A winter's morning.

More about A winter's morning.

Quilts are a kind of fabric griot: a story told in fabric. This one apparently tells the story of an exceptional sunrise on a winter's morning.

gri·ot /ˈɡrēō/ noun
noun: griot; plural noun: griots
a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa

Gee's Bend--a small, remote, black community in Alabama--is home to women who have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present, surviving slavery, the antebellum South, and Jim Crow. During the Civil Rights movement in 1966, the Freedom Quilting Bee was established as a way for African-American women from Gee's Bend and nearby Rehoboth to gain economic independence. (Their quilts are characterized by vibrant abstract patterns and piecing styles, so these dreams are pale in comparison.)

A beautiful book, 'The Quilts of Gee's Bend' by William Arnett, Alvia Wardlaw, Jane Livingston, and John Beardsley tells the story of this town and its art.