izzythebestever made this amazing embroidered The Lord of the Rings map! It took her 8 months to complete and approx. 380m of embroidery floss. Here’s more of what she had to say about it:

“I’ve only done 4 (much smaller) embroidery projects before this, so honestly it’s mainly the space & time that is the hard part. I made the map as a gift for my dad and I told my mum what I was doing, which is how I managed to keep going through the whole 8 months lmao.

The fabric is calico, and to transfer I printed off the map across multiple A4 sheets, and sellotaped them together. To transfer I used Frixion pens, and used my tablet with a plain white screen as a lightbox underneath the pattern. I traced around it on top of the fabric section by section, and moved the tablet by poking it around with a ruler as I went along to avoid moving the fabric. If you don’t have a tablet or can’t get a lightbox, I remember reading somewhere that you can get one of those cheap translucent clipboard storage boxes and shove some battery-powered LED lights inside it, and it basically does the same thing.

90% of the map is backstitch. The mountains are filled in with satin stitch, the forests and stray trees are French knots, and the black boat is stem stitch to save myself from doing almost exclusively backstitch for over half a year.

I did the lettering first, then the landscape around it, and I left the French knots until last to avoid crushing them. for the really small stitches, I have a simple desk magnifying glass with LED lights.”

Source: izzythebestever