Binding - decisions, decisions!

It is time to decide what I am going to use for the binding. I dug thru my stash and came up with two choices - red and olive putty. I am leaning toward the olive putty color because I think it would tie in the camo sashing and it looks fine with the backing. All opinions are welcome! I thought about navy, but I don't have any navy fabric and I am not buying any. Gray was another option, but if I am going with a darker color I figure the olive putty color would be a better choice.

I finished the Birds of a Feather sampler. I changed a couple of things from the chart. I made my first initial P in the gray color instead of caper, I added the skull, put the date where initials were suppose to go, and I made the birds black instead of caper. Now I need to get this framed.

My next cross stitch project will be a red sampler. I have pictures from books and other sources that I have accumulated of several red samplers and plan to use those only as a guide as I stitch my own version. I was waiting for some floss to come in the mail that I bought from an ebay posting. I kept watching the item for three weeks.  The listing time would expired and then it would be posted again at a lower price. After three week and a price reduction of $18.00, I finally bit and got it with no other bids. Even with shipping and tax I got 141 skeins of a beautiful Japanese made floss for almost a quarter of the price! Here is what I received in the mail yesterday including 11 skeins of a gorgeous red.

I know that is a lot of variegated thread! I will share some with my sister if she can use any of it. I got a small start on the red sampler. I had bought some of this 28 count light brown Italian linen a while ago and thought I would try it out. The floss stitches beautifully and the linen is easy to stitch. I checked the linen and it is more like 34 count as I am getting 17 stitches per inch, but it is easy to stitch. I really like the darker red floss against the light brown linen too.