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I brought the quilt into the house and, as I always do, laid it out on the bed in our guestroom.  Conveniently it’s also my shipping office so I don’t have far to go after I trim the loose threads and run a lint roller over it before I put it in a box and print out a shipping label.

This is my final look at the quilt to make sure that everything is just right. The quilt’s name, with my initials and the date, are stitched in the bottom right corner.

I folded “Goddess Of The Hunt” and put it in a plastic bag with a thank you postcard to Jenn, and my business card.  Then it all goes into a box.

The shipping costs have been eased somewhat since Pirate Ship, the company I get my mailing labels from (they are less expensive than USPS), started offering shipping through UPS.  It does mean a trip into Greenwhich, which is a half hour round trip to mail it at CVS.  But I’m happy to do it, since it saves so much in shipping.  And it’s a pretty ride like most around here.

Before the pharmacies became drop-off centers for Fed Ex and UPS, it would have been an hour trip one way to drop off a package. So I’m grateful for it.

I do like the way Goddess Of The Hunt looks on a bed.  Carol Conklin’s tree fabric on the bottom shows up so well and anchors the quilt in a very earthy way. The rest of the quilt is divided up nicely on the flat surface too.

Jenn, who is buying the quilt said it’s for her husband.  She bought my quilt  “A Gentle Place” which has a similar look and also has Jon’s old Chamois shirts in it and Carol’s Batiks.

They do make a good pair. And now they each have a quilt of their own.

Check out Carol’s Etsy Shop Amity Farm Batik, She not only has her original batiks for sale, but all kinds of things made from prints of her work, including clothing, housewares, and fabric.  Lot of good shopping for the holidays and you’ll be supporting a wonderful artist and person. Just click here. 

“At three, Artemis knew exactly what she wanted: a bow and arrows, a pack of hounds to hunt with, nymphs to accompany her, a tunic short enough to run in, mountains and wilderness as her special places and eternal chastity.  Zeus granted her wishes, plus the privilege of making the selections herself.  Artemis was granted autonomy and would never be violated or overpowered by male power.” Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses In Older Women.

This is the third time I’m writing this.  With each draft, I get a little closer.  This time, like a frying pan hitting me over the head, I got it.  Diana, also known as Artemis, is the Goddess of the Hunt.  She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it.

But what does this have to do with me, I wonder.  Is the message that I’ve already gotten what I want, because in many ways I feel like I do have the life I want.  And I did make it happen.  Or is the message to become the hunter?

When I placed the piece of fabric with the stag on it to the right of the full moon, I knew this quilt was about Diana, or Artemis as she is known in Greek mythology.  The Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon.

After that, as I continued to work on the quilt I had a strong urge to make a connection between the sky and the earth.   There were two people who were interested in my quilt when it was mostly blue.  But mostly blue wasn’t what the quilt wanted to be.  The cold blues needed the balance of the warm earth tones.

The two needed to come together.

I’ve made art about Diana/Artemis before, but I know when a goddess appears to me in this way it’s for a reason.  She has something to tell me that wasn’t true before or that I wasn’t ready to hear.

So I followed my instincts, adding the “constellation” animals to the top of the quilt and Carol Conklin’s line of trees, grounding it at the bottom. The rusty fern fabric that Sharon sent me even had the name, Fernwood printed on it.  Fern Wood are the words I think of when walking a path in my neighbor’s woods which is bordered by ferns.

When I was done designing it, the quilt spoke to me of my place in the woods, where the earth, sky, and water come together.  A place where I feel I belong.

Then I read about Diana/Artemis, in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book Goddesses In Older Women, and I saw something else.

I found that  Diana/Artemis represented autonomous women who have a spiritual connection to the natural world. That they often work alone and challenge the norms of society, either by trying to change them or by living life differently than they dictate.

I see now that the Diana inside of me has been emerging slowly over my lifetime.  She would show up making a subtle change, only to be squelched.

But now Diana’s message to me is clear.

This weekend, for the fourth time, I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House.  Like the goddesses who keep coming back to me, this story returns to me again and again.   But it’s only in reading it now that I see why.  It’s about Eleanor Vance, the main character (along with the house itself) in the book.

In Eleanor’s fears and fantasies, I see clearly who I used to be.

Like Eleanor, I was always worried that I’d said the wrong thing and was terrified about what people really thought of me. Instead of taking people’s words at face value,  I was always wondering or trying to decipher what they “really meant”  And the running, I always wanted to be somewhere other than where I was. But most important, like Eleanor, I was looking outside of myself to be rescued. I was too afraid to look inward and rescue myself.

But I’m not like Eleanor anymore.  I’m actually more like Diana.

Unlike Eleanor,  I  will get help when I need it, but I continue to look inward and know that only I can rescue myself.  And like Diana,  I make my own decisions and rules.  I’m living my own true life, paying attention to the call of the natural world and listening to my inner voice.

But do I know what I want and am I willing to go get it, like a hunter would?  As I said, I feel like I’ve done this already in some ways, but have I incorporated it into my everyday life? Has Diana come into my life to remind me of my own power?  Is this a slap upside the head?

It seems my quilt is more of a question than an answer.

Maybe by the time I finish backing and tacking it, I’ll have some answers.

Goddess Of The Hunt will be for sale when I finish it. It’s $425 + shipping. If you’re interested in it you can email me at [email protected].  Just click here.

Pink Moon is the biggest quilt I’ve ever made.  I didn’t mean to make it so big, it’s just how it turned out.

I did use the brown fabric I bought on Friday, which was just right.   Tomorrow I’ll work on the backing and start putting the quilt together and maybe even get to start tacking it.

Pink Moon is already sold.  I had a few people ask about it.  Chris was interested in the quilt for her son. She told me he had some of Carol Conklin’s batiks and loved them.

Carol’s moon and tree batik added just the other element that the quilt needed.  The colors were just right but also how she represents the earths layering from earth to sky.  The same is evident in the “pottery shard” pieces that I made with the woven Guatemalan fabric and the cranes and butterflies I used to frame them.

You can see more of Carol’s batiks on her website Amity Farm Batik.  She reproduces her batiks on all kinds of functional art from housewares to clothing.  You can see them all and buy them here. 

The moon seemed to grow out of the treetops like a flower last night.  The pink aura which my camera seemed to create adds to the illusion. I sent my photo of the moon to my friend Suzy.  We often trade full moon photos.

Last nights moon was a supermoon, meaning it was closer to the earth because of its elliptical orbit. It was also known as the Pink Moon, because of the pink flowers that grow this time of year.

But the moon in the trees also reminded me of one of Carol Conklin’s batiks that I was thinking of using in my new quilt.  I pulled it out yesterday, the colors and subject matter working so well with my “pottery shard” quilt pieces.

First I finished up framing the last two shards, then I tried to figure out how they would all become a whole quilt.

By the end of the day, this is what I came up with. I may keep adding fabric to the individual pieces until they collide and fit together. But I won’t know for sure until I start working on it.

This is a bit of a different way for me to work on a quilt, having the pieces all set within the space of the quilt.  It’s sure to change as I continue to work on it.  Right now I can’t picture it finished, but I do know it will happen.

Yesterday as I was cleaning my studio, I pulled a few pieces of fabric from my piles and put them aside.

After I was done cleaning, I laid them on my floor.  I wasn’t ready to begin working yesterday, but when I got into my studio this morning, I began with the grid of Emily’s painted fabric and the old quilt squares.

Sometime last year, at the beginning of the Pandemic, Emily gave me the painted fabric pieces. We, like so many people, were working on being hopeful.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

I’ve been think of Emily’s “hope” paintings as I’ve come to know them, since then.  But it was only this morning that I knew I would be making something with them.

In one of my piles of fabric, I had two birds that I quickly drew on a piece of linen a couple of months ago.  The seemed the perfect addition to Emily’s painted pieces.

But I wanted to sew them. So I found a couple of old linen napkins laid a piece of red fabric under one along with batting and backing and drew the first bird using my sewing machine.

Then I cut away the white linen to reveal the red beneath it.

Then I made a green bird…

…and started putting them together…

I wanted to keep the uneven shapes of Emily’s painted pieces, so I’m adding fabric to them….

This is as far as I got today.  More tomorrow.

Two weeks ago I was sure winter was here.  A few cold days in a row, then one that was so cold the first thing I did was take my wooden storm windows out of the barn and put them on my studio.

Even though I cover them up with a drop cloth, they always dirty in the fall.  But it was too cold to wash windows that day.  I was just thinking of being warm.

Then the warm spell.  It’s been going on for days and I know won’t last much longer.

Washing my studio windows was the perfect excuse to spend some time outside.

So I removed the storms, washed them, and my studio windows outside and in.  I dusted away the cobwebs and moved a couple of spiders outside.  Then, while I was in the cleaning mood, I got out the vacuum and poked the hose under all the furniture, sucking up the summer and fall dust bunnies.

After a lunch of Borscht on the back porch in the sun, I sewed hangers for my latest batch of potholders and backed and stuffed the pillow I started last week.

Linda saw the flat front of the pillow hanging on my studio wall in my video from Friday and bought it before I even got to finish it.

It’s a combination of a piece of one of my collages, fabric from my friend and batik artist Carol Law Conklin,some squares of fabric that Fran sent me from Canada and a few old quilt squares (probably dating back to the 1930s or 40s) from Crik’s box of fabric.

Looking at the pillow top hanging on my wall before I finished it, the words Between Worlds came to me.

I  think it has something to do with the layering of the fabric.  But also how the separate pieces of fabric all came together from such disparate places and times and fit together so perfectly.

The pillow has a feeling of not being exactly one thing or another.  More about moving and shifting than one single thing.