The pattern of the textile work, A Few Gossamer Yards, is inspired by a combination of the round style parachute canopy and the pattern of the Rumāl, a garment worn by Sikh men. The round parachute is purely a drag device (that is, unlike the ram-air types, they provide no lift) and is used in military, emergency and cargo drop applications. The Rumal was used by the Thugees in India to as a method of strangulation for offerings to the goddess of Death and Love, Kali. The draft hole in the center of the canopy is held together by a weaving in the style of a dreamcatcher of the Ojibwe people.
I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a while streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslin of a parachute — a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.
~Charles Lindbergh
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