"I started having monochromatic dreams," said the Hillsborough fabric artist.

Her first one was in yellow and involved water and drought.

"There were images of people from all over the world: someone washing with water, a farmer growing things, a child drinking water, and an animal drinking water," Chatelain said.

Chatelain was moved to create a quilt based on her vivid dream. She calls the resulting 85-by-70-inch piece "Precious Water," and it is filled with images mesmerizing in their intricacy, interplay, and symbolism: an American farmer looking at his withered corn, a little Indian boy sipping water from his mother's hands, an Ecuadorian woman washing black-eyed peas, and a kangaroo drinking from a watering hole.

From dream to finished piece involves much research, poring over texts and photographs. Then Chatelain paints her design onto cloth with dyes -- in the case of "Precious Water," all shades of yellow -- a task that can take her six to eight months. She rinses the piece in her kitchen sink and dries it on a clothesline in her yard.

For the quilt's back, she chooses a textile from the collection she purchased from an African textile factory. She puts batting in the center and pins the three pieces together with about 2,000 pins.

The fabric she chose for the back of "Precious Water" is blue and green and is filled with birds, flowers, butterflies, and plants. "Then I start quilting it. I use an average of about 200 colors of threads. There are about 18,000 yards of thread in the piece," said Chatelain, who uses a Bernina sewing machine.

Already an accomplished drawing artist, Chatelain taught herself to quilt while she and her husband were living in the West African nation of Burkina-Faso working for the Centre Ecologique Albert Schweitzer. A local tailor shop had scraps of textiles that they gave to the local mechanics shop to use in mopping up oil. Chatelain convinced the tailor to give her the scraps instead. She taught herself out to sew.

In 2004 "Precious Water" won Best of Show at the International Quilters Association Show in Houston, Texas. It was not the first award that this nationally acclaimed artist had won for her work, but it was one that would change her life.

"When 'Precious Water' won the award in Houston and I talked about it, I said that if we could just turn the water off when we brush our teeth it would make a huge difference in the amount of water being used," she said. "The next year during the five days I was there, people came up to me and told me because of what I had said, they had turned the water off. It made me realize how powerful art can be and how art can be a catalyst to making changes in the world

To channel that power, Chatelain and her husband Reynald are starting a foundation using art to promote awareness of world issues including economic refugees, wetlands, peace, genocide, and hope for migrants and resident aliens. The foundation, yet to be named, is creating lesson plans and materials that will accompany its art exhibits and help viewers learn to take actions that can make a difference.

"This is not just about the problems, but the solutions," Chatelain said. "We just have to work together to figure them out."

"Imagine Hope," the foundation's first art exhibit, includes "Precious Water" and 11 other quilts created by Chatelain, as well as 20 photographs from prominent international photographers. It will begin a world tour April 10, 2010, in Paducah, Ky.

Last year some of the quilts and photographs were exhibited at Duke Chapel as part of a day of activism. A student remarked to Chatelain that her work was "easy to gaze at but hard to forget."

The Chatelains are particularly eager to reach the world's youth, a task that will be made much easier by the facebook page they have created, www.facebook.com/imaginehopefan.

"We had a booth at the Houston show this year and what we noticed more than anything else is how excited the young people were," Chatelain said.

What she and her husband and the volunteer team working with them are creating will speak to the youth, optimism and hope in us all.