Cotton, acid silk dyes, silk charmeuse, silk dupioni, cotton batting, heat transfer photographs, nylon monofilament and cotton threads.

The American West is primarily a desert and the people who live there rely on a scarce resource, water, in order to survive. Because mining was one of the first American activities in the west, water rights evolved differently from those of the east. They are based on the doctrine of prior appropriation; water rights are acquired when a person first uses water for a socially recognized purpose and the rights are for a specified amount of water rather than a percentage of available water. During times of drought, the person with the earliest appropriation date uses their full amount, then the next oldest claim is satisfied and so on until the water source is dried up. One can see that as the population of the west increases that this method is not sustainable in the long term as newcomers can be entirely deprived of water in times of drought. This quilt is about a river in northern California, governed by these water rights. It depicts the watershed for the river - the free water - and the human interventions to divert the water to cities - the captive water.