the last stitches...for real

These are the final stitches on the piece….from a technical point of view its me joining piece 8 and piece 9, that’s the seam at 45 metres.  So what you see is the embroidered ECG being joined up.

 

And this is what 100 metres of lovely British woollen face cloth with my embroidery on looks like when its rolled up and ready to go.  It weighs about 4 stone.

the last stitch

Technically speaking this is the last stitches being embroidered.  I say technically because they are the stitches on the furthest right.  I have always seen the piece being read left to right or with the footprints coming towards you, either way these are the last stitches of the piece…..but that would mean that the embroidery was all done…..and it isn’t….its just that I have finished embroidering piece number 20.

The red threads

A big thank you and ‘star of the day’ must go to the guys at Madeira thread.  You might remember that they sponsored the thread for my piece (see: ‘The empty spool’ post).  I reckon that by the time I am through I will have got through 20 miles of the thread. It’s pretty close as to whether I have used more black or red.  Its hard to tell when I am using five different reds and just one black.  The plan is that the colour of the ECG waveform changes as the piece goes along but you don't really notice the colour change as its subtle; its stronger up one end and mellower at the other.

I was running low on one of my favourite reds. I spoke to them at Madeira and another spool was in the post that day.  Great stuff.  Thanks

An even more beautiful join

Sometimes the join does just have the ECG running over it but also a trainer footprint.  Dont you just love technology when it works how you want it to?

And here is a second one

The empty spool

When I picked up the cloth from Hainsworth in Leeds I carried on to Madeira thread in Ripon.  Karen Burrows had kindly said that she could help me out with some thread for this project.  They let me loose in the sample boxes and I came away with a treasure trove of stuff. 

I knew that I would be after some of their Classic embroidery thread; good colour, great sheen, dependable to use.  Its lived up to its reputation.  It sits on the woollen cloth and looks gorgeous; the texture of them both looks great.

So as you can imagaine I am eating up the thread at a fair ol' rate.  Give the size of the embroidery I had picked up 5,000m cops.  This is my first one empty; a black Classic.  However there are two reds looking pretty skinny and a white on the slender side.  I reckon I will easily have used more than 18 miles once the piece is finished and thats not including the bobbin fill.

the most beautiful join in the world

When you stitch out 48 separate embroideries each 20 cms in length and each one joining up to the one before to two separate pieces of lovely British woollen cloth and when you  then seam them together and press the seam flat and hoop  the cloth up, when you do all that and the gap between the two lengths of stitch  is exactly the size of the embroidery that you have programmed to go in between,  then you have the most beautiful join in the world.

Look no hands..............

The making is well underway.  So far, fingers crossed, things are going to plan.
This is my lovely Pfaff Creative Sensation (on loan from VSM UK Ltd) chugging away.  I often think watching it going is as interesting as watching a washing machine: Its interesting for about 40 seconds and then you have seen it all.  Okay this video is a few seconds longer than that but I thought it might be good for you to see the machine up close as well as the amount of room it actually takes up.

It shows a red wiggly line being stitched.  This is the ECG from the run.  At this point my heart rate was up to 181bpm.  At other points of the piece it was as slow as 68bpm.  On the ECG at that point the beat is two and a half times longer so it looks really different.  The ECG is being stitched down over an echocardiogram of my heart.  Its exactly the same ultrasound technology that's used for baby scans.  The image shows the four chambers of my heart.