Last night, I reached my latest milestone on my epic Ancora Imparo project adventure. She’s a lovely monster in 22 to the inch needlepoint!
Ancora Imparo is a quote attributed to Michelangelo, the Italian architect, painter, poet, and sculptor. Roughly translated, it means “I am still learning,” which, in my opinion, is a darn good philosophy.
I originally wanted Ancora Imparo (A.I.) to have an Arts and Crafts vibe with a few Persian design elements mixed in. I designed the alphabet first, which is based on a beautiful William Morris tapestry.
Next, I started looking at the overall scale of the piece and what elements I wanted to include. My original thought revolved around this floral. But after looking at the amount of detail necessary to reproduce the flower with any quality, I quickly saw that the floral would have to be its own separate big project. This eventually became the Persian Flower project, and it’s stunning.
As a result, I had to design flowers and other elements that would fit into a reasonably-sized project at a decent number of stitches per inch. I gathered my old friends, graph paper and colored pencils, and got sketching. The Arts and Crafts vibe gave way to more of the Persian vibe. I worked on the bigger elements first, and the design started to work around this, the biggest floral:
Then came the groups of flowers and then the individual smaller flowers, some of which have only three stitches. Then I laid out all the elements until they felt balanced and the whole piece had a nice rhythm.
I started designing this project in 2008 and started stitching it in August 2012. Last night I finished filling the red on the outer border. And the result thus far is this, my lovely work-in-progress monster.
I’ve been posting progress photos on Flickr since the beginning. I have to say that my productivity on Ancora Imparo has slowed for the last few months as I’ve been working like crazy on the Road Sign projects and the BeMores projects at the same time. And I’m not done yet! I have to fill in the ivory background of the center and stitch a couple of rows of ivory around the outside to make it easier for the (eventual) framers. Then I’ll backstitch green vines between all the flowers, tying them all together. So a lot more work to come, but the light is shining through the end of the tunnel, and it’s worth every stitch.