Little Delta

Earlier this month in my "Painting and Complaining" post, I included the image of a large single piece of hand painted fabric.

Yesterday I finished quilting that piece. All of the fabrics in the quilt are hand painted. I used reverse applique with a silk organza overlay which was dyed with Colorhue dyes and backed with Misty Fuse. The mountains were hand painted with Setacolor, as was the background sunset / river piece, which acted as the foundation for the reverse applique process.

The inspiration for this piece was an adventure in Alaska in which my husband and I were flown by bush plane to an area about 50 miles from Fairbanks. We were dropped off on the banks of the Little Delta River. We then followed the river upstream on foot hoping to locate the old prospectors cabin where Joe's father hunted with a bow and arrow back in the 50's. We hiked over river rocks for hours and hours and into the night before we finally gave in and pitched our tent on a sandbank.

The next morning, we awoke to the faint smell of smoke in the air. We discovered we'd slept just a few hundred feet from the cabin. However, the cabin was inhabited by a group of gun hunters who had an arsenal of guns, so it was fortunate that we did not find the cabin in the dark, as we would have startled them if we had barged in in the night (and who knows what might have happened, as they easily could have mistaken us for a grizzly bear).

Anyway, this quilt is an attempt to depict the splendor of that remote region and the vast uninhabited distances we hiked (about 13 miles each way), where likely no man has walked before - or at least not for a very long time. . . . it was a very moving experience for us.