Things to Think About

I've decided I'm definitely going to use the kudzu border, the spousal unit commented that I should probably have it vining itself around a telephone pole and then anyone that looked at it would go, "Ahh kudzu." I don't know that I want a telephone pole on either side of my sampler, but it did create a picture in my mind of a brown pole peaking out of the top of a lush green leafy border, but seriously, I'm all for quirky but that's taking it a bit too far, then again maybe not, any drive through the south that's what you see along the highway.

I love Missy Ann's suggestion of using the Kudzu WDW thread.

I'm also trying to decide where to begin my sampler. I'm thinking with my dad's parents. They were the single greatest influence in my life. Everything that's good in me came from them. Mamaw and Papaw were without a doubt the two most important people in my life.

On the design front, and I hope to have pages to show you all by the first of next week so you can see how I'm charting this out, and a lot of the charting is being done by hand. If I'm using pieces of charts I'm making a working copy, cutting off the part of the chart I need and then I plan to glue each section to a piece of printer paper and then make a copy of that. I'm sure there's an easier way, Lord knows I will take the hard way every single time, but right now this is what makes the most sense to me and I can move things around at the moment. I hope before I get too far along I have an "aha" moment and find an easier more efficient way to do this but right now I'm kind of enjoying the process. I've also thought about putting up a bulletin board to work off of too.

I'm thinking I'll start with my dad's parents, I guess I should mention my mother's parents but I wasn't that close to them--so maybe I'll stitch their names near my mom's or something like that. I was thinking I could maybe do my mom's name and then underneath do a tombstone with her parents names on there since they have both passed on(does that seem cold?). I could do the same for my dad's parents but would add more about them, like a Masonic emblem and maybe a Shriner's Fez for my Papaw and an Eastern Star symbol for my Mamaw and maybe a cross since both were devout Southern Baptists.

My dad was a Firefighter and my mom was employed by the University of TN. I don't think there's any way to make an orange U and T look tasteful but I'll see what I can do. I mean Go Big Orange, I have to use orange-- no way around it. I also worked at UT for about five years so it's kind of important to me to represent it somewhere on the sampler.

So these are things I'm pondering at the moment. The design can easily get out of control and I constantly find myself wanting to add more and more family and that's crazy. I need to keep it as simple as possible or I'll have a sampler the size of a wall.