My mammoth cross stitching project!

When I was around nine years old I developed a love for cross stitching. My hand wasn't quite as steady and controlled as I wanted it to be, and sewing a picture that was 100% accurate attracted me enormously when I failed to draw things perfectly. In my teens I grew better and better at drawing and eventually dropped my stitching completely, denouncing the whole idea as pointless and old fashioned. Apart from the result itself, I always found stitching very meditative and soothing and secretly missed that part of it.

This weekend, we went to watch the Dalí exhibition at the modern arts museum here in Stockholm. The main exhibition was stupidly busy and we ended up spending more time looking at the regular collection. A lot of the newer additions were crafted in the more traditional sense of the word. There were rugs, a lot of fabrics and textiles and so on, and I spotted a miniscule piece of art that was a wonderfully detailed cross stitching. If I'd been thinking twice about the coolness of cross sticthing, my doubts were now all gone.

The motive was much easier to find than the motivation. I've recently been playing some of the old computer games I used to play when mum got her first PC some 20 years ago. My all time favourite game was Monkey Island 2 - LeChuck's Revenge. You all know how these old games are of such low resolution, you can practically see each pixel. And there it was. It's a goddamned pre-made pattern, innit? As it turns out, it wasn't as easy as all that, but definitely worth the effort.

This project is now in the making and underway. In the next couple of days I'll describe for those who are interested how to sew a cross stitch picture from a screenshot. As a teaser, and to liven this post up a bit, I present to you the earliest version of my pattern:


Daunting, wouldn't you say? Definitely something to keep me occupied on a rainy night in.