Spirograph II - third spiral - first loop

Work is now under way on the third, and largest, of the three spirals in this design.  Here's the transfer on the back:

I don't expect it to leap out at you (I hope!) but this actually a different Spirograph spiral to the other two in this design; similar, but not the same.  In both the other panels, all the spirals are the same, just different sizes, but not here.  This sort of spiral has a void in the centre; I felt that when I scaled the original spiral up to this size, this void was just too big.  All the goldwork would be round the edge, with a great big gap in the middle.  So, I drew another one along the same lines but which had a much smaller central space.

The other spirals are both composed of thirteen loops, each of which forms a heart shape; this one has eight loops, but each of them is much longer, crossing over itself a couple of times.  This is a bit more obvious with the first loop picked out with running stitches:

It's more obvious still when these stitches have been couched over with the gold thread:

This means that the design is going to develop much faster, with the network effect becoming visible much sooner.  There's a lot more sewing in each loop, but fewer of them, so it should even out.  All the same, each one is pretty big, so there's a lot of work to do yet!