OVERLOAD ! embroidery on black adult sweatshirt

OVERLOAD !  on black adult sweatshirt PL0040

One of us is a chemist that knows how to make things go bang, and the other is an engineer who likes to push things until they go bang! Just don't ask about the chocolate on our kitchen ceiling.

We worked hard on this embroidery design, and reckon there was probably about 5 weeks work in total to get the effect we wanted. It's got a lot of life to it that cannot be caught by a straight photograph. As the wearer moves relative to the light source different stitches catch the light and so the blossoming core of the explosion moves around.  That's the rayon stitches reflecting light, but to get the depth of colour we mixed in stitches using Madeira Burmilana thread, a wool/acrylic mix thread that's matt and slightly fluffy.

The burmilana is a pig to run on the embroidery machine, it's quite different from the rayon so needs the machine settings tweaking a bit to run smoothly, and then is only happy if we run it slowly. Truculant thread and slow running combined with a big stitch count (32 thousand) on a large hoop with a heavy garment that likes to bounce around means each shirt takes a very nervous hour and a quarter plus of closely supervised embroidery on the machine. We haven't yet lost a shirt on this design as we've got a good ear for hearing the problems before they escalate, but there has been some swearing at times. Running an embroidery machine is sometimes about when to hit the stop button and being able to recover the mess cleanly when it all goes wrong!

Detailed photo of the embroidery here:

Feel free to download the image for personal use (eg desktop, screensaver, pinterest, facebook, tumblr, etc) as is, but no derivative works or commercial use please.