When Bethany Garner gave us the current prompt, she titled her post “HERITAGE… bring ART into the family structure.” Structure is the overarching theme of this third round of Cloth in Common prompts. So far, we’ve worked on Faces, Lost Worlds, Anatomy, Buildings, Light, Cells, and Flexible. If you click on the links, you can see the galleries of quilts the members have created.

I thought long and hard about my family heritage, and while I think I could come up with a wonderful piece applying heritage to my family history, I just wasn’t in the mood. I kept thinking of all the wonderful UNESCO heritage sites I have been fortunate enough to visit.  From the magnificent waterfalls of Yosemite National Park in my own backyard to the hexagonal volcanic columns of the Hong Kong UNESCO Global Geopark, to the buildings and gardens of the Alhambra, Generalife and Albayzín in Granada Spain, the UNESCO mission is to use education, science and culture to inform, inspire and engage people everywhere to foster understanding and respect for each other and our planet.

As a military brat and wife of an international airline pilot, I’ve traveled far and wide. And, as I write in my biography, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have friends who move to exotic locations just so I can visit them.  For this reason, I don’t really have a travel bucket list.  The closest I came to creating a list was when I took an Asian art history class at the local junior college. In the textbook, I saw a small black and white photograph of the Kailasa Temple at the Ellora Caves in India. I think it looked something like this only smaller.  

I decided I just had to see this magnificent structure in person. Kailasa temple is not built out of stones, it was carved out of the mountain from the top down.

None of my usual travel companions had any interest in traveling to India, so I waited. And waited. In 2019 my son-in-law’s mother and her youngest daughter decided to take a trip to India. I asked if I could join them, and they said yes. We found a wonderful tour, but it didn’t include the Ellora caves.  Since I was “so close,” I decided to add the Ajanta and Ellora caves to the end of the trip.

The whole trip was wonderful, but I was not disappointed when I saw Kailasa. Isn’t it wonderful when reality lives up to your expectations?  I knew I would someday create a quilt about Kailasa. But how to commemorate such a marvelous place that even wonderful photographs and drawings don’t do justice. 

You can watch my progress here and come back at the end of September to see how I did.