Minnehaha Falls: The Cross-Stitch Version
Quite a while ago, I became aware of this beautiful cross-stitch pattern of Minnehaha Falls.
I decided I needed to make this for my friend minnehaha K. This has been in progress for a while now but I've been keeping it a secret. However, minnehaha B. advised me recently that he thought that K. might like to know about it. I think this is a good idea since now that she'll know it's in progress, it will keep me motivated to get cracking on it.
I really love the design and I enjoy working on it, but because it is so detailed and has so many colours and blended colours and confetti stitches (single colour stitches scattered far way from each other), it can be a bit overwhelming. It's hard on the eyes, so I have to take breaks from it to do other simple pieces.
The piece is 400 x 282 squares. This is 112,800 stitches. The finished piece will be approximately 25" wide x 18" high. There are 58 colours for the solid colour stitches and 48 colours for the blended stitches (blended stitches are when you take one thread of one colour and a second thread of another colour and blend together to get a more subtle colour for an individual stitch). The pattern consists of 50 pages - 10 pages of lists and instructions and 40 pages of actual design. I can usually stitch around 100 stitches per hour. This one is a little slower since there are no large blocks of the same colour. Mathematically speaking, this translates to about 1128 hours. If I stitch at least one hour a day, this comes out to about 3 years of work. If I keep working on it steadily, it will probably be done in 2011.
It took a while to even get things prepared to start. It took over a week just to grid the fabric. Gridding is done every ten stitches to be able to count correctly. It is essential on such a large project. (It also prevents you from going blind and/or insane.)
Here are some photos of the materials ready to go. I didn't include all the floss in the photos since it would have covered the fabric completely.
I was planning to post a progress picture but my camera is not cooperating today. I'll post a current picture as soon as I can. In the meantime, here is an example of what it looks like. Because of the frequent colour changes and confetti stitches, you cannot work on this the normal way where you start a thread colour, do a section and then end the colour. Instead, I am using a method called "parking", where you do the first colour stitch in the row and then run the thread along the back for a certain distance until the colour occurs again. Then you go down to the next row where this same colour occurs and "park" the thread on the front of the piece until you get to that row.
(This is not my project, but an example from the Golden Kite site of what a project like this looks like when in progress.)
I decided I needed to make this for my friend minnehaha K. This has been in progress for a while now but I've been keeping it a secret. However, minnehaha B. advised me recently that he thought that K. might like to know about it. I think this is a good idea since now that she'll know it's in progress, it will keep me motivated to get cracking on it.
I really love the design and I enjoy working on it, but because it is so detailed and has so many colours and blended colours and confetti stitches (single colour stitches scattered far way from each other), it can be a bit overwhelming. It's hard on the eyes, so I have to take breaks from it to do other simple pieces.
The piece is 400 x 282 squares. This is 112,800 stitches. The finished piece will be approximately 25" wide x 18" high. There are 58 colours for the solid colour stitches and 48 colours for the blended stitches (blended stitches are when you take one thread of one colour and a second thread of another colour and blend together to get a more subtle colour for an individual stitch). The pattern consists of 50 pages - 10 pages of lists and instructions and 40 pages of actual design. I can usually stitch around 100 stitches per hour. This one is a little slower since there are no large blocks of the same colour. Mathematically speaking, this translates to about 1128 hours. If I stitch at least one hour a day, this comes out to about 3 years of work. If I keep working on it steadily, it will probably be done in 2011.
It took a while to even get things prepared to start. It took over a week just to grid the fabric. Gridding is done every ten stitches to be able to count correctly. It is essential on such a large project. (It also prevents you from going blind and/or insane.)
Here are some photos of the materials ready to go. I didn't include all the floss in the photos since it would have covered the fabric completely.
I was planning to post a progress picture but my camera is not cooperating today. I'll post a current picture as soon as I can. In the meantime, here is an example of what it looks like. Because of the frequent colour changes and confetti stitches, you cannot work on this the normal way where you start a thread colour, do a section and then end the colour. Instead, I am using a method called "parking", where you do the first colour stitch in the row and then run the thread along the back for a certain distance until the colour occurs again. Then you go down to the next row where this same colour occurs and "park" the thread on the front of the piece until you get to that row.
(This is not my project, but an example from the Golden Kite site of what a project like this looks like when in progress.)