Embroidery Art - Anatomical Heart

I embroider!
It's been a craft which I have been learning for the past year and a half ( I will post some of my early works later on...)
But this Anatomical Heart is by far the lengthiest piece I've done.
The fabric used is basic printed poly-cotton. I drew a simple outline of the shape of the heart in pencil, then embroidered over the top using regular embroidery thread/floss.

I began the piece shortly before I came to India in October 2016 - around the time I began to seriously consider the move over here.
In retrospect; my heart and mind were in shreds at the time following the loss of my grandmother and the after effects of a brain injury. Maybe the decision to represent something visceral emerged from the latent, unconscious desire to process a backlog of things which definitely ended up manifesting in other, less pleasant ways... Anyway! I'll put my violin away for now.
This piece definitely marked a progression in my embroidery skill, starting with the outline and pushing my technique to pull off the more detailed elements, particularly the colour shading. It was something which I put down and picked back up again, and ended up finishing in March 2017, while sitting in my bedroom at my family home in Delhi.

It suddenly dawned upon me how drastically my life had changed from the moment I began this piece, to the moment it was completed. I placed the very first outline stitches in my mums house in Coventry after having moved house for the 5th time in two years, having just lost one of the most precious people in my life, and (among other unfortunate circumstances) being in the midst of hemorrhage induced brain fog which I brushed under the carpet for a long time...

I sat holding the finished piece in a place I once had a pipe-dream to go and start a life in, working in the industry I wanted to work in. No longer was I doing two jobs in two different cities and burning myself out doing freelance alongside that, while trying to look for a steady art related job.
I sat there holding the restoration of my own heart in more ways than one, as cheesy as that sounds... It was a daring choice of design for a beginner, same as it was a daring choice to run away to a different continent to try and fix your life. But I suppose I managed to pull both things off... just about!

Where's the piece now?
It was sitting in my room collecting dust until a few months ago when I sewed it to the back of a denim vest and sold it at an art market here in Delhi for around 2000rs. I didn't tell the girl who bought it the story behind it, and didn't even take a good picture of it because I was in a rush to get my shit together that weekend.

But never mind, she loved the design, and sometimes you're just too busy living life to get sentimental about things :)