The Cross-stitch from Hell!

Here is the picture of the completed cross-stitch that came with the kit.



This is where I'm starting from.

Well I've delayed and procrastinated and now my rotations have finally taken me to the project I dislike the most. This is the cross-stitch from hell--the map of Australia. Why is it such a problem? There are a couple of reasons. First, it is loaded with half and quarter stitches. Thank goodness I'm using linen or I would have had to abandon the project before this as I couldn't have done it on Aida. Second, the kit as it was originally made up was to commemorate the torch relay around Australia for the Sydney Olympics. So it has a lot of Olympic stuff on it that I am not including as all I wanted was a map. You can see I've done quite a bit on it. I'm working on the border now and the bunches of flowers in the corners are a real pain in the pitoozie. I'm trying to push through it all.

What I'm not including are: the backstitching showing the route of the torch relay, the guff about number of athletes, etc in the border, most of the stuff on the bottom where the Olympic torch, etc is. I think I'm going to include the word 'Australia'. I'm not sure about the flag yet.

Is it going to be too plain with this stuff removed? I'm not sure. I've never altered a cross-stitch pattern as much as I'm going to do with this one before. So I just don't know. I'm going to start to do the backstitching within the map area as well as working on the corner flowers. I'll see how I go.