Cross Stitch Projects, Part 5
This would be by far my most ambitious and outlandish project to date. The planning alone took waaaaay longer than I'd like admit. It's also part of the reason why I took a break from doing cross stitch for a while. Not because I was burnt out or anything, but because this project was done for another Zine, the "Garden of Shadows" zine that left me so disheartened and frustrated from how things went about. It sort of killed my love of the craft for a bit. You can see it in the photos, I didn't stitch this onto dark colored fabric. Every single inch of it was hand stitched. Be it the figures in the center or the entire fucking night sky behind them. I'm not even exaggerating when I say I worked on this multiple hours a day, every day, for nearly TEN MONTHS. I even have a photo of it next to the previous gummiship project to show a difference in size and complication. The gummiship was done on an 8 or 10 inch hoop. The Garden of Shadows piece had to be done on a massive quilting hoop as to hold it all in place while I worked. It had well over 20 thousand stitches! Ironically, Namine was the figure that gave me the most trouble. I had to rip out the stitches and redo her at least twice. The project was a hug turning point in how I planned out my projects and gave me a better idea of how to get the idea in my head down to thread.
