Souvenir Explained

Lee wants to know the stories behind my choices on Drawn Thread's Souvenir Sampler, and I'm happy to share what I have so far. I am stitching this for my parents' 40th anniversary, so the souvernirs will reflect that. The owl next to the B is also going to be next to my initials. (I'm waiting because CZ said you should attempt an even distribution of color.) The owl is the symbol of my college. Because the owl doesn't really fit in the alloted space I stitched the box--in our school colors, yellow and white. The dog next to the M is all brown because my parents have a chocolate lab. I stitched the castle to look like (I hope) a sand castle. Next to it I will write "Wells, ME" when I can find an alphabet I like that also fits. This represents my parents' house at the beach. Further down you can see my parents' initials over the house, which sort of looks like theirs. Definitely the right color. I chose the yellow trees with falling leaves because they live in NH.


My plan is to put in loads of symbolic charms where there are buttons because buttons just aren't that evocative for me. I've paid most attention to the parts that are standard because they're easiest to stitch on the bus!

I want to thank everyone for responding to my question about stitchbooking. I do have to say, especially to Rosemary, that mostly we're stitchers, so that's what we want to see in our magazines. We're happy that scrappers stitch in their books! We stitchers who scrap--as opposed to scrappers who stitch--don't want to be consumed by scrapbooking. I subscribe to Simple Scrapbooks but they've never offered a stitching chart, tellingly. (Although Paper Crafts has shown a couple of cards that have stitching on them.) We're not against you, we're just for us!