From a distance it looks like a delicate, detailed watercolor painting of a Victorian woman in a colorful garden.

It’s only when you get closer, that you realize that the image is composed of thousands and thousands of minuscule stitches. It’s counted cross stitch and this is the art of Mary Ellen Walters.

Her creations line the walls of her Napa home, and there are more in the office of Dr. Thomas Suard, where she works part-time and where patients routinely ask if they might buy one.

The images are unabashedly romantic, women in ball gowns, fairies, angels, flappers and queens. One portrait of a Renaissance woman looks like a work straight from the Old Masters.

“It’s my therapy,” said Walters, who spends two to three hours a day meticulously copying intricate patterns onto a blank fine linen canvas that has 36 holes to an inch.

“I burn up lampshades like you can’t believe because I use 300 watt light bulbs.” she said, “I don’t watch television. I just listen to it.”

Walters, who moved from Michigan to Napa 31 years ago, with her husband, Jack, said, “I’ve always been a crafty person.” She learned to sew from her mother who sewed clothes for her family. In addition to learning the vanishing art of tailoring, Walters said she tried making needlepoint pillows, knitted afghans, and in the ’70s she made the macramé plant hanger that is on her front porch. “I was going to take that old thing to Community Projects,” she noted.

She brought out an afghan, knitted in the complicated Irish fisherman style. Compared to counted cross stitch projects, she said, “this was easy.”

Counted cross stitch remains her favorite craft. “It’s very addictive,” said Walters, who noted she also works on jigsaw puzzles and is hooked on Sudoku.

For years Walters ordered her patterns from catalogues but now she said she gets everything she needs, including the canvas, which is imported from England, on the Internet. The cost for the linen is $70 a yard, but the quality is worth it, she said, “and it’s 52 inches wide.

“Sometimes I order a kit,” she said, “but I throw the canvas away. It’s too coarse.”

After countless hours of work, she takes the canvas to Artissimo Gallery in Napa to be framed. The completed works garner universal praise, when she shows them as she has at the Napa Town and Country Fair and in Dr. Suard’s office. Several people have paid her up to $1,000 to purchase one.  “I probably work for a penny an hour,” she laughed, “but that’s not what it’s about.”

Many of her works, she simply gives away.

“I try every Christmas to give one to someone who’s down and out she said.” She also gives one each year to her daughter in law, “who is crazy about them.”

Although she has participated in different crafts groups, Walters said she doesn’t know anyone else who does counted cross stitch. “Several people have asked me to teach them how to do it,” she said, “but no one can get it … It does take a lot of patience and concentration.”

With her husband now “retired to golf,” she said, he is supportive of her own interests. He recently persuaded her to adopt two dachshunds, who began to cut into her embroidery time, “because they have to sit on your lap,” she explained. “But now in the morning, he’ll let them sit on his lap, so I can work.”

Indeed not only is her husband supportive, he is an appreciative fan of his wife’s formidable talent. He, after all, is the one who came into the Register to tell us, “You really have to see what my wife creates with her counted cross stitch. Just don’t tell her I told,” he added.

When we asked if we could tell everyone else, he said OK.

No wonder, she favors all those romantic images.