It started out carefully, small spirals that gradually got larger …
But the thought occurred to me that if a spiral represented time, as it did in Moon Myth …
then it might make sense to show how time varies, sometimes flying by and other times slowing to a crawl. At which point my spirals got wonkier …
I worked them in Jude’s split backstitch using 4-ply silk/cotton floss gifted by Deb, a perfect match for the colors of the beach …
And when it was finished, I was in a rush to remove the erasable marker, so I used just enough water to soak it out.
But … I didn’t rinse it thoroughly, nor did I use a dye catching cloth. And I knew better, but all I could think about was seeing the cloth dry.
Dry it was soon enough, which is when I realized the error of my ways …
Fortunately, this turned out to be a happy accident, one that was meant to be.
I dug through the pictures I took at the beach, looking for two that made absolutely no sense at the time I took them … pictures of rusted nails in the siding of the house we rented, a perfect match for the dye stained linen …
While we were at the beach, it occurred to me how my perception can be so different from the reality that the camera records (and yes, the camera’s “reality” is yet another matter for consideration).
This in particular was what struck me: how my perception of the beach is that the ocean looms much larger than the sand and the sky, as in this cropped photo view …
while the uncropped image shows the ocean to be a much narrower slice of the whole landscape …
So that’s what was in my mind as I gathered cloth for the other side ofThe Edge of Heaven …
I imagined how how blank patches of sea and sand and sky could be combined with Deb’s cloth …
and tried out variations on my design floor …
Until the story came clear … of the sun rising in the east over a dark sea …
and then setting in the west as the golden hour illuminated both the faces of our loves and the waves beyond the dune …
Cloth holding memory yet again, in my own unique perception …
And now all that remains to discern is how it all might come together and become The Golden Hours …
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 onlineworkshops 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.
I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0) 