The last cross-stitch project I started, The Ark, has been put aside since the beginning of the year due to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s new child.  As you may have guessed, I do a LOT of cross-stitches for family and friends, and so of course I’m doing one for my new nephew.  But that will be another post in itself.

For now, I’m going to give an update on The Ark.  I’ve invested a total of 47 hours and 44 minutes into it.  I don’t know whether to be excited by that time or frustrated since I’ll have to be taking out probably 20 hours of that work.  (I’ll explain in a moment).

47:44 hours in

As you can see, I didn’t exactly do what I had hoped.  I started in the middle and worked my way out until I could reach the top and then started working down.  The reason you want to start at the top and work down is to keep even tension on the linen, instead of pulling it in a bunch of directions, and distorting it.  But it definitely looks like I have a good start.  Half the sky is done, some mountains have been started too.

Also, don’t leave your pieces sitting in the Q-snaps for several months like I did here.  Oops!

Here’s where the problem is:

Notice the stitching of the light blue

If you look closely, you can see the columns I inadvertently created when I stitched this.  I thought I was being smart and tried something that I later realized (much later) was not a good idea at all.  The light blue here is very, very long, and on such small count linen, I thought I could break up the sky into blocks of 10.  Unfortunately, this created a column effect, instead of a smooth and seamless stitch.  Since I am a bit of a perfectionist with my craft, I’m going to be tearing out all that work and part of the rest of the sky I didn’t mess up on, and re-stitch it.

C’est la vie!