£5

In 1977, the Yorkshire Ripper was nearly caught by a £5 note.

A newly minted note that had been left on a victim had only been distributed in one company, so the police interviewed the employees. Peter Sutcliffe, an employee, was interviewed, but overlooked.

I set about trying to recreate the note in stitch. I first did it with free machine embroidery.

This took me 6 hours. I then scanned this into a computer the prodded it into a form that could be input into a machine.

I then put this information into an automatic embroidery machine.

After 68 minutes I got this.

Here they are together.

I really enjoyed making these. My one is neater and easier to read. I imagine I could clean up the machine image better and get a neater image, but I think I wouldn't be able to gt the delicateness of my hand embroidered one. Not sure which one I will use in my final peice, I will produce couple more.

Thats all for now.

the face

I decided to make a needlepoint lace image of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. I envisaged it taking me a week, but it was more like 2 and a bit, working through break and lunch times too.

Here is its progression from quite late on.

I am most pleased with the outcome. There has been a bit of a distortion, so it is now as similar to Sutcliffe as one of his photofits. But I am proud. I am not going to do anything so time consuming again this project, as I only have 5 weeks left, and I would loose a lot of time that way. 

The red it quite eye catching. I originally wanted to do the whole thing in red, with a different stitch for the paler parts of the image, bit unfortunately that didn't work well, as you couldn't see the edges and had to re do the middle in off white thread. Now it is more of a functional net to hold the red in place.

I am so happy though.

maps

I seem have managed to return to map inspiration. I was thinking about where Sutcliffe killed and harrased his victims. I ended up making it on the wall, but I decided to make it a more abstract shape by not using a map behind and just seeing how the shape looked.

I quite like the simplicity. 

I decided to make it more sketchy by dying the string myself.

I dyed the string myself. Here they are.

I like the patches of the string. There is a big contrast to factory dyed stuff.

Thats all really. I will update on how thats going.