No sweat. Hoping everything went good with the surgery and that you're recovering nicely. And if you thought things looked good in the last post, check this one out.
Yes, Minish Cap is complete! Clocking it at 329 hours, so ahead of most of my estimates. I put in an extra hour on Wednesday and Thursday, mostly because I saw I was getting close and wanted to finish before/on today. Was going to be at Mom's, so opportunity to take a picture, plus grab supplies to start Spirit Tracks, and could stop by The Artery afterwards to drop it off (alas, the gal who does the framing is out of town for a couple of days, so I'll have to wait until Tuesday to drop it off/see what ideas she has for framing it). But here we go, a little over a year after we started it, it is complete. Obviously, past couple of weeks went faster/easier than I was expecting, but no complaints here. And in general, we saved ourselves a ton of time not stitching the white on the outside. Pattern called for 10 or so columns of white to the right and left of what we did, all the way up to about 10 rows above our picture. So there's a few hundred/maybe even a couple thousand stitches we skipped. White background is good enough. Now, the white within the picture, yeah, that we stitched, but none of the outside stuff. Long project, but no major mistakes or hiccups. Lot of color switching, which is obviously slower than just doing a bunch of one color, but all those colors are what help give it that bright look, and add to the stained glass look. As I say, each picture is different with its own challenges. But that also means each has its own look and really looking forward to seeing what we come up with the frame, matte, etc. With 90+ colors used, there's a lot to draw on, so really curious what the focus is going to be.
Side note: not seeing the forest through the trees, I never noticed the Picori (little elves in the game) below/to the right of Link until looking at the whole picture. You get caught up in following the pattern/focusing on what color goes where, you can miss some of the details.
And with Minish Cap done, tomorrow we jump into Spirit Tracks. Princess Zelda is playable for the first time in this series (controlled by the player. She was part of the final fights in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but computer controlled) in Spirit Tracks, so wanted to make sure she was part of the picture. And, as the name implies, trains/tracks are a key part of the gameplay/Link's primary means of getting around the land. This is basically the cover of the box, with things like the title and a few little things edited out. Credit where credit is due: a big thank you to @blackmageheart for creating the actual pattern. I'd also like to give thanks to @ovi.sergiu . I didn't use their pattern, but I appreciate them taking the time to put one together and to get the ball rolling.
At 180x180, this will be our longest project yet due to the number of stitches (32,000. Twilight Princess was 27,000. Harder to estimate Minish Cap because of the curve and all the white I didn't stitch, but that was prolly around 22,000 stitches). Super Mario Bros. and Adventure of Link, both being full NES screenshots are bigger in terms of size (256x224), but much of those I didn't have to stitch. We're stitching all of this. Thought about using a light blue background to save stitching some of the sky, but because of how the colors interweave and such, I thought it would look better texture-wise if we stitched everything. But we have our supplies ready to go, so looking forward to jumping into this. Got 5+ months to get a start on this before we pause for GDQ stuff (have a pattern all ready to go for SGDQ 2025 and possible ideas for AGDQ 2026), so a chance to get a chunk of it done. Time-wise, no idea how long this is going to take. As I said, way more stitches than anything we've done, though we won't be having to switch colors as often as Minish Cap. Just to throw a number out there to give us a starting point, we'll say 400 hours, and then once we start stitching/things progress, we can adjust that number.
