Below you'll see the progress of my Cinderella cross stitching. I'm currently finishing the garden inspired sampler for my fathers upcoming birthday, but I couldn't resist starting this one as soon I found it in the mail box in stead of finishing the sampler first
.As you might know, the pattern is based on a painting of Thomas Kinkade for Disney:
If you look closer, you can find many details which you won't see on first hand; like the fairy godmother on the right side of the rainbow or in the lower left corner something like this:
. Have you found her slipper?Cross stitched, in the end it will look like this:
And a close-up of the castle made by Lauren http://ambitiousstitches.blogspot.nl/:
It might seem easy, but be warned: it are approx 66.000 (!) cross stitches and on top of that also many back stitches, french knots (especially for the flowers) and some sparkly filiaments that is hard to work on, but in my opinion it really adds the Disney wow factor to the avarage cross stiching patterns.
On some other blogs I had read that they were busy for a few hours to sort all the floss, and some complaints about choosing the wrong color and than had to start again. Thankfully, Disney / Candamar learnt of this because now the floss is already pre-sorted on three different cards:
This turned out to be a mess when you needed only one thread, so I placed the seperated threads in small ziplock bags:
Still, this wasn't working great so I bought a binder and some display folders with 30 pockets each. Now, each card has its own display folder and each floss has its own page/ folder/ map:
I stickered each page with the card number (each card has its own color, like this page is of card 1 so all the pages of card 1 have dark blue stickers), the floss number and the symbol. The oriinal card is placed in the first page of each folder to keep everything clear and easy. This works for me and the total cost is less than $10
, but there are many other (more professional and more expensive) systems.Disney/ Candamar advises to start in the middle of the pattern, but I prefer to start in the upper left corner. But to do so, I had to count where to start exactly. The pattern is divided on four pages and each page is divided in blocks of 10 rows (10x10 stitches). In total there are 29 blocks horizontal (29 blocks x 10 stitches= 290 stitches from left to right), and there are 22 blocks from top to bottom. When you fold to Aida, you'll know the middle of it. From there it's 6 inches up and 8 inches to the left to find the upper left corner stitch.
Now, the fun part comes in: stitching!
I'll try to show you each week a picture of my progress.
Week 1 (March 17, 2013):
Some people may use pencils or fishing line to mark each block of the pattern, but I prefer to do it the old way by counting correctly. By making a kind of chess board, I think I can count the other stitches of this pages as I now have some reference. Each of the above blocks is 20 x 20 stitches, so I think that I stitched around 2000 stitches this week. This might sound much, but it's just approx 3% of the 66,000 stitches...
Week 2 (March 24, 2013):
To be honest: I'm delighted about my progress. It went much faster than expected
The yellow stitches in the central zone are the top of the castle. I prefer to finish the sky first as I'm a bit afraid that I only want to stitch the castle and afterwards loose my stitching bug with all the purple, gray and blue in the sky that I than still have to stitch...
Sorry for this long post, look forward to your comments!
Happy stitching everyone!
. Right now, I've received the Lion King kit but unfortunately the Beaty and the Beast kit is still not here. USPS keeps stating it's missent/ routed wrong and it will be delivered very soon. Keep my fingers crossed 
. By the way: the Little Mermaid is out!
. You might find some great deals for the kits on Ebay. Like right now the vignette (small one) is for sale at $11.98, and the big one for $34.38 by seller 'valegosales'. Hope this will help you to find the kit(s)...
