The inspiration for this design came from seeing several spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis from an airplane at night at an altitude of 39,000 feet, during my career as a flight attendant. There is always a curved black shadow above the horizon, caused by the shadow of the curve of the earth between the North Pole, which reflects the lights and the latitudes of the United States. The colors in the quilt were created by discharging dye from black fabric in an even gradation, then overdying by hand with fiber reactive dyes. Tiny iridescent beads are sewn into every other quilting stitch on the earth part of the quilt to represent the lights that can be seen on the ground when flying on a clear night. The design grew out of a couple of maquettes made in 1983 from colored paper. This was the first quilt in which I used string piecing extensively and the first in which I did a full size drawing on paper. The drawing was cut up to form the templates for string piecing with strips cut from hand-dyed gradations.