Alice Blue Legs  Alice Blue Legs (July 26, 1925 – January 2, 2003) was a Lakota Sioux craftworker, notable for her quillwork. She received a 1985 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a featured artist for the documentary film "Lakota Quillwork—Art and Legend". Her work was seen in the epic film "Dances with Wolves" and exhibited in museums such as The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the Heard Museum, the Sioux Indian Museum. Examples of her work are in the permanent collection of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board at the Washington, D. C. headquarters of the United States Department of the Interior and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Rosaline Alice New Holy was born on July 26, 1925 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, near Grass Creek, in Shannon County, South Dakota to Julia (née Kills at Lodge) and Joseph New Holy. After her mother's death in 1937, she was raised by her father, his second wife, and her grandmother. She attended the Oglala Community School, graduating after completing high school. New Holy remembered her mother and grandmother, Quiver, doing decorations and medallion work when she was small and she learned some techniques from her grandmother, but both had died when she wanted to learn the craft. Her father encouraged her to learn the traditional quillwork skills of the Lakota and though he encouraged her, he would not touch the quills as they were women's objects. He showed her samples in magazines of various designs and through trial and error New Holy taught herself the craft. To make designs, quills were collected, boiled and then dyed bright colors, before they are dried. There are three basic types of techniques then used in decoration, but only two were traditionally women's handiwork. For fringes and jewelry, quills were softened and flattened, typically by chewing as soaking them causes an alkaline reaction making them brittle. They were then wound around strips of buckskin. In the stitching technique, quills were woven through flat fabrics and the third method, which New Holy rarely used as it was typically for men's objects like pipe stems and tampers, was to braid the quills. Her motifs replicated geometric and free flowing designs found among Lakota artists who had quilled in the past. By the time she married Amil Blue Legs, New Holy was an accomplished quiller. His family was known for trapping and hunting porcupines, and she taught Amil how to quill.