National Academy of Needlearts - Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling

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Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling by Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts

In 1995 I was searching for a challenging cross-stitch project and was inspired by a pre-restoration picture of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling. With the help of a cross-stitch design program, several books with good photographs of the restored Ceiling, and lots of patience, I spent the next 9 years designing and stitching the curved ceiling onto a flat canvas. It took approximately 700 hours to design and 2872 hours to stitch. Except for the faces of the figures (which were stitched using quarter stitches) the entire project was cross-stitched using 669 skeins of DMC cotton embroidery thread on Aida 14 count fabric. All but five (602, 3804, 3805, 3842, 3845) of the DMC thread colors were used. To achieve the subtle shading for the cloaks, two threads of different colors were often combined, resulting in a total of 1206 distinct shades of color in the completed piece.

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