The Covid Quilts: Part 2

We all know that the last 6 months have been tough.  I am married to a front line NHS worker so we had been following the growth of this illness for some time.  It was clear that things were going to be bad from mid February.  I had read stories of what was happening in the hospitals of Northern Italy and could see it was only a matter of time before it was over here.  Nicky was battling with getting decent PPE and the right to wear it on wards with coughing patients still waiting for a diagnosis taking days to come through.

I was still teaching at Hereford College of Arts.  The last day before lockdown, as I walked to the station I overheard two students behind me talking; they talked about how they wouldn’t mind getting ‘IT’ because they could do with ‘a bit of a skive’.  I was so angry I couldn’t turn to look at them.  They were young and naïve but I thought of the older people in their lives and how they might be affected by the illness.

Nicky led from the front and was one of the first of her team to dress up like an astronaut and go onto ITU. She works in cardiology and Covid does horrible things to your heart; echocardiograms were in high demand.  The first time she went up there she said it was like a war zone; she was clearly shaken; she stopped talking about what was going on during the 12 hour shifts day and night.

I was at home feeling fairly helpless.  I am zooming away to my students from Hereford trying to keep them positive and working, but in comparison to what Nicky was doing it felt very small. 

I am a quilter; that’s what I do.  So I decided to quilt and this piece is the result.

I started with a simple ‘Stay Safe’ and then another for my sister, but I knew that I wanted to make a bigger more considered piece.

It says what I wanted to say to those two young people.

 

 

The error bred in the bone

Polygon model of skull from Digitising Diseases website. http://www.digitiseddiseases.org

Some of you may well know that I have been working on getting a project off the ground with the Biological Anthropological Research Centre (or BARC) at the University of Bradford.
Thanks to Arts Council England funding the project will finally begin next week with an extended visit to the Centre.

So how did it all happen…… At the opening of Cloth and Memory2 last summer I met Professor Keith Manchester  who was worried about my ECG in the piece.  In fact a number of people expressed concern at the ECG until it was explained to them that for most of the ECG on the piece my heart rate was at 181bpm and that’s why it wasn’t looking ‘normal’.  At the very beginning where my bpm was 60 you could see it was fine.

 

So Keith and I got talking and he suggested that I should visit the University and see the fascinating things they do.  8 months and a G4A award later the chance for me to make a body of work in response to what is going on in the Centre is now finally about to begin.

So what will I be looking at….?  To be honest I am not sure what the focus will be yet.  They have some amazing stuff in their collection or passing through their hands…everything from medieval leper bones to ancient and modern ivory and scrimshaw having its DNA analysed.  They have been very involved in the Digitised Diseases project that allows you to examine and rotate a whole range of archaeological bones indicating various diseases.
http://www.digitiseddiseases.org/alpha/

I intend to tell the story of this project through my blog so please keep reading!

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

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.

Taking the P wave



detail of one of the samples bearing the satin ECG

Okay now I don't want to get too technical on this but you might remember the post about the ECG data http://www.karinathompsontextiles.blogspot.co.uk/2013_01_01_archive.html
The ECG had 3 lines of data.  My technical adviser (Nicky) suggested that if I was to use a single line that it should be the bottom line as that was coherent throughout the run.  It clearly shows what my heart was doing from rest to peak to post-run.
I started cleaning up the data and programming part of it into a lovely 4mm wide satin embroidery.  After a couple of technical problems I finally could stitch it out in a way that I was happy.  I could repeat it and build it into lengths in a way that I will do on the final piece.  I was really happy with the results.

I could stitch the wave form out over the reprogrammed footprints and over densely stitched echocardiogrammes.  It felt like the piece was finally taking shape; it was looking really lovely

However working on the other 2 wave forms I suddenly realised that I had actually left out part of a heart beat and that every other beat had no P-wave.  That would be pretty serious if my heart was really doing that!  No points for attention to detail.......

ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom

So what does this ECG data look like?  Well the image above my pre-exercise heart rate.  You'll see from the numbers in the top right hand corner that it says my heart rate is 68 bpm.  I have quite a slow heart rate, sometimes its a bit lower than that usually around the 60bpm as any of you who follow my work will know. If you haven't seen my work before you might want to read about my piece '60 beats a minute' here.
http://www.madeinthemiddle.org/post/21905077027/karinathompson-60beatsaminute-photoandykruczek-on

Now there are three wiggly lines because there are three leads each measuring electrical activity from different angles as the heart beats.  This is me wired up and ready to go.  Yes, I did feel a bit of a Charlie.

It was strange having all these wires attached but if truth be told it didn't really affect how I ran.  I really tried to push myself as much as I could.  I had been doing some fast runs in prep although I am not fast.  I was hammering it trying to do between 7-8 minute miles.  I couldn't keep it up.  In many ways it was about my thinking rather than my legs that let me down.  I was thinking 'I cant keep this up' rather than 'my legs have gone.  I am going to fall over'.  If you know anything about running you'll know some people would consider that a jog.  I don't.  This is what running like that was doing to my heart.

171bpm; lots to work with.