The news is enough to make a hermit out of me (although in truth, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch). Trust in government as a solution to anything is hard to find these days.

Fortunately, my run-in with Covid is now mostly a memory … my senses of taste and smell have returned, although I’m still napping more than usual. The good news is that I’m back to stitching.

The working title for my latest pillow top is The Edge of Heaven, which is how I feel when walking along the shoreline in Avon. It is the perfect nexus of land, sea and sky.

And so I found the pieces of Deb’s cloth that I brought to the beach to be perfect representations of the flowers blooming behind the dunes, the deep purples of broken surf clam shells, the rosy interiors of heart cockle shells, the foaming edge of the breaker zone, the flaming skies of sunrise and sunset, the flashes of color from bathing suits and kites, and the haunting reflections of moonlight …

But I needed sand to tie them all together, which I found at Burnley & Trowbridge, a wonderful supplier of fabrics for historic costuming. And it’s worth noting they also have an extremely generous (which is to say, free) series of videos on stitching technique, plus online workshops on garment construction (which do cost money). If only they had been around back in the days when I was still living in Williamsburg!

The cloth they sent was everything I hoped for … the crepe dark and pebbly, a perfect analog for wet sand … and the osnaburg crackling crisp with a yellow-ish cast that perfectly matched the hot dry sand of a summer’s day.

I stitched some of the patches together with Deb’s thread, others with black DMC floss, which recalled the dark micaceous sand that clung to my feet even after rinsing off at the house. The darker crepe mimicked the water’s edge, the lighter Osnaburg stood in for the sandy dune that just barely separated our house from the sea (click to see full images) …

After stitching all the patches together, I added a silhouette of the 50 miles of Hatteras Island, from its northernmost end, also known as Pea Island, to the southernmost tip with its ferry terminal leading to Okracoke …

But I took the piece one step too far when I added kantha, with which I had hoped to imply waves running toward the shore. Unfortunately, the stitching overwhelmed the blocks of color …

So I tore it all out and went with a much lighter touch of #12 Valdani perle cotton along the sandy edges of the cloth …

the stitches like tracks left in the sand …

And so with that, I’m calling it done and will now work on a companion piece to serve as the back of the pillow it will become.