The label on the reverse of the frontal reads

Easter Sunday 2021

The Covid Pandemic began in early 2020. During lockdown, as I listened to press conferences and news updates I picked up needle and thread because I am a quilter after all. As I listened I made prayer squares inscribing each with a name, place, event or statistic that was in the news that particular day. For three months during the first full scale lockdown in 2020 the collection grew. First it hung in my sitting room window for passers-by and delivery folk to see. Then as summer came with the easing of restrictions it moved to my sewing room as a reminder of where we had been over that long winter.  When the second lockdown came at Christmas, extending into 2021, I took the prayer squares down and tried to make sense of all the feelings and prayers they still contained.  I took some of the squares which I felt represented universal concerns of the Covid Pandemic and stitched them into an altar frontal for St Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church in

Strathnairn.  What I did with these squares is take them to God, placing them on or near the cross which for thousands of years has held close the sorrows and sufferings of our broken world. There were still questions about the trauma of the pandemic which still awaited answers.  What now?  Where do we go from here? and the biggest question of all, WHY?

Revd Canon Kathy Collins

Resident Priest

St Paul’s, Strathnairn