Unstitching!

I woke up this morning at 5 am and started thinking about a fellow stitchers blog, The Stitching Post, that I had read yesterday.  She is stitching Shores of Hawk Run Hollow (dream piece!) and had left out the space between her blocks.  She had already stitched 3 (I think) and wanted everyone's opinion about whether or not to rip everything out and put the spaces in.  What!  No way would I ever do that.  I might finish the three blocks, make it a needle case, and then start over but never rip out that much.  Well, guess what I am doing to ATS today?  Ripping out!

I started to stitch the large middle cloud and began around the bird on the right.  I didn't like the difference the color slate was looking like against the pebble so I stopped.  It's just too light and the picture shows the middle cloud much darker and brighter then the outer ones.  Then I remembered a little shop about 15 minutes from me called The Covered Wagon who has GA Sampler Threads.  It is not a cross stitch shop but she has a little bit of everything and I don't think her inventory moves very quickly.  So I called and sure enough she had some Slate for me.  Just look at the difference in the dye lots!  Both of these colors are slate but obviously NOT the same.  Her inventory is old and my color came from a more recent dye lot.  I am going to rip out the little bit around the bird and use the darker one. What is one hour of unstitching when I am going to look at this sampler for the rest of my life?  I have to like it--no, I have to love it.
So I decided all of this while lying awake at 5 am.  Then I fell back asleep and had a dream that I had the coolest cross stitch tool in the world.  It was a magic button that you attached to your linen and when you pushed it, it unstitched the top row.  I pushed the button and it said, "Are you sure you want to unstitch the selected stitches?"  Yep, I was sure.  And then they were gone!  No extra fibers laying on the linen, no big holes that the needle had left, nothing!  And then I woke up.  Dang it!