BOREAL

One of the MANY, MANY wonderful things about being a member of Cloth in Common is the ongoing learning that we are all experience.

We learn from each other, the prompts, and the processes of making. It is a joy.

I have lived in Alaska since 1996. That means next year, we will have lived here for 25 years. That’s Sour Dough status!

Despite living here for more than two decades, I have never managed to learn the proper scientific names for the wilderness that surrounds even the city dwellers of the far north. (I should also say that I never managed to do this in Kansas either.)

Today, in prepping for this blog post, I realized that I needed a name for this quilt. I had been calling it Flora & Fauna, which is nice, but not very specific.

For me, the Ecosystem Prompt has been all about the lush AK landscape—the bounty of 24 sun—that August provides.

My previous blog post in response to the Ecosystem Prompt was called Boreal Climate. I called it that because when I googled northern climate that is what showed up on my screen. It sounded good, so I used it.

Today, I was thinking, what exactly is Boreal? Well, it is simple. Boreal means far north in Latin and Greek. From there the word goes on to mean just about anything you can think of that means living north. Check it out for yourself.

There is even such a thing as borealism—which many of you are guilty of. Borealism is “the exoticisation of the northern regions of the Earth and their cultures”

Think Ice Road Truckers, or any other reality tv show you’ve watched about Alaska.