Project Recap [misty mountains]

The latest big project I completed was for no one in particular. I liked the pattern when I saw it, it was on sale, and it didn’t require too many colors, so I ended up picking up the thread for it when I went shopping for the supplies for my previous two projects (the monarch butterfly and sunset lake).

The (untitled) pattern was drafted by ZephyrMood and I purchased it on Etsy. There were ten colors, with only one color needing more than 1 skein if stitching on 14 count aida with two strands. It was a full coverage pattern, all full cross stitches with no backstitching or specialty stitches. Not a whole lot of confetti stitching to speak of, and enough color blocks to mostly work tree by tree at the bottom and by horizontal layers in the mountains.

Fog on mountains and trees

The circular pattern measures 112 x 112 stitches, or 8 inches in diameter on 14 count fabric. My unwashed project measures about 8 1/16” wide and 7 7/8” high, so slightly off like all my other projects, but not noticeably uncircular. Based on the area of a circle, the stitch count is somewhere north of 9800 stitches, though the sum of the given stitch counts for each color in the pattern is 9715. I started right after Christmas and finished a few days after Valentine’s Day, for a total elapsed time of 55 days, an average of ~180 stitches per day, though I didn’t work on the project every day. At this time in real life, it was after I defended, then before/after my final thesis submission, when my brain appreciated taking a break from micelles and margin formatting. I currently don’t have the supplies for my next project, so I’ve turned to the library to start going through Terry Pratchett’s works and RNG-ing my way though a long list of sci-fi and fantasy titles.

This pattern was based on a watercolor work by another Etsy seller, AquarelleSpace. One of the problems with some of the pattern mills that have popped up is that when they make patterns by running photos and artwork through pattern generating software, the resulting patterns can sometimes be not great, with excessive confetti and random colors with two or three stitches in the entire pattern. That was not the case here, and I thought it was a good adaptation of the original watercolor. The only negative was that there’s no stitched model on the Etsy page, so the colors in the mockup don’t exactly match the floss colors in real life, but I still think the finished project turned out well. I worked off the 1 page tablet pdf version of the pattern, with the symbols over colored squares. Symbol choices were reasonable and the pattern was easy enough to read. Overall, a solid pattern, I like the final result, and even the top however many stitches done entirely in 3865 weren’t too bad with a YouTube video or podcast running in the background.