WIPGO 2023 Week 25 – And They Sinned

It’s now July – and this month is the month that #13 was called… so I have SIX… yes, SIX WIPGO projects to work on. Thankfully it’s also a month with a 24 Hours of Cross Stitch Marathon, so I’m not that concerned. I’ll be plugging right along with these through the month. But because I have six projects – there will be a couple of Friday editions of WIPGO Weeks this month, on the second and last Fridays.

To kick things off… we’ll go with the Biggest of Big A** Projects I have going – And They Sinned.

Do I tell the story again? Oh sure… let me tell the story again about how this insanity came about. 🙂

And They Sinned has been on my bucket list of projects for well over a decade. I’d seen a couple completed versions in person, and was just amazed by it. It was always shoveled into the “someday…” bucket, though, with no plan for when I’d actually start working on it.

In 2018 I was at Celebration of Needlework in Nashua, New Hampshire as I try to be every year. One of the great things about that convention/retreat is the shopping mall – a collection of about 12-18 vendors, varying by year, for stitchy needs. It’s soooooo easy to break your stitching budget there!

Anyway… in the back corner of the shopping mall, the boys from Needleworkers Delight were set up with a large booth full of wonderful fabric to peruse, feel, and drool (not literally) over. And in the back, back corner of their booth was a small table with high count fabric. Including a couple cuts of 56 count, labelled at approximately $16 each. One was white, and one was cream.

Now – at that point, I had barely ventured into 40 count. Something inside me screamed that I had to have this piece of 56 count – just to say I had it. At at $16? It was a bargain for how much stitching could be fit upon it. So… it became mine.

Later that day while sitting in the circle of my local stitching friends, sharing all of our purchases and laughing at the occasional person jumping up to go back into the mall to go get something someone else had shared, I pulled out the piece of 56 count to show Abi Bellastitch and Amy (Gables Stitcher), who I both know via offline stitching. At some point in the conversation, I sarcastically said “I wonder if And They Sinned would fit on this?”

Well… we know how sarcastic comments something develop — look at what happened when I made that about the WIPocalypse in 2011.

Phones came out, stitch counts were checked and calculated… and why yes, it would fit on the piece of fabric I bought! Clearly it was fate!

Over the next few months I acquired a copy of the pattern and the charted floss. And They Sinned was my New Year’s start for 2019. Originally I was trying to work on it as a Sinning on Sundays piece, but that didn’t work particularly well. Now it comes up in normal rotations and I try to get whatever done that I can.

I’m currently battling the Cloud of Doom – which will connect those two grey swirls together into one mass below the angel. It’s a hefty block of stitching…. well over 3,000 stitches. Once I get through that, it will loosen up again for a while.

Obviously absolutely no timeline to finish this. I just want to finish it someday. And then present it at the fair. Because it’s insane. 🙂