And onto Phase 2: Back-stitching and French Knots. I can’t wait to finish this! (And now that the fall TV season is starting up, I’ll have lots to keep me entertained while I complete this project).  Total time so far: 454 hours and 12 minutes.

454 hours, 12 minutes of cross-stitching

392:22 Hours

Getting so close to being done with The Ark! Forgive the lack of pressing before taking the picture, but I wanted to get this done quickly.

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Question from melfish on a previous post:

Is there any way to tell if you back-stitch the brown all of the way across the top edge of the ark? (underneath the animals’ noses, not sure if I should leave it, and fill it in when I back-stitch the animals).

Since the edge of the boat goes underneath where the animals are, then the backstitching that is around the animals’ noses would be the same as the rest of the animals, not the color of the boat. So I would leave a gap in the ark back-stitching when it reaches the animals.

And here is a much needed updated post on the Ark’s progress.  Obviously, I’ll need to iron it out before I put it back on the Q-snap.

315:25 hours later

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Well, it’s not quite 300 cubits in length, but the ark is pretty much done!

245:52 hours later

Still need to finish the door on it, but you can also see rams and zebras on the deck of the ark, two eagles, a goose (looks like a Canada goose), partial elephants, mountain goats, and lions.  And there’s also the outline of a monkey on the rocks on the left too.

All that’s left is finishing the rest of the animals and the beach and the water.  No major drama with it at the moment.  Found some binder clips to roll up the excess fabric that’s not under the Q-snap, so it’s not getting in the way.

160 hours later, and I’ve completed the Sparkly rainbow, the couple of angels, and most of the mountains.  I’ve also ran out of DMC 775 floss, that I desperately need more of.  Unfortunately, we’ve been snowed in at home, so I haven’t had a chance to get to the store to get more.  Anyhow, I’m really glad I got a majority of the stitching done that requires the blending filament thread: it’s ridiculously annoying to work with.

159:59 hours later

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Already a total number of hours past what I spent on the Beatrix Potter sampler I recently completed, and I would probably say only about and eighth of it is complete.  This is a BIG project (as if I knew how to do small projects!)

Edit: I mistakenly added the total hours to the Beatrix Potter project instead of this project, so the previous reported hours was an error.

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No pictures, because it’s shameful (except what was previously shown).  But I’ll write about it.

Previously, I showed a picture of what I thought was a good idea, but it turned out to be a terrible idea. There was so much blue in the sky of the cross-stitch for The Ark that I decided to do ten stitches across and then work my way down.  What resulted was a bunch of columns of blue. Because of the way the thread was pulled at the edges of the columns, very obvious lines were displayed throughout the parts of the sky I had stitched.  I told myself that if it wasn’t something worthy of being judged in the Fair, it wasn’t something I would give as a gift.  As a result, I’ve started picking out all the stitches I’ve done.

I’ll probably have to pick out all the sky blue stitches, and I imagine this will set be back probably 10-20 hours of work.

Live and learn!