It took legendary artist Michelangelo Buonarroti only a little over four years to complete his original work of art on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Of course, he wasn’t working full-time as a software consultant at the time.

It took Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts almost ten years to re-create that same masterpiece in an amazing 40" x 80" cross-stitch project, but then Joanna DOES work full-time as a software consultant! In fact, her computer expertise was very helpful in diagramming and planning the work of art before stitching began.

Joanna is a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, who now resides in Junction, Texas. With considerable help and support from her husband, Aaron, she has startled the cross-stitching world with her gargantuan design, composed of 628,296 stitches in 1809 different color combinations from 669 skeins of DMC thread.

The finished work will be on display in Austin at the 17th Needle Arts exhibit, February 10-12, 2006, with more than 600 other exquisite (smaller, but exquisite!) pieces of hand-stitched needlework. For more information on the show, visit www.austinstitchers.org or call publicity chairman Ray Carter at (512) 858-1506.

Aaron and Joanna do a lot of traveling for her job, and the stitching occurred at quite a few different locations: New Orleans, Toronto, Albany (NY), Santa Clara (CA), and different towns in Texas, New Jersey and Ontario. The project was rolled up on a wooden frame and transported between cities in a piece of 4" PVC pipe. At night, Joanna would sit and stitch for hours at a time while Aaron read aloud from Will Durant’s "The Story of Civilization." At 20-hour intervals, Aaron would photograph the progress, and the resulting scrapbook provides a fascinating visual account of the work from 1995 to 2004.

Although the masterpiece is undoubtedly worth a fortune, the per-hour compensation could never justify the effort. "Stitching is a labor of love, not of money," Joanna says. She spent more than 3, ...

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