A Treasured Time

This time last year I took the plunge and started an embroidery design I had been admiring for quite some time.  It's a special Christmas scene called "A Treasured Time" by Dimensions Gold Collection.

Although I've stitched many cross stitch designs in the past, this is different because it's mainly stitched in half cross stitches and it's on Aida, whereas I'm more used to stitching on linen and evenweave.

I've seen many Russian ladies stitching designs like this on Instagram, and I though it would lovely to have my own piece hanging on the wall at Christmas time.

The stitching is very dense, and there are frequent colour changes, so it's taken me longer than I expected to finish this piece, but it's going to be beautiful when it's framed.

The lovely shading comes about by the frequent blending on threads.  Often three strands are used at once, two of one colour, and one of a completely different colour, but it all works out in the end.

I decided that if I was going to have this piece finished for Christmas 2017 I would need to work on one quarter of the design each quarter of the year.   That worked well for me, but I left all the backstitching and French knots to the end, and that has taken me longer than I expected.  In my mind I thought the backstitching might take a week, but it's actually taken three weeks.  My elbow hurt at times from pushing the needle through the very dense stitching.

But as you can see from this photo, the backstitching really brings out the design.  Compare the windows on the right to those on the left - a huge difference.

I'm hoping to get it finished this weekend, and off to the framers early next week.  I don't know if they can do it time for Christmas or not, but I will be happy to have achieved my goal of finishing it by Christmas 2017.