So I have never been great at doing things on a small scale. It's how I ended up buying over 600 books in 5 years when living in the UK. It's why I am tinkering on a 40k piece jigsaw puzzle.

And it turns out that cross-stitching is no different. To first get the hang of it again I stitched four 10x10cm (little under 4 inches by 4 inches) coasters for a friend, featuring the starter Pokemon.

But already my fingers are itching for a big project. I have picked my image. And I thought I might document the journey here.

First was the question of getting the pattern right before ordering all those threads.

I love the extra vividness you get from using as many colours as possible. But I am not certain I can justify buying over 250 skeins. Sadly I am not made of money.

I compromised at 100 colours, which still leaves me with 143 skeins.

I got the brightness where I wanted it pretty quick. But then started the question of the contrast. In general I like contrast, and I want the colours to be vivid. But on the other hand I dont want the face and stomach to have these massive blotches of white.

In the end I went with brightness 30, contrast 15, smoothness 0.

Converting between pixels/stitches, inches and cm almost tripped me up bad. I speak metric. So I almost made a picture, the length of which fits in a frame and the width... wouldn't. Thankfully I caught it in the nick of time.

In total this will be 320 x 449 stitches. So a total of 143,680 stitches. Yikes.

Any suggestions on good places to order DMC cotton that would ship within Europe anyone?

I got really lucky with threads. I googled all these UK places that would ship to where I live (Estonia), but I was still looking at a pretty penny for all this. And then I found that there is a place in my home town that sells DMC at near wholesale prices. Score.

Of course ordering so many different colours, some got messed up, so I drive up there to pick them up twice, which is not easy to organise during lockdown. But now I have all these lovely lovely threads. You can really see the quality difference between DMC and the cheap Chinese stuff I used to try if I like cross-stitch.

Starting a big project like this now brought up a bunch of new questions that I had not considered when working on small pieces.

I will start with the latest and maybe you have a tip for me Melanie. I am using Aida 14 fabric and DMC threads. And I am not sure if to use two or three threads.

I tested both:

2 thread:

3 thread:

Obviously 2 thread looks neater which is always nice. But it seems to me that quite a lot of white is showing through. And I am worried that with white Aida and a fairly dark colour scheme picture will mean that it will look too sparse.

But will 3 thread get too crowded once I have a bigger area done?

Any tips would be much appreciated!

Thanks for the response Melanie .

I know what you mean, my 14ct cloth was Zweigart and it felt really nice.

I was hoping to avoid having to buy a new cloth, as I am both so excited to get started and also it is such a hassle to shop during lockdown. I thought it would likely be a few days before it would either be delivered or I could go to pick it up.

But if it is the best solution... It's such a big piece I want it to look as good a possible.

In most guides I found:
Aida 14 - 2-3 threads

Aida 16 - 2 threads

Aida 18 - 1-2 threads.

Based on this 16 seems like a safe bet.

I phoned through half of Tallinn (capital of Estonia) to try to find a place that would have Aida 16 bigger than precut 15inch / 39cm  ones. There was a wholesaler, but they sold minimum 5m (15ft) at a time. They had one that was almost 4m (12ft) that they could have sold me but thats still... so much fabric and I have already spent a fair bit on this project. After I was ready to give up, I phoned the wholesaler one more time and asked that if they already have this cut up piece.. maybe they could cut one more piece off of it and sell me 1m (3ft). And the lady said that "You know... why not. If you are willing to drive over then yes, I will get you that piece". So off I went, bought a big chocolate as an additional thank you and I got my cloth! Wholesale price and everything.

So this is now me, at the beginning of my project.

So I am now a few days into this project. I have already spent... a lot of hours on it. I am actually keeping track of how long this takes me. I am an accountant by trade so I just like data and numbers. But I wont report the numbers yet. As I am still only 2 months back into cross stitching then it feels like I am veeery slow still.

So far I love doing this. I am also so glad I got the 16ct fabric. You can make out the x's but there is not a ton of white shining through.

To keep track of where I am, I colour in the done parts with a highlighter.  I decided to start with the bottom right corner, from the last pages of the pattern. Because page 1, so the top left corner, had a lot of colour swaps in a small area.

Progress so far:

Seems like decently big chunk. Until you put it into perspective:

I started with a hoop. And though it was only in the hoop for maybe 2 hours that first night, you can still see the ring of it on the fabric. I am also worried about pulling and stretching already stitched areas with the hoop later. So I decided that this is the time to learn to stitch in hand. At first it was tricky. I had gotten used to the hoop with the small projects I did before. But now its not so bad. I am getting the hang of holding the part of the fabric that I am stitching stiff, but not stretching it too much.

I will try to update again in not too long.

Glad to hear that more experienced people do the same Read a lot of opinions on hoop/no hoop, but in the end decided to go with what sounds reasonable to me.

By the way, it is really nice that you comment and give advice on all these posts Melanie. It makes it much more fun to post these updates, knowing I wont just be yelling into the void.

Another week has gone by, so here is where I am at now:

A fair bit extra and I have put in some serious hours too. I really wanted to get to the lady herself and also to have a break from the gray tones. Which is why I have sort of worked diagonally upwards.

I was quite surprised that the main colour in the cape is 154 - Grape (heheh, that rhymed). Its more purple than red. But next to the other main colours in the cape it looks nice, so I am reserving judgement until I have a bigger patch done.

The work continues and hopefully I will have another update in a week.

Something I really enjoy about posting these updates.  Both weeks I have thought that I didn't get that much done. But looking at the picture from the previous week helps show that no, there are a fair few new stitches here.

This week I got to work on big batches of solid colour, mainly the grape cape, which is what it's now officially called. As my dayjob was kind of hectic, then working on the rows of solid colours was really nice. A bit less planning needed to make sure I can keep going with the same thread for as long as possible.

I am a huge fan of purple too, but as on the picture the cape is more red then I was wondering how it turns out. But really, as long as the different tones in the cape look good together and I dont have a print-out of the original image next to it, who will know that the cape is a bit more purple than it was intended?

The light was not great for the pictures today. Next week I might try to take the pictures during daylight, so you get a better idea of the colours.

This week I thought that instead of taking the pictures late Sunday night, I will take them Monday morning so I could show what the colours are like in a natural light.

It slightly backfired, because the weather is absolutely miserable. The clouds are so dark that I actually had to put the light on in my office. But I did try to catch as much of the natural light as possible and it is a little better still and quite an accurate representation of th colours.

Very happy with the progress this week.

But I do have some big home improvement projects coming up soon so it is likely that I will get to put in a bit less time the closer we get to summer. Also my wedding refuses to plan itself, so I need to get to work on that too

Thanks so much Melanie.

What sort of home improvements do you have going on? I don't mind doing them usually, but I am not working on them just for my own place, I am helping my dad renovate some apartments so we could rent them out.

My latest update is a bit... late

But I am at the spot I was on Sunday, when I usually take the progress photos. This Monday was probably the first day in a month where I didn't work on it for at least a little while. So next weeks progress might be less. But last week I got to do more than I expected, so that is nice.

Filling in the little gaps in big patches of solid colour takes so long. A lot of colour swaps. One thread gets you sometimes only 1-3 stitches. Working really hard to keep it tidy in the back too. Not always succeeding Might take a picture of that next time too.