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This map of the Island was taken from a book I saw on the table at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore in Vineyard Haven many years ago: Looking at the Vineyard by the Vineyard Open Land Foundation, West Tisbury, MA 02575, 1970, 1973 copyright. It is a topographical map of the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.
What caught my eye were the figures, contours, and patterns produced by the topography. Like a child enticed by a good coloring book, I could hardly wait to embroider it. Other shapes appeared as I stitched. I deliberately stitched in other figures when I had something I wanted to talk about, such as a sailboat on dry land and a sinner sounding.
The stitching was done with DMC embroidery floss on an even-weave fabric with a gauge of 37 threads per inch. By using different needlepoint patterns I could clearly show the great variety in the Vineyard’s topography, including salt lands and beaches, bluffs overlooking the water, moors (marshy or peaty open wasteland), hilly thickets (covered with bayberry, huckleberry, and wild grape vines), wooded moraines (rock and soil debris carried by a glacier), open plains, flat thickets, and wooded plains. It is an amazing place!
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