Resolution

It was Tomb-Sweeping holiday (ancestor worship in Asian countries) in 2013, early April. We had a few days of break from class and I went shopping with one of my teammates. We took the bus down a few stops and went to an underground shopping strip we had frequented that year. Having picked up a new hobby of cross-stitching during my time in China, I wanted to buy a more challenging one to continue working on. We stopped by one of the stands which sold them, and I sifted through the piles of packages. It was a difficult choice between buying one with an attractive image and trying to match the difficulty I was looking for - not too beginner, but not too advanced.

After being indecisive for quite a while, I finally settled on one that had a beautiful picture, but was probably much too difficult for my ability. I told myself I'd work on it and finish eventually. It would just take some time, right?

A few weeks after that, I was video-chatting with a friend back home in the states. He saw me cross-stitching and rolled his eyes. I asked him why he was so turned off by cross-stitching. He said, "I hate it when people start them, work on it halfway, and then never finish them." The thought occurred to me - if I didn't finish this cross-stitch, I would be one of those people he just referred to.

After moving back home from China, I made pretty steady progress on my cross-stitch that summer. However, in the fall, I got a full-time job, so my progress drastically slowed. I had a full-time job for two years after that as well so I definitely did not have a lot of time to work on it. In those two years, we also got married, bought a house, did renovation projects, traveled, and the list goes on.

Earlier this year when I took a spontaneous trip to visit friends out of the country, I brought my cross-stitch with me on the plane. On the first leg of my trip, I cross-stitched. The gentleman who sat beside me saw me cross-stitching and was very familiar with what I was doing. He knew how time-consuming it was and how detailed things were. He asked how long I had been working on it. I told him, "About three years."

He told me, "Keep working on it. When you finish, let me know." He smiled, and left me to work quietly the rest of the leg.

On November 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, I stitched my last stitch into this cross-stitch. It is finished.

My 3.5 year masterpiece. Pre-washing.

For those of you who aren't too sure how cross-stitches work, they come two ways. The first way you can buy them is a completely blank piece of cross-stitch cloth and a template. These require counting the squares to the tee in order to complete. Extra intense. Not the kind I had, especially for this large of a scale.

The second way you can buy them is with the colors labeled for you. This entire piece of fabric had the colors pre-printed on it. The key on the right side of the fabric allows you to match the color that's printed to the color of thread you use. Don't be fooled - this still requires quite a bit of brainwork, especially when your cross-stitch has six different shades of green thread all mixed in next to one another, AND, the key used six very similar shades of green to mark these squares for you. So all six shades of green look exactly the same next to each other and you still have to consult the actual instruction manual that came with the cross-stitch which is nine pages long.



These two images give you a size reference for the span of this cross-stitch. It is 290 squares wide by 200 squares tall. If you do the math, that's 58,000 little squares. By looking at the design, you can approximate 85-90% of the fabric stitched and merely 10-15% of the fabric that's left unstitched in the top right corner. That's almost 50,000 squares that need to be stitched, not to mention stitched twice to make the X. So that's a total of nearly 100,000 stitch strokes that needed to be completed in order to finish this cross-stitch.

This was truly a labor of love, but I'll have to be honest with myself. If it weren't for that friend who made that comment while we were video-chatting, I would have been less resolute to finish it. I texted him this afternoon after I finished. He can't roll his eyes at me. :)

Unfortunately, I don't have contact with the gentleman on the plane. He was just a very nice neighbor for a two-hour flight who sympathized with my hard work.

So what am I going to do now? Well, I have more cross-stitches to work on. But, I'm going to take a nice long hiatus first.

Washing my cross-stitch to remove the instructions and grid lines.

Washed