On April 13, 2005, I started working on The Mirror of Erised
(Erised for short)
which has quickly become the longest and most demanding project
I've ever tried to complete. Coming in at a whopping 70+ thread colors,
it will finish at 10x12 inches on 28-count Monaco antique-white fabric.
There are a total of 16 pages to the pattern,
and don't ask me how many stitches per page. Honestly, I simply prefer not to think about it,
because I'll just get depressed.
Please note that this is not an official pattern.
Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros., et al. No infringement is intended.
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The original picture
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Here's what it looked like the first day. Originally, I intended to go in blocks of 10 squares by 10 squares. I kept this up for much of the first page.
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The same square, a little closer.
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After a while, I gave up on the square-by-square plan.
The fabric was warping pretty badly, and then I came across the description of parking,
which is a method in which you don't actually tie off your thread, instead carrying it to the next square in which it is to be used.
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By parking my thread, I was able to move much faster, finally finishing the first page --- only five months after I started.
You'll see that I did tie off the threads here, even though there was going to be more stitching below this page. I have NO idea what I was thinking when I did that.
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A close-up of the first page.
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The second page went even faster, and I finished it at the beginning of March 2006.
As you can see, I did not tie off the threads when I completed this page, so that it would be easier to start the page directly below it. (This guess on my part ended up being accurate.)
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A close-up of the completed second page.
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Here is Erised on April 13, 2006, exactly one year after I began it. As you can see, I had done a lot of work in the span on a single month.
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A picture of the wrong side of Erised, taken only by request. I find it quite ugly, but my Russian tutor thought it more beautiful than the right side.
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The finished third page of Erised, completed in May 2006.
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A move in the summer of 2006 kept me from working on Erised for a while. In fact, I didn't finish Page Four until April 13, 2007 - exactly two years after I began.
Unfortunately, this started a trend of extremely long waits between pages.
Here is Page Four of Erised - and the completion of the top row of pages.
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Pages One through Four comprise the top row of Erised. Now there was nowhere to go but down.
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The whole thing.
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The timing for Page Five's finish ended up being seriously prophetic. One month later, we adopted a baby boy, Andrew, who has since featured in many of the Erised photos,
mostly because he started out smaller than the project itself. There is some debate over what will happen first: will Erised be completed? Or will Andrew graduate from high school? Only time will tell.
Because I was moving so slowly, and I desperately wanted to finish Page Six, I entered Erised into the Stitching Olympics in my online community, which ran alongside the 2010 Winter Olympics.
I was able to win the bronze by finishing ten lines in two weeks. Pretty good for a new mom. Here's what Erised had looked like before the Olympics began. I stupidly had not taken a pre-Olympic photo, so I whited out the bits I had recently done.
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Here is what Erised looked like after. I was enormously pleased to realize that the dark spot in the corner of the white is the top of someone's head!
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Erised's fifth anniversary, April 13, 2010. I also noted that my son, Andrew (he's on the right), was five days shy of being five months old, and I had completed five pages (and a little).
Five was clearly a good number.
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Motherhood slowed me down, but did not halt progress. Page Six was completed in July 2010. Several family members are now visible.
Like with the letters, I don't see them as I'm stitching - only once I step away or take a photograph, and then I'm very excited to see what I've done!
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Page Six with Andrew, who is also apparently much excited to see Erised's progress. He also thinks it can fit into his mouth.
At the time, Andrew was 7 months old, and had just figured out the whole crawling thing.
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And here we are, at Erised's sixth anniversary on April 13, 2011, and the requisite photo with Andrew, who has grown quite a lot.
I haven't touched Erised since November 2010, owing to several other projects, so you can see how little progress I made down Page 7. I hope to pick it back up again by September 2011.
