if she had any teacakes. Sometimes if my grandma wasn’t busy, she would take me but if she was busy, she would tell me I could go down and check for myself. Sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t. Her youngest daughter, my great aunt, is still alive and I asked her if she happened to have the teacake recipe and she told me that her mom made biscuits every morning and some days she would make extra dough, add a bit more flour and some sugar to the leftover biscuit dough, roll the dough out and cut it into cookies. I think the real problem is that I remember loving those teacakes but I don’t really remember exactly how they tasted.

OK . . so much for a long trip down memory lane . .

I had this frame and I was so hoping it would work but it’s just barely too small. I stitched this on 36 count and if it had been stitched on 40 count, this frame would have been perfect.

I tend to not like such wide frames and that’s a thrift store frame (price tag residue still on the bottom left corner). If it would have fit, I would have used it but I think I’ll be happier with the frame I ordered.

I think that green will look very nice with the shades of green in this project.

You can see this piece was started four years ago! This was the first larger project I started when I got back into cross stitching after having not done it for probably 35 or more years. I’m glad to have it finished and will be really glad to have it framed and on the wall.