Meet the Christian brother who’s cross-stitched the periodic table using a million stitches

It's not a surprise this fulfilling project took two decades!

Martin Sellner is a Christian brother who’s spent his adult life teaching chemistry, and his love of the subject has led to a project that has taken two decades to complete and required over one million stitches.

Brother Sellner’s beautifully hand-stitched “Periodic Table” was recently completed — and he posted a video of his final five stitches.

The project took more than an impressive knowledge of chemistry: it also took immense precision (those straight borders and grids required endless measuring) and the patience of a saint!

Brother Sellner is obviously thrilled with the end result and is now busy ensuring that it’s framed to show off the front and back. Yet incredibly this is not the only creative project he’s been working on.

To relieve Brother Sellner from the tedium that came with such a detailed piece, he also carried out a number of other cross-stitch projects, including this beautiful design of the Blessed Mother:

The nimble needleworker has notched up over a million views to match his stitches. And perhaps this has been Brother Sellner’s best lesson to date: that patience is its own reward.

If you’d like to see more projects by Brother Sellner, take a look at his Facebook page. And if you’d like more details on the Periodic Table project, take a look at the video below, where he goes into more detail on why he needed two decades to complete his work of art.