I found myself making these potholders in groups of colors. One leading to the next until there was nothing left and I had to find new combinations to work with.
I have nine new potholders in my Etsy Shop. They are all $20 each + $5 shipping for one or more.You can see them all and buy them here.
Last week I made the mistake of ordering 100 stickers of my Owl Woman instead of magnets. So with each order from my Etsy Shop, whether you buy, potholders, posters, postcards, or magnets, you’ll get one of my Owl Woman stickers along with a “Shield Of Words“, Thank You postcard.
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.
First I poured boiling water into a cup filled with half a cup of black tea leaves. I brought it to my studio to steep. It’s still steeping. Tomorrow I’ll use it to tea stain the face of Owl Woman.
Then I stitched her eye. Two different browns, orange, metallic gold thread, and black marker for the pupil.
I woke up thinking about her. From 6:15 to 7 am, still half asleep, I pictured how I would stitch her eye and the color thread I’d use. Then the idea of using the same twisted pink yarn I outlined my “Cloud Is A Whisper” tree in, came to me. I imagined how I would sew it down, by hand. I saw her tea-stained face, darker than the tea staining I used on the woman in “Shield of Words“.
After that, in my mind, I tried a few different ways of applying the pieces of applique, that I had removed from the quilt to her dress. By the time I got up, I knew I would be sewing them down, using my free motions machine. I’d create a simplified feather design, leaving the edges untethered to give it a little extra dimension.
Sewing the “feather” to her dress
But by this afternoon, once I had actually sewed the feathers on, I moved onto the beak and owl eyes/breasts.
There was no question for me what the color of the beak should be. I saw it immediately.
I had a piece of fabric just the right balance of orange/yellow, but then found a piece of one of the collages I’d made earlier. It was the same color except it had some collage layering and I liked the weight and texture of it better than the fabric.
It’s on a piece of canvas with a layer of matt medium over it. I wanted to stitch it down with embroidery thread, but it was so thick I had to poke holes in it.
You can’t see it in this photo, but the blue fabric I used for the eyes/breasts is iridescent. I still have to sew the beads on at the centers, but I’m not completely sure about them yet.
This is what she looked like when I left my studio today. I don’t have any concrete idea how I’ll deal with her arms, legs, and feet yet. But I do know how to make her hair, so I’ll probably work on that next.
My Shield of Words and I Belong To Me magnets are for sale in my Etsy Shop.
I never thought to put my magnets on my car, but Jon likes having them on his. They’re right above the handle on the driver’s side, so he sees them every time he gets in his car.
One day he came home from Walgreens and told me that the woman at the drive-through loved my magnets and was going to check out my blog.
That’s all it takes to make me feel good.
I wasn’t sure if the magnets would do well on the car, exposed to all the elements. But my I Belong To Memagnet has been there for months and it hasn’t faded at all. So far they’ve endured the snow, rain, and sun. They even survived the snowstorm that all but buried the cars in the driveway.
Both these magnets are 4″ x 2 3/4″ and are $6 + $1 shipping for one or more. You can buy them and all my other magnets in my Etsy Shop. Just click here.
My I Am Enough Postcards and Magnets available in my Etsy Shop
Kathy bought a pack of myI Am Enough Postcards and left me a message saying that she was a counselor and gave them to her clients.
I remember talking to Jon about the fabric painting that is the image for this postcard on our podcast. It was during that conversation that I realized that the single image of the goddess I was creating was complete without any other elements.
She was an illustration of the idea “I Am Enough”. But that’s how art works. So often it’s my art that tells me what I’m thinking, what’s going on inside of me.
I made that fabric painting a while ago, but since I started making my work into postcards and magnets and posters, they have a longer life. And they get to reach so many more people.
Now I have a good collection of magnets and postcards, all affirmations, some accompanied by words, some just images.
I love when I get a message like Kathy’s, knowing that my art is doing good in the world.
Next week I’m going to start the process of having my Shield of Words made into a magnet and postcards. Now she’s in her new home, doing her good work on Kim’s wall. Soon, she’ll be able to be in the homes of so many more people.
And that reminds me of the importance of artists and the power of art in all its forms.
I had the paints all mixed and leftover from my Shield Of Words. So used what I had on the back of an old quilt, just putting some color, shapes and lines on the fabric.
I hung it on the line to dry until it started to rain. Now it’s hanging on my studio wall. My idea is to find images in the paint and use my free-motion sewing machine to bring them out.
I have a feeling I’ll be using more paint on this either before or after I do some stitching and who knows what else. I’m open to whatever wants to happen.
I still have potholders to piece together, but otherwise, everything that I’ve been working on is done. So it’s time to start something new.
I went looking around my studio this morning and the practice moth that I made for my Shield Of Words, fluttered her wings at me.
I thought she might make a nice pillow.
Then I got the idea to stitch the meaning of moth around her. So I went back to the blog World Birds that I referenced when I made Shield of Words, then started stitching.
I started pulling out fabrics to sew around the moth and words, but nothing was working. That made me think that maybe it’s the beginning of a quilt. But that wasn’t working either.
So I’ll get back to it tomorrow and see what happens then.
As I ironed all the brown scraps of fabric from the bag that Crik gave me marked “Scraps from my Grandma“, I wondered if all the work of sorting and washing, ironing and sorting again was worth the time I was spending to prepare them to make into potholders.
My idea was to hold onto some of the potholders I make from this bag of scraps and have them available for people to buy when it comes closer to the holidays. Last year I found that people wanted more potholders than I could make up to a couple of weeks before Christmas.
This kind of thinking ahead is unusual for me. But it was the bag of scraps that set my plan in motion. As if their arrival was an affirmation of my idea.
I only had to start sewing the potholders and my doubts left me.
Piecing together all those old odd shapes of fabric was entrancing. At first I had a hard time throwing the smallest scrap away even if unusable, thinking that it had survived all these years. And I felt a connection to Crik’s grandma, who, like me, obviously understood the value of those small leftover pieces of fabric.
So I was back at it again today.
This time I dumped the brown scraps in the washing machine and took them to my studio still damp. One by one I peeled them apart from each other and flattened them one on top of the other getting a feel for the patterns and colors.
And as I created a temporary collage on my work table, I saw in the fabrics the leaf-covered forest floor from my afternoon walk in the woods.
The idea that these scraps are not worth my time comes from a voice inside of me that I don’t choose to nurture.
Next week I want to finish working on the quilt for Liz, my shearer, who will be coming at the end of the month to shear the sheep and bring me two new ewes for my flock. And I can’t wait to get back to my Shield of Words fabric painting.
But I know how powerful the call of those scraps on my work table are.
Like the piles of firewood that Greg Burch drops outside my studio window all summer long that taunt me into stacking them for the winter, the scraps of fabric will sing like sirens, demanding after all theses years, be made into something both beautiful and useful.
I already had the next pieces of fabric of my Owl Quilt laid out when I left to meet Jackie. So when I got back home aftward, I made a few adjustments and sewed it together.
Then I added a strip of fabric to the right side of the quilt and the plaid border.
This is what I’m thinking happens next…
….but who knows. In the morning I might see and feel something different.
I wasn’t aware of the crack, the breaking of something inside of me.
I wasn’t surprised to hear of one more man sexually abusing a woman or a teenage girl. Like most women, I expect it. I know it as a truth, as “the way things are“.
It’s such a good thing what’s happening, women (and with some men too) finally feeling safe enough to speak out. Finally being heard and for the most part actually believed.
What I didn’t expect was the anger.
My anger. I didn’t even know what it was when it started to bubble up in me last night. I only knew I was feeling something that I didn’t recognize. Something I didn’t know what to do with.
At that point, what came to my mind were the few pairs of white underpants in my dresser drawer. I never wore them, I don’t like white underwear, but they came in the package with the other colors. Suddenly I was driven to make those underpants mine.
I sat at the dining room table with a couple of black markers and started drawing on my underpants.
I couldn’t tell you why, but there was nothing else I wanted to do at that moment.
Then I had a dream…
I was in a museum or zoo. There was an old Chimpanzee and a deer-like animal sitting on a couch together cuddling, as if they were on display. The Chimpanzee was aggressively massaging the deer and singing a song called “What is Love ?” I knew, in the wild, the Chimpanzee was the predator and the deer the prey, but the Chimpanzee had no teeth and his nails had been removed. So at first what looked like a loving relationship between the two animals turned out to really be a predator trying desperately to kill his prey, but unable to.
Maybe I was creating a shield, claiming my body as my own by drawing on my underpants.
In Sue Monk Kidd’s book TheDance of the Dissident Daughter, she writes about the myth of the Minotaur. The Minotaur is a creature, half man and half bull. He lives in a labyrinth under the palace of King Minos. The Kings daughter Ariadne, helps Theseus find a way out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur if he promises to marry her and take her away from her father’s kingdom.
Kidd writes: In the female psyche, the Minotaur represents negative, uncivilized (beastly), masculine power, the part the old King had driven underground. …the Minotaur is the bullish, bullying, bulldozing force of the patriarchy internalized in the cellar of a woman’s psyche. It is a presence that works invisibly, hampering, limiting, driving, even destroying a woman’s inner and outer life.
When I read this, I immediately thought of Donald Trump. How with his being elected president, the “old part of the king” (or as in my dream, the true nature of the Chimpanzee) has risen up from the underground, how, now it’s all out in the open.
I’ve been silently cheering each time another woman comes forward and tells her story.
I’ve been allowing myself to feel so good about it, I forgot to let myself feel the pain of it.
And then, last night, the anger.
Slowly seeping through the widening crack, till it broke wide open this morning. It crashed through my body, coming out in curses and tears. A life time of internalized anger. My very own underground…surfacing, spewing hot rocks and fire. “I’m angry”, I yelled through tears, “I’m so fucking angry.”
It came in waves and bursts lasting an hour or so. I let it come, working its way though me. I’ve felt anger before, but not like this. It wasn’t free-flowing, or misdirected.
I knew what the anger is about.
It’s about my personal experience of growing up in a family where my sister and I weren’t seen as equals to my brother, and my mother was subservient to my father. Where I was told that if I walked past a group of men, instead of crossing the street, it was my fault when they made lewd remarks about me. And how that dynamic lead me into an early marriage, that I thought was an escape, but turned out to be another relationship where my feeling and thoughts were dismissed and ignored.
It’s the anger that comes from with living in a society that accepts sexism as if it’s normal. That in so many institutionalized ways tells women and girls that they are subordinate to men. A society whose culture is to silence women through intimidation and fear.
It’s the anger I tucked away, replacing it with fear, shame and confusion. Blaming myself for men’s inappropriate sexual behavior and at the same time wanting a man’s approval at almost any price. And the frustration of not being able to understand or articulate it all.
It’s not one thing, not one incident in my life, but a million little things. Words, images, touches, gestures that over a lifetime have made me feel inferior to men. And I sometimes wonder what my life could have been like if I hadn’t believed that lie for so long.
The anger has subsided now. Maybe I released it all. Although I have a feeling there’s more inside of me. I do feel like there’s some healing going on. And somehow, drawing on my underpants, telling my story that way, is a part of it.
