Probably world largest cross stitch pattern was created in Poland. This is a cross - stitched Jan Matejko's painting "Battle of Grunwald" in its natural size.The cross-stitch pattern contains 50 parts but at the very bottom of the image the parts are more than three times lower than the other ones, therefore during cross-stitching they were connected on a one piece of canvas with parts neighbouring from the top. So, there are 40 parts which will comprise the image.

The "Battle" in numbers:

Expected size of cross-stitch: 9,87 m x 4,26 m (32.38 x 13.97 feet)

Real size of cross-stitch: ? x 4.05 m

Size of the pattern: 4304 x 1835 crosses (7 897 840)

Volume of pattern: The pattern consists of 50 books, each 20-77 pages (altogether: 3,270 pages), excluding legends and covers.

Number of colours: 220

Average number of colours in one part:100

Theoretical length of threads used: 90 km (56 miles)

Works preparation time: 6 months (June 2008 - December 2008)

Cross-stitch creation time:1 year 9 months (December 2008 - August 2010)

Pattern creation time:1 year 3 months (November 2008 - February 2010)

Estimated real cross-stitching time:4.5 working years

The pattern was designed by Grzegorz Zochowski with use of HaftiX application. All parts of the pattern were created at once which took several days including tests and preparation of the photo but they were not optimised. Next, each part was manually simplified and corrected. It took several dozen months in stages but resulted in saving at least one month per one part of cross-stitch. Number of colours after manual editing was reduced by ca. 90, reaching the average value of 100 colours per part.

You can finf full information and discription of this project at http://www.my-cross-stitch-software.com/battle_of_grunwald/index.shtml (in our article used information and photo from here).