One of Pauline's conclusions: "You have to look closely at the works but you surely can see the differences between the handwriting of the artists." Despite the strict instruction by Pauline the participating artists all made their individual choices during embroidering. These choices show something of their personality and of their own technique. During the project they were looking for space to leave a personal mark.The question on how am I visible.
But another issue arose: how can I embroider neatly? A lively discussion between artists followed. Perhaps our ancestors taught us to work neatly and it still is present within our female values.
What differences we saw between machine and manual embroidery?
The average embroidery time of the hand embroiderers was 14 hours per work. The embroidery machine was given the same production time. This resulted in six works embroidered by the machine, including the programming.
If we compare the hand-embroidered works with the machine embroidered works, we see that the machine did not work that precisely at all. There are even differences between these six works. In this design, it is for the machine difficult to choose the starting point of the next shape that had to be filled. So you see in the six separate works that the forms are not filled in the same way. It is easy for our hand to embroider exactly in the form, the machine finds this difficult.
For our hand it is difficult to place all stitches exactly parallel next to each other. For the machine this is very easy. A piece of cake!