I got a new Project!

[shorinai]

With a capitol "P"
And that rhymes with "C"
And that stands for "Cross-Stitch"!

/Music Man
(I've been wanting to use that for a while. ^_^ )

So, some of you may remember, at the dawn of 2008 I bought a cross stitch pattern of Stealing the Moon. I've made some decent headway since then (not nearly as much as I'd hoped, but...) and recently came to a conclusion:

The colors are wrong.

Put simply, DMC doesn't make about half the colors needed to do a good job on it.

I imagine at some point I'll dye my own flosses and re-chart it and start over. Maybe, within 5 years. Anyway, in the meantime, I needed a new non-holiday BAP (Big Ass Project) to work on in the non-holiday season (since I have Saint Nicholas Dragon Sleigher to work on in the holiday season. ^_^ )

So!

July 4, in the wee hours, I purchased another BAP pattern from Heaven and Earth Designs.

This one.
L-Etendard
400W x 512H

I've been in love with this image since I first visited HAED's website in 2008 (shortly after I brought Stealing home). After acquiring the pattern (yay, auto-download of PDFs!) I found that there's sparklies in it. O.O Lots of sparklies. The snow is sparkly iridescent Kreinik braid. Unfortunately, so is the banner.

I opened the pattern in my PDF editor and added white to it so I could de-sparkle the banner. This took... about ten days of diligent work. I changed a little over 3000 stitches (about 40% of the sparklies), symbol by symbol. Then I re-saved it as a new PDF - for the printing-out thereof, soon. I also made a PDF cheat-sheet (single page with the symbol key), instead of doing the print-cut-tape-copy routine I did for Stealing and St Nick.

Now I just(!) have to print out the pattern and acquire the materials. It'll take longest to get the fabric, since I don't have a car the get to my NSLNS (Not So Local Needlework Shop/Store), and I need a big piece of 25 count. L-Etendard is an even 50 stitches (2 inches) shorter than Stealing, so that's also an even 20,000 stithces fewer to make. The colors seem much more clumped and much less confetti than in St Nick, so I imagine it'll be less annoying to stitch - though I plan to keep using the area method of stitching instead of the color method since it's easier to keep track of where I am and therefore make fewer mistakes.

I've already decided to sew this into a tab-topped (and -bottomed) wall hanging as a finish, in keeping with the banner in the image. Fabric to be determined at a later date.

tl;dr - New BAP! ^__^