34,340 Needlework Stitches

Not much happened this past week other than lots and lots of stitching.  More on that anon.  First, a quick look at the non-stitching stuff I did.

Zoom Sketch Group Piece #1

Zoom Sketch Group Piece #2

A riverfront walk where we caught the American Empress paddlewheeler coming to the dock.

Another walk on a different day, along a different river.

That was about as exciting as things got, as I spent most of my time staying home to keep an eye on Pippin.  His back pain is slowly improving, as is his mobility, but he needs to be kept penned up except when going outside, on leash, for brief relief breaks.  He can't risk being active too soon -- I don't want a repeat of our May visit to the neurologist.

So I stick close to home as much as possible to make sure he's comfortable.  And to keep myself amused, I started working on that needlework project mentioned here back on July 5.

You may recall (or more likely, you forgot all about it) that I planned to execute the new Good Omens Series 2 promo pic in cross-stitch.  I found an online site that created a pattern from the photo, and set to work.

After just two hours, I remembered why I preferred needlepoint to cross-stitch.  Because it's so much easier!!!  Argh.  It was not enjoyable.  It did not make me happy in any way.  I had managed to do about one square inch and had struggled mightily.  Bah.  Phooey!  Cross-stitch sucks.  Needlepoint rules!

I learned needlepoint as a wee child, and have done lots and lots of it off and on over the decades.  Why had I not chosen it for this picture in the first place?  The pattern works the same for either technique.  Well, I'll tell you why.  This is the photo:

As you can see, it has an awful lot of stuff in it, with oodles of colors and complex details.  My brilliant idea (okay, at the time it seemed brilliant) was to eliminate the background, and just stitch the two figures and the umbrella.  You can do that with cross-stitch, because you're working on a solid piece of cloth.  It doesn't require a background.  It would still look fine, and not be as complicated, and take a lot less time.

At least, it would if you liked cross-stitch and had a lot of experience with it.  

Which I did not.

Argh.

How was I supposed to know?  It looked deceptively simple -- one stitch in one direction, one stitch back over the first...but it was sheer torture.  The teensy tiny miniscule holes in the cloth which indicate the teensy tiny squares were easy to find for the first stitches, but got increasingly hard to locate once the first threads were in place and well, I'm not going to go into the painful details, just take my word for it -- it's hard.  And annoying.  

What can I say -- one could persevere in the face of adversity, I suppose.  One could grit one's teeth and put one's nose to the grindstone and refuse to be easily deterred, one could not throw in the towel at the first little setback and buck up, for heaven's sake!  

One did not do those things.  Screw this, I said by way of encouraging self-talk.  Just do it in needlepoint already.

Sigh.

The cross-stitch pattern had 7,062 stitches.  No background.

The needlepoint pattern, which had to have the background because it is worked on open mesh canvas, had 34,340 stitches.

Oh, dear.  

Here is Page 1 of the needlepoint pattern:

Just for kicks and giggles, let's zoom in on one small section of this pattern:

See those lovely symbols?  Each of those symbols indicates a different color of DMC embroidery floss, thusly:

Needlepoint involves a lot of counting, and a lot of double-checking that you're on the right square with the right color.  The pink highlighted areas on the big pattern piece show where I've already stitched, so I won't lose track of where I'm supposed to be.  Yay.

Here is the top of my coffee table:

It's not terribly well organized, but tomorrow I should be getting a package that includes a storage container for the SIXTY colors of floss that will make it easier to find the right color, or so I dearly hope.  Anything to make it faster would be nice, because this is as far I've got in the past six days, working around five hours a day:

You might notice the bright green binding tape on the top and left side of the canvas -- that indicates the length (12 inches) and height (14 inches) of the whole picture.  Remember that photo up above showing Page 1 of the pattern?

THERE ARE NINE PAGES.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But you know, at least I'm happier doing good old needlepoint instead of cross-stitch -- that's the important thing, yes?  

Yes????

Well, do check back next week to see if that's true, and in the meantime, have a great time out there and get plenty of fresh air and don't do anything crazy like I'm doing, okay?

Yes!