He broke my heart

Right now, I am in love with John Foster. It's a reproduction by Historic Stitches. Danielle posted her progress and finished sampler on her blog and I immediately fell in love with it. I bought the pattern when it was released and put it into my *wanna stitch* pile but eventually it ended up in a binder behind closed doors, forgotten and lonely. Until I saw Danielle's work. Then John came out of the closet and into the light of day. It helped that he is stitched with DMC and I had 36 count flax linen in my stash. If not, he would have made it back into the stitching basket but because I had the requisite supplies, John seduced me, that naughty boy.

I started stitching him last weekend. The plan was to put in the upper portion of the sampler and then work my way down the center of the sampler to the house so that I could stitch it as I stitched the other motifs. I realized that if I only had the house to stitch, I would get bored with it and John would become an ex-love.

I got the upper border stitched and I worked my way down the right and left sides about a quarter of the way. But my true desire was to stitch the BEE HIVE. What could go wrong, dear reader? Let me tell you,I am math challenged. I count to ten badly. There also is something wonky about the linen I am using. I find it difficult to stitch on, it feels scratchy in my hands and the threads vary from very thick to barely there. So I have a hard time counting on it. But that is no excuse, I can't count to ten.

Once I had the upper border stitched and the center marked I counted down to the top of the bee hive. Instead of stitching my first stitch in 16 threads down (8 blocks cause I count by 2's) I put the first stitch 7 blocks (14 threads) down from the border. I was so careful about making sure that it was centered correctly. I counted and recounted before I put in the first stitch. I stitched that entire bee hive in one evening. I was in stitcher's paradise. After each evening's work, I would congratulate myself on not messing up this sampler cause it's not symetrical and it's easy for me to be lulled into stitching mirror images of the motifs.

Then I proceeded to stitch more of the border, and the floral baskets on either side of the hive. I stitched the grey-green leaves on the side of the floral motifs first, realizing that the flowers are not symetrical. And I stitched the upper half of the quaker medalion under the hive. The last thing I wanted to stitch was the little bees buzzing around the sides of the hive. I couldn't figure out why I the little bees would not fly where they were charted. And that's when I realized that the hive and the quaker medallion was stitched 2 threads higher than they should be. The hive is stitched in the wrong location. My heart sank. I think I need an abacus, a calculator, someone's 10 fingers to learn to count to 10.

This is a ton of frogging and for all intent, I wasted 3 evenings stitching because even though the hive took me an evening, the medallion was stitched over 2 evenings.

Well, I decided to leave the hive alone for now because it really doesn't affect the placement of either floral baskets as I am using the border as a reference. Yes, the border is stitched correctly, I made sure of that. The Quaker motif has to be removed cause it does affect the placement of other motifs in the sampler. I'll probably pick it out as I stitch the other motifs around it.

My question is...

John, why did you break my heart so early in the game?