Sunset Cross stitch for Dad

As i've mentioned before, my dad encourages my cross-stitch projects, and sometimes, he likes to "commission" me to do projects, and this is the biggest one i've undertaken. The pattern comes in a booklet and is 16 pages long, no color, just black and white letters as symbols. I opted for 16 gauge because I prefer to work with smaller squares, I think it blends better. The pattern is 20 inches x 22 inches.

I first went and bought all the colors using DMC floss...all brown, some white and plenty of black. How they came up with so many names for brown, I'll never know.

Next, because I knew the design wouldn't really come together until the end, I knew I would need some markers to go off of to make sure I was in the right place and to differentiate the colors from one another, I gridded the fabric in a bright blue, each square is 10x10 sts.

After that took me 2 evenings, I began stitching in the top lefthand corner, just like they instructed. The first page didn't look like much, just a bunch of brown colors fading into one another; not a very interesting picture, but the second page you can start to see some of the branches.  The first few pages are very time consuming because you may only have a few stitches in each color, but you can start to see some of the branches coming along, so here's the picture so far:

More updates as it comes along - I think it'll be a while.