I’m not sure how to think and write about it yet. It’s different from any quilt I’ve made before. Those little slivers of circles, the same ones I used in my Heron fabric painting make this quilt unique.
I’ve only used an arched line in one other quilt and never in this way. It has a lot of triangles too. Although I keep thinking of them as arrows.
The image below is what it looked like when I left my studio today. I had to hang it on my wall because by the time I took this picture the natural light was already fading and the colors are more accurate when its on the wall.
I keep fighting the urge to square it off but I want to keep the odd angles going.
Moons and Microbes Potholders for sale in my Etsy Shop.
I lost my courage.
I made these potholders over a month ago. I sewed them up without loops, making them into hot pads because I couldn’t figure out which way they went. I was so unsure about them, they sat in a pile in my studio until today.
I made these around the same time I started working on my “I Decide” quilt. And I had the same uncertainty about that. I put those cats aside for weeks before I picked them up again and started sewing them into a quilt.
The timing on the quilt worked out perfectly. I can almost believe I was waiting to read that article on the Abortion Undergroundin the Atlantic to find out what that quilt was really about.
Today I picked up the “hot pads” and was stunned that I had a hard time seeing which way was up. It was so obvious to me, that I took them apart and sewed loops on them.
I thought back to when I made them and remembered that it was just after I had my first Therapy session. Talking about my past for an hour, explaining to my new therapist why I was seeing her, it brought up the past in a way I hadn’t thought about it in years.
And it brought me back to the past. That’s where the uncertainty came from. The indecision. That feeling of not knowing which side was up was something I used to experience all the time.
That old feeling lasted about a week, then I got my confidence back again. But somehow every time I looked at the hot pads, doubt crept in.
Until today.
Today I looked at them and saw them for what they truly are. I saw clearly why I made them and how they grabbed and held my attention. It’s in the subtlety and nuances of the hand-painted yellow and purple fabric. In the contrast of the hard edges and bold shapes.
They’re sunrises and planets, landscapes, phases of the moon and microbes. They’re universal and infinitesimal.
They are different than any potholders I’ve made before and they inspire me.
Writing this makes me want to paint some fabric and cut it up to make more potholders like these and like nothing like them at all.
I sat on the ground, the fence in front of me, twisting wire around wire. I removed most of the mesh fencing I’d put up a couple of years ago. Some of it was still in good shape, but I liked the idea of replacing it all.
I’d used up 150 feet of turkey wire but still had to secure it to the fence that was already standing. That’s what I was doing when I saw the woodpeckers.
I don’t think they saw me, or if they did, they didn’t care. It was a pair of them. Small black and white bodies and wings with a touch of red on their heads. They landed on the trunk of the old Hawthorn tree directly in front of me.
They traveled the tree, up and down the trunk then flitting from branch to branch. Woodpeckers come to my feeder all winter long, but I’d never seen a pair flirting like these two were.
There are hawthorn trees sprouting all along the fence line. Their branches hang down over the fence in places and are covered in long thorns. Perfect for keeping the sheep away from the fence. There are lots of saplings too. I’m hoping they’ll grow quickly, filling in the spaces between our pasture and the neighbors.
I think once they’re done, my fences should last a while and when then fail, they’ll be easy to repair. I also won’t have to worry about the sheep getting their heads caught in them like the mesh fences.
I hope to get them all done this week, or by next weekend anyway. I’ll be going back to my studio tomorrow for the first time in over a week to finish up my Cat Calendar quilt. I’m looking forward to working with fabric again instead of wire.
It was a beautiful spring day today and I was happy to be working outside. But it will be good to get back to my studio and my hand could use the rest.
Looking through the turkey wire fencing at the green grass on our neighbors property.
It feels good to have finished designing my Cat Calendar quilt before our vacation. When we get back I’ll have something to work on to ease me back in.
I’m spending part of the day getting the loose ends tied up before we go. Doing my paperwork and banking and cleaning up my emails. I cleaned up my studio too, all the fabric is back on the shelves and the floor swept.
I also finished up some potholders, but I won’t be putting them in my Etsy Shop for sale until we get back from our trip since I won’t be able to mail them out till then.
Fate and my most recent batch of Scrap Bin potholders
The Etsy strike is over, but the campaign to pressure Etsy not to raise its rates along with the other demands will continue in different forms.
Today I sent out a letter to Etsy asking them to talk directly to the Etsy Strike Team which is representing us artists.
I finally found a therapist. I gave up on the idea of finding one after getting some help two years ago. The therapist I was seeing was very helpful but she left abruptly and I didn’t feel comfortable with the woman who took her place.
I’ve been looking, on and off since then. As in many places, most therapists in our area weren’t taking new patients. So a few months ago, when my anxiety was getting bad again, I went to my primary care doctor and discussed getting anti-anxiety medication.
She was very helpful. We talked for over forty-five minutes and I came to see that what I was really looking for was someone to tell me that I wasn’t a bad person because of the decisions I was making in regard to my relationship with my birth family. In our discussion, it became clear to me that I had to look inside of myself, not to someone else, to feel good about the decisions I was making.
My doctor didn’t think I needed medication and I agreed with her. I didn’t really want to take medication if I didn’t absolutely have to.
It was after that conversation that I started meditating a half-hour a day. In that half-hour, I find that I am, for the most part, able to get grounded and come back to myself and feel less anxious.
I wanted to write about this when it happened, and I tried, but I think I was too close to it. I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
Two weeks ago, when Jon’s therapist told him she knew a therapist, that she highly recommended, who had an opening, I called her immediately. I was doing okay by myself, but I knew there would be a time when I wished I had a professional to talk to.
Today I had my second session.
The first was two weeks ago and after I left it felt worse than I had in a long time.
Telling my story, going back to my childhood, and reliving certain memories threw me off. I had dredged up lots of old feelings, the ones I usually try to avoid. It took me back to a bad time and I got lost in it. When I got home I had returned emotionally to an old place. One where I had a hard time feeling good about myself, where I lost confidence and decision-making became difficult.
I found I couldn’t go back to work in my studio after that first visit. My work is so much about being confident enough to make one decision after decision.
So today, when I had my second appointment with my therapist, I planned my day knowing that I probably wouldn’t be working in my studio after it was over. But I had the morning to do some work on my Cat Calendar quilt and I knew I could probably spend the afternoon fixing the fence in the back pasture.
This therapy session was not as emotional as the first. We talked about how at certain times, my emotions are at odds with my reasoning. My therapist said that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help.
I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I know it has to do with being able to change my thinking.
We had a Zoom session which went well (the first one was in person) and when it was over, I felt hopeful and am looking forward to getting started with this new therapy.
I’m grateful and feel fortunate, and lucky, to have found a therapist who I feel so comfortable with.
I’ll write about it when I can and when I can articulate what I’m experiencing and have something meaningful to say.
One thing I didn’t know and might be helpful to anyone reading this who is looking for a therapist is that if you’ve seen a therapist before, even if it was many years ago, most of them will view you as their patient. So even if they say on their answering machine that they’re not taking new patients, you might not be considered a new patient, but one of their regular patients.
When I look back at it now, I see the words “A low hum of menace” stitched in purple thread. I remember that feeling, the uncertainty I and so many other people were feeling. The expectation of the unknowable.
There’s still so much we don’t know, but it does seem evident that the virus isn’t traveling through the mail. I don’t know of anyone who is still washing down packages or leaving mail in their garage overnight.
But the USPS is once again on people’s minds.
This time in regards to mail-in voting, a necessary service for so many people, like me and Jon, who don’t want to risk going to a polling station to vote, during the pandemic.
And like everything else regarding the Corona Virus, there is political controversy surrounding it.
Voter suppression has a long history in our country, beginning with the Founding Fathers who severely restricted who could vote. It has manifested in some complicated ways over the centuries and this year it’s coming, from our Federal Government, in the form of severely limiting the mail service.
Ever since I started my business, I’ve had a very personal relationship with the post office, which I visit several times a week to ship my art, and the people who work there.
When I think of the first months of the Corona Virus Shut-down and how the postal clerks at my post office, Wendy and Josie, believed they may have been risking their lives to keep the post office going, I get choked up at their courage and commitment.
What I don’t get is how the Post office was important enough to keep open and potentially risk the lives of the people who worked there a few months ago and now it’s just a financial burden.
I made some practice drawing last night as I was listening to the Democratic Convention. Because of our history, I understand that some of us will probably always have to fight to vote. But I never imagined we’d have to fight for our post office.
You can see the history of my Corona Kimono since that first April 6th entry here.
The practice drawings I did last night on the back of an envelope.My Corona Kimono so far.
My Belly Dancing Class. Don’t look for me dancing, I’m taking the picture.
“Instead of saying you’ll never be able to do it,” Jon said to me, “why don’t you say, I can do this.”
Yeah, I read “The Little Train who Could” but only later in life. “I think I can, I think I can“, wasn’t part of my early neural system. My little engine hummed “Who do you think you are anyway? You can’t do that.”
So I go to Belly Dancing Class every week for the past six months and I think to myself, I’m not a dancer, I can’t even clap to a beat, I’ll never be able to do this, but it’s kinda fun.
No pressure, no expectations.
On those few occasions when Julz tells me I’m doing something well or even just better than before, I think hmm, what do ya know? As if I had nothing to do with it.
And yet, slowly, I’m seeing that there are some things I’m learning. I first noticed it when, after a couple of months, I found I knew enough to have questions.
And with some practice, I discovered that I actually was able to count out a beat and eventually even step to it, even using the right foot!
Now, I can even imagine being able to Zill someday. (Zills are the small cymbals you wear on your fingers and play while dancing) I’m beginning to believe it does become automatic, just as Kathleen told me. (My fingers do two different things when I typing, so why can’t they do two different things when I’m Zilling?)
“Once you get it into your brain and body memory”, both Julz and Kathleen repeat again and again, “you won’t have to think about it anymore and you’ll just do it”.
So now I’m seeing I’m leaning something new each class.
Yesterday I realize that I’m very tight.
I always think of my body as being limber, but that’s different from being loose. Your body has to be soft and loose to belly dance.
I’m moving my body In ways I never even imagined and discovering muscles I never knew existed.
I still often thing “I can’t do this” But I’m trying to change that brain memory. If I can learn to Zill I can learn to change “I can’t do this” to “I think I can.”
Now mark you Calendars:
On May 19th at 7pm at the at the Mason Lodge in Bennington Vermont, Belly Dancers from all over the region will gather and dance to benefit Meals on Wheels. It’s only $10 and there’s food and raffles tool.
This happens every year and it’s the event that got me interested in Belly Dancing. This year I’m going to help design the stage set. I’ve never designed a stage set before, but I think I can do it.
In some ways, I’ve been thinking about making this quilt for almost a year.
It started when my friend Cathy gave me a book before I went to India. It’s called Tantra Song.
The book has reproductions of painting that author Franck Anrdre Jamme collected in the 1970’s in Rajasthan, India. Although the paintings are contemporary and anonymous, the designs originated in the 17th century, a form of Tantric art used to meditate on.
One of the reproductions of Trantic art from the book. I was inspired by the colors and shapes.
The paintings in the book reminded me of so many of the Gee’s Bend Quilts that first inspired me to start making quilts.
Quilt by Gloria Hoppins, one of the Gee’s Bend Quilters.
When I started sewing the hospital green and red (which are from scrubs that poet, and nurse Jackie Thorne gave me.) together I was expecting to make a rectangular shape out of them. But as I pieced it together, another shape evolved.
The shape was pleasing and somehow familiar to me, although I couldn’t place it. But I decided to trust it. I knew it somehow had meaning for me even if I didn’t understand it.
I turned the shape around and settled on it in an “upright” position. Like a giant boulder in an ancient stone calendar, or one post to a stone lintel.
I’ve never made a quilt with a shape that wasn’t all angles and easy to sew together. I decided to hand stitch the shape onto a ground. Making tiny dots and dashes of stitches along the edge of the shape.
It wasn’t until this morning, when I took down the scarf I was using as a curtain in the bedroom (with the cooler days, there’s no reason to keep the sun out anymore) that I saw the shape in the rock hanging from a piece of orange yarn alongside the window.
The loom weight
When I first saw the rock, which Jon had stashed in a copper pot in his office, I thought it might be a fishing weight. Jon had no idea where the rock came from, but I assumed someone found it on the property at Old Bedlam Farm. And although Jon wasn’t really interested in rocks at the time, he apparently thought it special enough to save.
The rock made the move to the new house and I just “discovered” it a year or so ago and hung it on the window.
It was in one of my Goddess books that I saw a photo of a rock, much the same as this one, and it was described as a weight used on a loom. The rock was special enough, even without me knowing it’s purpose, but the idea that it might have been a part of a loom, made it feel almost holy to me. A relic.
And wouldn’t that explain the comfort and familiarity of the shape.
I finished designing the quilt this morning. Not a reproduction of the Tantric paintings, but my own creation bringing together many different influences and elements, some I was aware of and some from my subconscious.
Grey Day, this quilt, named after Jon’s poem (yet another element) isn’t finished yet. I still have to back and tack it. And I’m planning on using that idea of the dots and dash stitching that I did around the shape in the tacking.
I’m thinking of tiny red dots and dashes on the brown ground and maybe the pink edge too….
When I done with it, Grey Day will be for sale for $425.00 + $20 shipping.
It’s a spring and fall ritual. Picking up last autumn’s wool from the Mill in the spring, shearing the sheep, then dropping off the new wool at the Mill. Then the same thing in the fall. Having the sheep and selling the wool has created a new calendar at the farm. It breaks the year up into two halves. One that starts in the spring and ends in the fall and another that begins in the fall and ends in the spring.
When Jon and I first decided to get sheep, it was a practical decision. They’d be good for Red, and Jon loves to herd and I could sell the wool. But, it’s become more than that. The sheep change the rhythm of the farm. Red herds the sheep, the donkeys protect the sheep, Jon and I take care of the sheep and they give us wool, the joy of herding, photos and stories and soon, lambs. Without them, each of us lose a job, a purpose. Sure we could live without them, but they complete a creative circle, connecting us all in a unique way.
Then their wool goes out into the world, scattered across the country, so that someone in California, or South Carolina is knitting or weaving a piece of Bedlam Farm. And the circle grows. This time I’m going to keep a skein from myself. One of Tess’. I don’t know how I’ll use it yet, but I feel like I want to take the whole process a step further, not just selling the wool, but being part of its transformation. And connecting me even further to everyone else out there who’s doing the same.
Jon and I have decided that we’re not going to have an Open House this year. You can still see the artist who have participated in many of our Open Houses below. Most of them have Website and Etsy Pages, so please take a look…..
This is a video of the Sister’s of the Shawl dancing in October 2018 at the Bedlam Farm Open House.
You can buy Mary Kellogg’s new book from Connie at Battenkill Books, . It’s $10. I hope to have Mary Kellogg Jackie Thorne and Amy Herring and Carol Conklin back next year reading their poetry.
Here’s some of the artists who I hope to have back to our new Open House next Fall….
Carol Conklin doing yoga in one of her batik tank tops
Batik artist, Carol Law Conklin has become a regular in my School House Gallery.
Carols makes her work available in many different forms. She reproduces her original Batiks onto so many different items, as well as selling the originals, there’s a way for almost anyone to own and enjoy a piece of Carol’s art.
You can see Carol’s work including her original batiks here on her website Amity Farm Batiks.
Handspun and knit shawl by Suzy Fatzinger
I hope to have Suzy Fatzinger spinning her wool again.
Some of Suzy’s wool comes from her own goats and bunnies, but she’s always experimenting and combining wool from many sources. She’s making shawls for the Open House as I write this.
The Tops of Pincushions that Jane is making for the Open House
Jane McMillen and her soft sculpture Pin Cushions are always welcome at the Open House. You can read about about Jane and her work here on her blog Little House Home Arts.
By Abrah Griggs
Abrah Griggs know insects. She’s captures them and their personalities in her drawings. She’s a wonderful artist with a great sense of humor. You can see more of her work on her blog In My Nature.
Bee Cup By Sarah Davis
Sarah Davis is a local artist who makes mostly ceramic cups. But she also grows and sells flowers and gathers greens to make wreathes from them for the holidays. She sells all her work locally. All that she does can be seen in the original designs she creates with her ceramics. Click here for a link to her Etsy Shop.
By Sara Kelley
Once again I’ll have original paintings and prints by Sara Kelly. Her work, often based on nature is down to earth and mystical at the same time. Sara is also a graphic designer and helps me and Jon create our business cards and post cards. Sara will have a new calendar next year. You can see all her work on her website Sara Kelly Graphics and Design.
By Rachel Barlow
Rachel Barlow has become a regular at the Bedlam Farm Open House too. Both her writing and painting and drawing is alway honest and meaningful and beautifully done. You can see more of Rachel’s work on her blog Picking My Battles.
Kitty Farnham,” A View of the Field. “
I hope Kitty Farnham will be back next year demonstrating how she makes her original drawings…
Flying Vulva Pillow by Maria Wulf
And I’ll be there too.
Bedlam Farm is located 5 minutes north of the Town of Cambridge at 2502 State Route 22 Cambridge NY 12816. You can email me at [email protected] if you have any questions.
While you’re here, visit the town of Cambridge NY, just 5 minutes away there are some special things going on in town. You can visit Connie and Marilyn at Battenkill Books You can stop into the Round House Cafe for breakfast, lunch or coffee and baked goods. And don’t miss Heather at the bead shop, Over the Moon Beads, where she sell her wonderfully colorful socks and other magical things. There’s also a new brewery in town. The Argyle Brewery is in the old Train Depot building on Main Street.
Also visit Jacks Out Back Antiques and the other Antique shops in the same building. You can also have breakfast or lunch at Country Girls Diner and dinner at Salvano’s on Main Street and get good food and snacks at the Cambridge Co-op. It’s all within a few blocks, easy walking.
There’s plenty of places to stay nearby from B&B’s to hotels.
Here’s some of them.
Motel Cambridge 51 South Park St Off Route 22 Cambridge NY 12816
The Laughing Rabbit 60 Dickensen Road Buskirk, New York 12028 recumbentsandrooms.com 518 686-0175 (Dot and David will take good care of you)
Hopkins House Farm B&B Hopkins House Farm 6603 State Route 22 Salem, NY 12865 914-205-3460 518-409-1784 (Say hi to Charlie and Aggie, the Inn Keepers, for me)
Redgate Lodging 72 Redgate Lane Shushan, NY 12873 (518) 854 – 7350 redgatelodging.com
Black Creek Farm House Inn Jill Fronhofer 1084 Country Rte 30 Salem, NY 12865 Phone: 518.854.7620 [email protected]
