Monday, March 26, 2007 Mitos, cross stitch whiz By Jenara Regis Newman
CAN your portrait be done in cross stitch? Mitos Moras Montilla says it can, but only with a lot of patience, a love for the work, as well as the time – plenty of it – to do so.
Mitos, who has been living in Spain for 40 years, regularly comes home to Cebu to visit family and friends, to relax and to go to the beach. In one of her trips home some five years ago, she saw all the things being done on cross stitch in some specialty handicraft stores and she told herself, I can do that! After all, she recalls, she did do some cross stitching while in school at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepcion. So she started to do cross stitch again. She made mostly angels, and beaded her handiwork, too.
When her friend, Dian Franco Ledesma, one day asked, “Who’s going to do my portrait?”, she bravely said, “I will.” And thus started her cross stitched portraits that look like beautiful paintings she makes for her friends.
The pictures, she says, are enlarged to the desired size and Stitches ‘n Things sends them to Manila where the pictures are computerized to make a chart of the cross stitches for the portrait, and the colors of the thread, including the amount of each kind and there could easily be 30, 50, different kinds of color threads needed for each picture so as to get the exact shadings for the face and hair and the design of the dress, the background, the embellishments.
Mitos says it takes her three to four months to cross stitch a portrait, and she’s at it for 10 hours a day! Her day begins at nine or 10 in the morning; she cross stitches until 2 p.m.; stops for lunch; is back at her work after 30 minutes; stops at 5:30 to relax, and is back again at her work at midnight until 4 a.m.! All this is labor of love because she does not charge for her work (her friends just give her the material to work on). So far, she has the portraits of Diana, Jean Teves, Helen Misa, Joyce Dizon, Ninette Garcia, Marget Fernan, Filna Espina, Risa Espina and the portrait of a friend’s boss.
She does her projects only in Spain where she lives in Montalbo, Castilla la Mancha, some 114 kilometers from Madrid, with her husband, Pepe Honvuvilla. Now retired, Mitos can devote her time cross stitching which has become, for her, a fascinating hobby that has her friends lining up for their portraits to be done!
