I wanted to dye my own fabric for the first time, and I wanted to make a quilt out of it. The color came from something I wanted to recycle from my household: coffee grounds. The design came from a traditional “lady of the lake” quilt block.

A big part of the joy of quilting for me is creating original designs, but because natural dyeing was so new for me, I felt a desire to ground it in something familiar and celebrated. The lady of the lake block can make so many different compositions depending on how its repeated and oriented. I found something unlike but somehow equal to natural beauty in the severity of this arrangement that groups and shoves the blocks into a corner. The resulting sandy colors and rigid lines gave me the feeling that this lady is the lady of a lake that has actually dried up and become something new.