Only 52,668 stitches left to go

Three years ago I bought a beautiful cross stitch pattern of Gustav Klimt's, The Kiss from Scarlet Quince. I go through stages of stitching every minute I have spare for weeks, and then not touching it again for ages. Recently I picked it up again and made a few changes to my set up that have sped up how much I can stitch in a night.

The biggest improvement has come from colour coding the pattern sheets - this pattern has 30 A4 sheets representing 93324 stitches, using 139 colours/combinations. I use a technique called parking and prior to colouring the sheets would spend so much time between stitches, poised with needle in hand after a stitch, scanning the page for the next appearance of that colours symbol. Add in the occasional glance at the TV and some nights I would maybe only achieve 20 stitches. Now after colouring the sheets I can see the next symbol quickly and last week amounted to something near 3000 stitches!

Secondly I started using a music stand to prop up the pattern sheet, hold the highlighter (which I use to mark off completed stitches), and hang my scissors from one of the arms.

this is roughly the area completed last week

For the first time I believe I may actually finish this cross stitch in the near future - well within 12mths maybe - after all I've only got 52,668 stitches left to go till it looks like this

and then I can start another!