The Little Mermaid, a.k.a. Giant Ariel

I can`t tell you how excited I am about Hachette Partworks` news that`s just landed in every Disney Cross Stitch Magazine subscribers` inbox: the massive Ariel stitching I worked on 3 years ago is finally available to purchase (and for a pittance too - perks of being a subscriber)! 🤩 

Now, before you could say, "£49.99 is not what I call pittance", I agree; for a lot of us, it is a lot of money to spend on ourselves when everything is getting so expensive, but I look at it this way: knowing the size of kits that retail for around £50, you get at least 4 times the threads and fabric with this one, and if you consider how many days/weeks/months you`ll be spending working on this, what`s a few pence per day to pay for something that brings you joy, as I`m sure it will to every Little Mermaid fan out there. 😉

And I`m not kidding when I say you kinda have to be a fan: I worked on this giant piece - designed by the wonderful Durene Jones - between January and May 2021, for a total of 62 days (as you can see in my pic below, I was also stitching, among other things, the Princesses sampler for the Disney XS magazine at the time). In other words, it took me 2 months, stitching 7 days a week, 6-8 hours per day.

When the stitching pack arrived, it was overwhelming for a moment as I had never seen a piece of aida this size before (but then it turned out it was for other projects as well, so I cut it in half), and just as well, because it covered not only my stitchy chair but most of the living room too! 😂

After chopping my fabric to a more manageable size (!) - about 70 x 100 cm, the size of one of those massive IKEA frames for posters...? Yeah, that one. But don`t worry, the design itself is "only" 46 x 76 cm (😳) - have I mentioned this kit was HUGE? 🤣 So after sorting the fabric and my 80-odd (!) skeins of thread, I sellotaped the twenty-one A4 pages of the chart together (see above), which I needed for the backstitch detail that I added on the go, whenever I could, but the majority of this had to be left till the very end because e.g. the grid of the map sits on top of everything else.

In the end, Giant Ariel with her over 100,000 stitches took me almost 400 hours to finish: 395 hours to be precise, 336 of which was the cross stitch, and a whopping 59 hours of backstitch at the end. As I mentioned before, it measures cca. 46 x 76 cm - the above photo probably doesn`t convey fully how large it is, so here`s a photo of my son holding the fabric:

And last but not least, I have a video for your viewing pleasure: I made a mini film by stringing together the screenshots I took every day after I finished stitching. These are not of the actual fabric, because that would have been cumbersome to unclip and roll out every time, so instead, I took a photo of my daily progress in Pattern Keeper. Enjoy watching the birth of this piece that was a real joy to stitch (as something this size is bound to be because it has everything from small details to large areas in just a few colours where you can `rest` after tackling busier places), so I hope a lot of people will decide to give it a go - happy stitching! 😊