Ancestral Flames

I love fire. Fire connects me to my ancestors, who used its healing power to clean forests in the fall so that cattle could graze on new green grass in the summer. I designed four fire-themed fabrics, intending to create a whole-cloth quilt out of one of them. I printed small test pieces on both rough linen and a shiny polyester satin. Because they all printed up so beautifully and I couldn’t decide which one to use, I cut them apart and stitched them back together in a design evoking a raging forest fire. These massive destructive fires happen all too often after an era of government-mandated fire suppression.