Potential

To me, the cocoon represents "potential".  In this quilted cocoon, we can see the bold colors of the soon-to-emerge butterfly that is depicted in my first quilt of this series, "Mirage".  I was deeply impressed by an article I read recently about how the numbers of the Monarch Butterfly have decreased in their annual migration from the United States to Mexico.  Where the fields in Michoacan, Mexico were once covered with more than 60 million Monarch Butterflies during their annual winter migration, due to destruction of the Monarch's habitat, these fields now host vastly smaller numbers of butterflies, some say now only in the hundreds of thousands.  What a sad world this would be if we lost the Monarch Butterfly.  That article inspired my slight change of perspective for our theme for this year and my four quilts will depict, in abstraction, the life cycle of the butterfly.

The beautiful hand-dyed background fabric for this quilt was purchased from Carol R. Eaton at the SAQA Fiberlandia conference this spring.  The quilt was constructed using fusible web applique and was machine quilted.

Frances