Stitches
Kendra Tuthill (2020)
Literary Mystery
Featured in
Photography-based Typography-based
Aleksia's family seems to be hit with a suicide plague. In order to save their nineteen-year-old granddaughter, her grandparents send her to live with extended family in Baltimore. She soon finds herself living in the industrial part of town with Mark, the anxious and agoraphobic father, Freya, the religious and worried mother and her cousin, Reddy, who has been locked in a room ever since a botched surgery that left him deaf and blind. Unable to make friends and disappointed by the dismal state of things, Aleksia kidnaps Reddy and takes him on the last adventure of his life.
Alluding to a description in the book of the underside of a cross-stitch piece, our cover cooks meticulously cross-stitched the title on black fabric in reverse. Four colored threads, one for each of the characters, intertwine as they fall down the into dark spaces on the front cover. The frontside of the cross-stitch then becomes the back cover, where an eerie secret is revealed. To create the cover artwork, the choice of materials were carefully considered and several versions were stitched, but the unexpected challenge was arranging the threads by hand to achieve an organic messiness that looked both beautiful and sinister. The final image, chosen from among 30 shots, was taken with a Sigma camera with a special sensor that yields exceptional color rendition and detail.