Death by 138,500 Stitches

I have never understood the true meaning of the word “relax.”

Even when I’m supposed to be taking time to myself, when I’m supposed to give myself room to breathe between my two jobs, I can’t just take things easy.

A ‘hobby,’ by definition, is “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”

Too often, I have been accused of not taking relaxation seriously, and when I look at my current crafty project, I guess I have to agree – at least in this instance.

Now, as a disclaimer, when I say my “current project” I really mean “one of the dozens of projects that I currently am working on simultaneously because I can’t help myself.”

But back to the main subject.

So.

I only picked up cross-stich about a month ago.

Have I completed a project yet? No.

Have I already started designing an 18th Century gown with cross-stitched edging with a pansy motif that will also be represented in the stomacher (that yes, will also be cross-stiched)? Yes.

Is that the massive, insane project that I am absurdly proud of and will be talking about today? No.

The project that I am most excited for and proud of is one that I have simply titled “Jessamine.”

Jessamine Lovelace is one of my favourite characters in Cassandra Clare’s “Shadowhunters” fictional universe. Featured in the prequel series, the Infernal Devices, Jessamine Lovelace is an orphaned young lady who is under the care of the London Institute – a sect of a world-wide organisation of demon-hunters. But Jessamine does not want to be a Shadowhunter. She just wants to be a high society lady in Victorian England.

Jessamine wants to find love, and get married, and have babies. She has no interest in fighting demons and vampires, or of dying the same horrifying, gruesome death as her parents did.

Despite my love for the series and my fascination with the idea of hunting demons, there was always something about Jessamine Lovelace that drew me to her. Dismissed by many fans of the series for being rude, vapid and selfish, I could understand her desire to follow her own path rather than one that was preordained for her. Usually opposing the main character and their love interests, Jessamine was usually portrayed as a spoiled rich girl.

But she just wanted to live a normal, mundane life.

Her desire to be normal and mundane, however, becomes her downfall. She is manipulated, and used, and ultimately she is forced to face the very death she wanted to avoid. Within the series, her ghost doesn’t cross over to some other side, and she is forever chained to the Institute, a place that she spent her whole life trying to get away from.

In the artwork that I chose to transform into cross-stitch, Jessamine is paired the bay leaf and what it represents - I change but in death.

Jessamine’s tragic beauty is something that I have considered incorporating into my craft for some time. While I am still planning on constructing a complete Victorian ensemble to cosplay as Miss Jessamine Lovelace at a convention once the pandemic is over, I decided to bring Jessamine to life in another way.

It has taken me weeks to create the cross-stich chart.

I don’t think it would have taken me so long if I hadn’t lost my progress as many times as I had, or if I had realised that Stitch Fiddle let me have colours AND symbols, but as it stands, I am nearly done with the creation of my piece that is 500 stitches long by 277 stitches wide.

Yeah, you read that right.

500 stiches long, by 277 stitches wide.

I have yet to finish a small hoop project, and I have created one that is going to have my stab a piece of AIDA cloth 138,500 times. And I’m starting to reconsider my idea of using 14 count cloth for this piece, because based on my calculations, “Jessamine” will be approximately 1 Metre long.

And if those numbers weren't daunting enough - the printable PDF version of the chart is currently sitting at 70 pages long.

Yeah - I think I have officially gone off the deep end.

But I wasn’t completely stupid – I didn’t try to create the chart completely from scratch.

I took advantage of Stitch Fiddle’s “make a chart from a photo” option and uploaded the official artwork of Jessamine Lovelace by Cassandra Jean. From the generated chart, I went in and tidied up the lines and reduced some of the colours to make the project a little easier on myself.

While I still have a long way to go for this project to be anywhere near completed, I am still happy with the progress that I have made. I know that I still have many months ahead of me, and that my wallet will be crying about how many skeins of stranded cotton I’ll have to buy, but I am so excited for the day that I can show my finished work, and hopefully I’ll be lucky enough that Cassandra Clare and Cassandra Jean see it, and see how much their work has affected their audience.