Prairie Windflowers

Bragging time! My quilt, Prairie Windflowers won a blue ribbon at the Nebraska State Fair and received the Pride of Nebraska award. The quilt is 33" X 41".

About my quilt:
I do a lot of long-distance driving across Nebraska and the other Plains states. Along with the hawks that sit on both natural and man-made hunting perches, I see windmills. The non-working windmills are harder to spot, with their missing blades and the overgrowth of vines. The working windmills make me think of a single flower, growing high above the other plants, blades turning or not, dependent on the wind “sweeping down the plain”. These are my “windflowers”.

While windmills are typically solitary figures on the landscape I’m passing at 60 MPH, there are also windmills near my house in Omaha. I am intrigued by this juxtaposition of urban and rural within the largest city in Nebraska.

One windmill is alongside the trail I walk almost every day. The trail winds along the outer edge of an urban neighborhood less than ten years old. I photograph another windmill in a park while my kids play just a few feet away on bright plastic modern playground equipment. These and other urban windmills remind us “city slickers” that Nebraska is more a land of wide-open space than suburbia.

This quilt combines a solitary rural Nebraska windmill with a splash of urban Omaha flowerbed. The background fabric was created using a can of rusty nails taken from an old barn on a farm handed down through at least three generations of Nebraskans. (A farm with a non-working windmill.) The windmill is some distance from the viewer, as are most that we see. The flowers, on the other hand, are seen at close range, perfect for viewing the subtle variations in color and shape.

Look for both windmills and flowers on your next drive!