LARGEST EMBROIDERY (COMPLETELY COVERING THE FOUNDATION FABRIC)

Margaret S. Pollard (UK) stitched scenes from C. S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" children's stories. Her embroidery measures 20 cm [8 in] x 408 m [1338 ft]. The total surface is 81.6 sq m [878 sq ft]. World's second largest piece of embroidery is the Overlord Embroidery of 34 panels which together measure 83 metres [272 ft] in length. It covers an area of 75.8 sq m [816 sq ft]. The embroidery was commissioned by Lord Dulverton from the Royal School of Needlework in London. Twenty embroiders worked for five years until it was completed in 1979. It shows the Allied invasion of Normandie in 1944. The embroidery is one of the highlights of the D-Day museum in Southsea, Portsmouth (UK). It is shown on the museum web site. The story behind the artwork can be found on the web site of Sandra Lawrence, the designer of the Overlord Embroidery.

The book Operation Overlord: The History of D-Day and the Overlord Embroidery tells the story behind the artwork. It can be ordered using this link from amazon.com. (From the UK: use this link to order the book from amazon.co.uk)

LONGEST EMBROIDERY (NOT COMPLETELY COVERING THE FOUNDATION FABRIC)

The Embroiderers' Guild stitched an embroidery of 605.55 metres (1,986.77 feet). The embroidery was started in August 2003 and traveled around the UK to various shows and exhibitions for people to stitch on to, with the completed length exhibited at the Knitting and Stitching Shows in London, Dublin and Harrogate in the autumn of 2004. No less than 7,000 participants contributed to the record. More information can be found here.

LARGEST EMBROIDERY DISPLAY

It took the members of Trichy Innovative Ladies' United Needlework Association (India) twelve years to create 1,500 helf cross stitch reproductions of the Rajagopuram of Sri Ranganathaswamy temple. Each embroidery measured 86 cm x 63 cm and was made by 82,875 half cross stitches.
TILUNA arranged a display of 1,170 embroidery pieces in December 2007 in Seethalakshmi Ramaswamy college in Trichy. DETAILS

LARGEST CROSS-STITCH The largest cross-stitch is The Battle of Grunewald, a replica of the famous painting in natural size. The cross-stitch pattern was designed by Grzegorz Zochowski (Poland). It was stitched by group of hobbysts under command of Janina Panek and Adam Panek (Poland) from December 2008 to August 2010 and measures 9.20 m x 4.05 m. 150 kilometers [93 miles] of thread (in 220 different colours) were used. More details can be found on the project web site. The project also set the record for the largest cross-stitch pattern. The pattern consists of 50 books, each 20-77 pages (altogether: 3,270 pages), excluding legends and covers. It took one year and 3 months to create the pattern.

LARGEST CROSS-STITCH BY A SINGLE PERSON Peter Volna (Slovak Republic) cross-stitched a replica of a part of da Vinci's painting The Last Supper measuring 1.94 m x 1.34 m. The artwork consists of 871 columns and 1276 rows. It took 10 years with 3 working hours per day to complete the embroidery. The total length of the thread was 48 kilometers [ca 30 mi]. The artwork is for sale, please contact sashomt@gmail.com you are seriously interested.

LARGEST PUBLISHED CROSS-STITCH PATTERN It has taken Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts (USA) nearly ten years (2,872 working hours) and 628,296 stitches to cross-stitch a replica of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling measuring 1 m [40 in] x 2 m [80 in]. She published a book entitled Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Cross-Stitch showing others how to do likewise. The book features patterns representing all 45 of the scenes in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.