A stitch in time

It's finished! The cross stitch blanket I have been working on for the past eight-ish months is finally done. I completed it not ten minutes ago. It is lovely and everything I hoped it would be - unique, full of sunshine and joy, and a wonderful reminder of something horrible I am going to see in a positive light (not losing a year out of my life because of a horrible infection but working on reganining my health and tackling the long journey to being able to walk again). The entire project took five-hundred and forty hours to stitch, not including all the time I spent shifting through my collection of corss stitch patterns, choosing different skeins of floss to work with (this is tricky when you have about twenty shades of the same colour to choose from), and planning everything out when I used more than one pattern per section on the blanket. It has been my biggest project by miles. Before this, my biggest projects took about twenty hours but even those were few and far between. Most projects were between five and ten, so five-hundred and forty is huge. I couldn't be more proud of myself! I'm alread prepared to start on my next project - the lovely Seashore Sampler by Madeleine Floyd. Don't worry though, that one will only take about fifty hours to stitch. I'm in love with my blanket, but I'm not sure I will ever stitch such a big project again. The only one that even comes close in my "to do" pile only requires about one-hundred thirty hours of stitching. XD