Watching It Fly – 6 months progress

I wrote about this briefly in my goals post a few days ago, but I’ve had a few people ask about my epic cross stitch, so I’m putting a post up in full explaining it.

A while back, someone got me onto Heaven and Earth Designs. They created a monster – aside from this project, I’ve got a bunch more charts purchased and printed out, for when the time fairy comes to visit.

I fell in love with “Watching It Fly”, although for the sake of my sanity I chose to stitch the “mini” version, which is the same chart, just condensed. Because they’re still so large, it means that very little detail is lost.

I printed out the entire chart and laid it out – you can barely see the picture here, but this demonstrates how large the project is! I’m starting from the bottom left up, and have managed to do the bottom page, as well as the full page above that, and am now midway through the next page. This will take a while.

I ordered all of my threads ages ago in preparation from 123stitch.com – as much as I like purchasing them here as it’s faster, it’s hard to justify when doing such large projects as it’s almost half the cost to buy the DMC threads from the US. As you can see, there’s a lot of colours in similar shades. I may go crazy.

About 6 months ago, I began the first stitches. All of the fabric you can see here is the size of the eventual finished project – the fabric is a bit longer, but I haven’t cut the right side off for fear of cutting the wrong size!

Here’s a look at the finished design, and what it’ll hopefully look like. I should point out, this is a colour print out! The final result will have 74,100 stitches. Yeah.

I haven’t done much work on this for about a month, but this is where I’m currently up to. Despite the pain of so many different shades of grey, it’s coming up quite well and you can start to see the clouds in the sky properly forming (along with the tiniest bit of hair!) Page 1, which I’m currently stitching, has a lot of similar stitching in it, with a god awful amount of metallic thread. I hate that stuff. Luckily, the majority seems to be on the left half, so by the time I get halfway through, I will have finished the bulk of metallic threads.  I think.

I’ve been focusing on my stitchery lately, rather than my cross stitch, but I’m hoping to go back to this, or at least put it into my rotation and work on it at least once a week. After all, one of my goals is to finish 3 pages of this, so I can’t get too lazy!