Stitching The Day Away

Well, not quite, but close.

A few days ago I finished stitching another saddle pad:

This is a design that I've done on a few pads now.  It was an accent I saw on a real saddle pad when I first started stitching these and I really liked it.  So I started making pads completely covered with what was just part of the real pad. 

Designing the pattern for these is a lot of fun for me and when I come up with a new pattern I can't WAIT to start stitching it.  Such was the case with the one I'm working on now.  I drew up the pattern for it shortly after starting the one above and it was SO hard to stay on track and finish the first, before moving on to the new (shiny!) one.  (haha)

I finally did finish the one above a few days ago and promptly took it out of the hoop, reloaded and started on the new one.  In my haste though, I messed up the pattern and was well underway before I realized the error.  I decided, as I always do, to pull out all of the stitches and start over.  Jeff has seen me do this before and says I have a lot more patience than him.  I don't mind undoing stitches and I'd rather not waste the fabric if I can help it.

I don't have any pictures of all of that, though once I'd finally undone everything I sort of wished I had documented it.

I spent another number of hours re-doing what I'd messed up and undone and that was pretty much where I'd left the project yesterday.

Today I spent most of the day working on the new pad and here is where it sits:

I'm not sure I've ever talked about the inspiration for any of my pads before, so I thought I'd do it on this one.  Here is what it's based on:

(picture is from this website)

I'm going with a teal/turquoise color scheme for the first one, but I've already decided that the NEXT one will be the same pattern with shades of pink for the colors. 

I like the black in the original pad, but I feel like I've done a lot of black lately and I was playing around with making the big black area grey or even make all of the black areas a tan/sand color instead, just to be different.  I'm not sure yet and that's why I've stitched about everything except those areas at this point!