Search Results for: owl woman

I haven’t made Potholders since last year.  I think that may be the longest stretch without making them.  I had been making them every week since September at least.  I’m getting the itch again, but I guess I needed a break.

I do still have some potholders for sale in my Etsy Shop. And a few more of my Dirty Dishes magnets along with the rest of my magnets all made from my fiber paintings.  Except for my Dirty Dishes magnets, my magnets are all on sale for $1 each.

And I have new Owl Woman Postcards.  You can read all about my Owl Woman here.  From when I first started creating her to making her into postcards.  The postcards are 4×6″ and a pack of 6 is $12 including shipping.

I’ll be putting a Thank you- Owl Woman postcard in with each order from my Etsy Shop. 

Below are some of the pieces I have for sale in my Etsy Shop, just click here to see them close up and/or buy them.

Gail sent me this picture of my Owl Woman fabric painting in her new home.  It feels to me like where she belongs.

My day was filled with shipping Scrap Bin Potholders, postcards, magnets, and  paperwork (sales tax is due in March) and panic (which I wrote about).

But I also got this proof from Sticker Mule for my Owl Woman magnet.  I should get them sometime this week.  When I do I’ll put them up for sale in my Etsy Shop.

I also have an order that should be ready soon of Shield of Words postcards and posters.  But, like many small businesses, our local print shop is having some trouble due to the pandemic. Hopefully, they’ll be back soon.

I finished  Owl Woman today.

After the backing was done, I tacked it with small knots of yellow embroidery floss.  Now she’s ready to go to her new home.

Sometimes people ask me if I want to keep a piece of art I’ve made because it’s so personal and comes at an important moment in my life.  I appreciate and understand that someone might question that.  But I never have the urge to keep my art.

I’d always rather it go out into the world and live its life.

I was in high school the first time I read Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Children” from his book “The Prophet“.

It touched me deeply because it was the kind of relationship I longed to have with my parents.   One where I was expected to have my own thoughts and beliefs.  Where I was taught to live the life I chose, not the one my parents expected of me.   Where it was known that I belonged only to me.

Since then I’ve always thought that if I ever had children, I would try to be that “stable bow” from which “living arrows are sent forth.” 

I never did have children, but in a way, I think of my art as my children.

Two years ago,  D.J. bought my fabric painting “I Am Enough”.    A couple of weeks ago, she sent me a letter letting me know that Delilah, as DJ calls her, has become a muse.

“Delilah…is still reigning gloriously over my studio. She has inspired many wonderful songs and prose.” D.J. wrote me. “I particularly feel her in times when I begin to second-guess myself.  All I have to do in that moment is look up at her and I hear her shouts loud and clear, YOU ARE ENOUGH! And all my concerns over whether it is right or wrong are instantly dispelled. “

It was wonderful hearing from D.J. and knowing that my fabric painting had evolved to become a part of D.J.’s creative life.

I have no doubt Delilah is just where she belongs.  Just as I know that “Owl Woman” is going to the place she belongs.

I’m thinking of the Barred Owl I saw in the woods last fall just before hunting season.

There was something mystical about how he noiselessly flew through the trees and landed on a branch.  If I hadn’t been looking in his direction and seen a flash of movement, I wouldn’t have known he was there.

So I turn off my music and sew in silence.  But it’s still not quiet in my studio.

There’s the sound of the snowplow going by on Route 22 and the slow drag of wheels on salted snow from the line of cars following it.  There’s the clicking of metal from the baseboard heater and the hum in my ears that never stops just like when I close my eyes, there is still so much to see in the dark.

Out of the corner of my eye,  the snow is coming down in a fury out my window.

I see a flurry of birds landing on the feeder then flying to the lilac bush and back again. The snow and birds look noisy but are quieter than Fate taking a deep breath in her sleep.

I’m sewing the backing on my Owl Woman fabric painting by hand because that’s the only I can imagine doing it so it will look right.

I think of the woman who made the quilt that I used as the backing and inspiration for the piece.  I think of how I pulled the stitches out of the appliques she sewed by hand.

The quilt she made was old and worn when it was given to me. I gave it new purpose.  Rearranging what she did in her time to speak of women in my time.

As I sew, the back of the needle pricking the finger I pushed it with, I listen for the sound of horse’s hooves clomping on Route 22.  For the gravely grip of wagon wheels on pavement.  In the past complete of months, the black wagons pulled by one or two black horses driven by people dressed in black have been passing our farm.

And Amish community has come to our neighborhood.

When they drive by I stop, watch and listen.

It takes me back in time to when our house was first built.  When women sewed quilts by hand.  When our barn held horses and a wagon of its own. I feel the pull and as much as I wouldn’t want to live in an Amish community, I want to be on that wagon, holding the reins that connect horse to human.

When it gets dark and the wagons still haven’t come, I’m glad to know they’re not out in this weather.

And with each stitch I sew, I think of how time must have moved slower without machines to help us do our work.  I think of the sounds I know so well, that I  wouldn’t have heard a hundred and fifty years ago and wonder about the ones I would have heard and will never know.

I look at the impressions that the stitches I pulled from the old quilt have left, like a memory.  The past and the present accommodating each other to survive in this moment.

It was on Friday that I decided it was time to sew my owl angel onto my fabric painting.  But I had the idea that the owl should have a yellow aura.  So I mixed some yellow fabric paint and painted it on the old quilt backing.

But once it was done, it looked to me like just a blotch of yellow.  It didn’t have the feeling I wanted.

It had to dry anyway, so I just left it for the day.  I knew that this mistake (as often happens with mistakes) would take me to a place that I wasn’t thinking of going to.

In the past, I would have tried to fix it right away. I would have been anxious that I had ruined the whole piece and I would need to prove to myself that I could “fix’ it.

But I’ve come to trust my mistakes.

Although not enough to put it up on my blog on Friday.   I wasn’t ready for that.

I did talk to Emily about it in our Zoom studio chat on Monday.  She wasn’t as bothered by it as I was.  But when I explained the idea of an angel being kind and encouraging words, she suggested stitching words over the paint.

And as soon as she said it I knew it was the right thing to do.

I wasn’t sure of what the words would be until early on Tuesday morning.  I was still in bed, going in and out of sleep when I thought of the beginning of Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. It begins…

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.”

I wrote about how I realized I was creating my own version of an idea I read in Megan Watterson’s book Mary Magdalene Revealed in my blog post, Owl Woman and Eye of The Heart.

I chose the words from Mary Oliver’s poem  because Watterson wrote  that the most important message to take from Mary Magdalene’s gospel  is that “we are inherently good.”

I think Owl Woman is complete.  But I’m going to sleep on it and look at her again in the morning to be sure.

I spent the morning sewing down the tree on my Owl Woman Fabric Painting. I decided it had to be done by hand.  I didn’t want the look of machine stitching.   I still have to sew the owl down, but this afternoon I have a ton of paperwork to do that’s been piling up on my desk.

I’ve been putting it off, but I know any day, Anne, my bookkeeper will be asking for it. I’m backed up a couple of months.

So as much as the bright sun is lighting up my studio and keeping it warm.  And as much as I want to keep working, I turned off the heat and brought my computer in the house at lunchtime so I won’t be tempted to go back to my studio.

It was Donna’s comment on my blog that reminded me of Meggan Watterson’s idea of Angels and The Eye of the Heart.

When Donna wrote about my Owl Woman….This is getting interesting, Maria! What is happening between Owl Woman and Little Owl? Makes you wonder. Her words woke me up.  I didn’t have to wonder anymore. I suddenly knew, remembered what it was all about.

I wasn’t aware, but all along, from the moment I drew my Owl Woman and chose her to be the start of a new fiber painting, my subconscious was at work.

It was a week or so before that when I began reading the book Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson.  It’s about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene which was discovered in a market in Cairo in 1896 written in Coptic on ancient papyrus. It wasn’t published until 1955.

I got interested in the book when Janet Hamilton wrote about it on her blog. Then she sent me a copy which I’ve been slowly reading.

In her chapter, How A Feminist Sees an Angel,  Watterson writes “Angels are the thoughts, the memory, the sensation of love.  They are whatever comes and shifts us from being lost within ourselves, to seeing again, not with the ego, but with the eye of the heart.”

Watterson describes the scene from religious paintings of Mary Magdelene literally being lifted up by winged angels.  In my mind, I thought of each angel as a true and kind word releasing Mary Magdelene and all women from the idea of Original Sin.

Watterson writes “…know that this is the most important message of Mary’s gospel: we are inherently good.”

She explains that the point of Mary Magdalene’s gospel isn’t about “becoming someone else, someone better”.  It’s about being able to see who we really are, what is truly inside of us,  without the voices and images of ourselves that people have put on us and we have taken in.

“And in this moment of recognition” Watterson writes, “this is when we save ourselves, from the self that was never real to begin with.  This is when we see with the eye of the heart.”

The message felt very personal to me.  It took years for me to question the idea that we are born sinners and how the Bible often depicts women and their bodies as immoral and something to be ashamed of.

And I loved the image of Mary being lifted up by angels.  The symbolism of each one of us, shedding the lies and being lifted up by the truth. It made me wonder what my image of this phenomenon would look like.  How would I paint it?

This all came back to me when I read Donna’s comment.

Not so much in words, but in images.  The images I’ve been creating in my Owl Woman fabric painting.

I made an owl for my Owl Woman today.

I tried out some drawings with pencil on paper, but as often happens, when I drew it with my free-motion sewing machine, it came out just as I wanted it to.

It was something I just couldn’t do with pencil on paper.

In some ways, I feel like I really learned to draw with my sewing machine, like it taught me how to let go to be freer.  Somehow it takes away the expectation of perfection.

I still have to sew everything down.  I was going to start doing that today, but that owl called to me.

When I couldn’t get my sewing machine to work this morning, I turned to my Owl Woman.  I knew what I needed to do next and I didn’t need a sewing machine to do it.

I sat at my work table, with Owl Woman laid out in front of me, and stitch by stitch I removed three of the appliques from the old quilt.

I knew there was going to be a tree next to Owl Woman, I had seen it there when I was falling asleep one night last week. I wasn’t completely sure what it would look like, but I figured that out today.

It’s still just pinned, now I have to sew it down.

I have some idea what will come after that, but I’m also going to ask for a dream tonight and see if something comes to me before doing anything else.