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.

 

 

How do you show a 100m long piece without a 100m long plinth?

You might remember my piece '1 hours production = 1 ½ miles = 15 lengths' that a created for Lesley Millar’s show 'Cloth and Memory 2' at Salts Mill, Saltaire, West Yorkshire.  The piece contains my biometric data recorded whilst running in the Spinning room at the mill as a metaphor for woollen cloth production in the 19^th century.  I made the piece specifically for the space but have been thinking how I could also show you in other venues.  Its 100 m in length and whilst I had the luxury of a plinth that long at Salts Mill I know that is unlikely to be repeated.

So I have been thinking how I could show this piece again in another venue…..one without an enormous plinth!  

This year I will be showing the piece at Festival Of Quilts, NEC, Birmingham 1^st - 4^th August.  We will hang the piece from the ceiling letting it drop from the 15m ceiling and letting it rise again before wrapping it around the stand itself.

Things we do in bed

My piece ’60 beats a minute’ will be part of the exhibition 'Things We Do in Bed'.  This was the first major piece in the echocardiology series about my heart and therefore, if you excuse the pun, will always have a special place in it.  In fact the whole 100m piece at Salts Mill wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for this piece

The show has been curated by author and quilter Tracy Chevalier and will have 7 different rooms focusing on ‘Things we do in bed’.  She asked if she could show the piece in the room that will focus on ‘illness’.  Even though this is piece that is about my healthy heart (fingers crossed), I am happy for it to be shown in that context.  The images are the result after all, of a medical diagnostic test.

I hope you can get along to the show. 
It runs from 1 April – 31 October at Danson House, Bexleyheath, Kent DA6

http://www.bexleyheritagetrust.org.uk/dansonhouse/

 

 

here it is

So here it is

This isn’t a proper photo, just one taken with my i-phone but the give a good feel as to the piece and how it looks in the space.  The figure in red is Nicky cardio technical advisor and work horse when we installed.  Big thanks.  Her being in the photo gives and indication of the scale of the piece

Let me know what you think

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.......

Half hearted




Half stitched out echocardiogram of my heart.  you can see the frame and the clips used to hold the fabric in place

 

Those of you who know me, know that I use a Pfaff sewing machine kindly sponsored by VSM UK Ltd (thanks Mike). Now I am not going to get all Jeremy Clarkson about it but it has got one of the biggest hoops on the market.  However to use that hoop you need to 'break' your design into two halves.

Its a simple thing to do if you know what to do before you stitch out and you get an even better effect if you split it when its a design, rather than an embroidery file.  However this piece is at such a preliminary stage I have programmed a couple of footprints but for the large scale samples I just increased the size of an existing heart scan embroidery file.  The software automatically split it down the middle and the result is half hearted in all senses