Search Results for: owl woman

Backing My Shibori Hankie Quilt

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The back of my quilt

I turned on the heat in my studio when I let the dogs out this morning. I wanted to give it and my sewing machine a chance to warm up before getting to work.  After morning chores and sending off a couple of packs of Owl Woman Postcards, I got right to work on the back of my quilt.

 

Once I have the back sewed together, I lay the quilt on top of it, with the fabric right sides together. Then I trim the backing to the size of the quilt top.

After that I get my big roll of batting, roll it out onto the quilt and cut it to size.

Then I pin the two pieces of fabric and the batting together.  Next I sew them together on my sewing machine, leaving a small opening in the bottom.

When it’s all sewn together, I turn the quilt inside out and hand stitch the bottom.  Then I iron the edges flat.

Now the quilt is hanging from a few rings from the beam in my studio where I will tack it with blue yarn.  The last thing I’ll do is stitch the name of the quilt, the year and my initials on the bottom of it.

My Shibori Hankie Quilt is sold.

Curating My Etsy Shop

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I Am Enough poster, postcards and magnet and my Rainy Season Potholder.  All for sale in my Etsy Shop.

“I do enough, I have enough, I am enough. All is well.” ” That’s how my yoga teacher starts off each class,” Susan wrote to me.

Susan sent one of my I Am Enough posters to her teacher and I’ve adopted that mantra.

At night, when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes, put my hand on my belly to feel my breath move in and out, and repeat those words over and over.  Sometimes, I imagine writing them with my sewing machine. The grand up-swoop of the cursive “I” the repetitive mounds of the “m”.

This morning as I was packing my “Hope” quilt into its box, I noticed I had only three potholders in my Etsy Shop and decided to spend some time this week making more. But I also noticed how the three potholders I did have went so well with some of my magnets and postcards.

It’s the curator in me that wanted to see them together.

So I arranged them on the floor and took some pictures.

They make a nice little package I thought.  And remembered how Jody bought one of my magnets and a Flying Vulva decal as part of a gift for a friend who was turning 50.

I’ll have some new Intuitive Patchwork Potholders in my shop sometime next week.  Until then I do have it stocked with reproductions of my fiber art in a few different forms.   With each order, I send one of my Shield of Words Postcards and an Owl Woman sticker.

And I’ll leave you with a message from Stephanie about Mary Kellogg’s book This Time Of Life. A five-star review in my opinion…

“I received Mary’s book a couple of days ago and was moved to tears by her poems. Please tell her thank you from me and how very much I could relate to them.” Stephanie

My I’m Not A Ghost Postcards and Magnets and my Pothotholders, Ins and Ions and Thinking of Spring for sale in my Etsy Shop. 
Mary Kelloggs Book This Time Of Life for sale in my Etsy Shop. 

The Last Of My Scrap Bin Potholders For Sale

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Scrap Bin Potholders for sale here. 

It’s the last of my Scrap Bin Potholders.  For a while anyway.

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 Owl Woman sticker free with any order from my Etsy Shop
ABC and Squares, Triangles and Stripes, Scrap Bin Potholders.
A few more of my Scrap Bin Potholders

My 1930’s Penimaid Rick Rack

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Yesterday I was going through a box of rickrack that people have given me over the years thinking I might use it somewhere on my Owl Woman when I saw the deep orange/yellow.  Drawn to the color, I pulled it out and really saw it for the first time.

It was different from the others I had which were wrapped in plastic and clearly not as old.  When I turned it over there was a price tag on the back.  It cost 8 cents.

At first I thought it might be from the 1950’s but when I saw the price tag, it seemed to me it had to be older.  I mean the last time I bought something for two cents,  it was a single piece of candy in the early 1970s.

So I looked online and up popped a newspaper ad for JC Penny with sewing notions that cost 8 cents each.  It was from 1930.

My mother was born in 1929.  When I look at the RickRack I picture my mother, who will be 92 this year,  as a baby in a tenement somewhere in The Bronx.  I try to imagine my grandmother holding her, but I can only see her as an older woman, the grandmother I knew.

The label is faded and torn, but the RickRack itself is still an intensely rich color.

A part of me doesn’t want to use it, wants to keep it just as it is.  But I know I will use it if it’s what I need for a piece of my art.    It would seem almost magical to me to think that this Rick Rack survived for 91 years to be used by me.

I don’t believe in fate, but this does make me wonder.

I Made One Bird Potholder Today

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I looked through my fabric for inspiration and found it in the birds sitting in golden rings.  But that was last week and it took since then for me to complete this one potholder.

I was stuck till this morning when I found the yellow print to border the potholder.  I was excited to make more of them, but as soon as I started to sew, my machine shut down. Motor Overload was the message that kept coming up on the digital screen.

I had a feeling it was the cold.  Over the weekend the temperature dropped below zero and didn’t get much warmer.

But I was determined to make potholders.

So I took out my 30-year-old Singer and plugged it in. It’s a simple machine and I was thrilled when it worked.  But, it too was cold.  It was so slow, I could have sewed the potholder by hand quicker.

After sewing the yellow print onto the potholder I knew I was beat and gave up on potholders for the day.

This afternoon I tried my sewing machine again this time it worked without a problem.  But by then I had moved on to working on my Owl Woman.  

Before I left my studio tonight I wrapped my sewing machine in one of my old quilts. I thought it would appreciate it.

Tea With Emily

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The card and cupcake that Emily made me.

We wiped the snow off the benches that were in front of one of the many churches in Hoosick Falls. Two green wooden benches spaced about ten feet apart.  Ice clung to the wooden seats, but we were glad to have a place to sit in the sun.

I guzzled a hot chocolate (I have no self-control when it comes to hot chocolate)  and Emily sipped her tea.  Each on our own bench we braved the zero temperature to be able to see each other in person.

I watched the snow devils tornado up behind Emily as we caught up on the past week.

She talked about how cleaning out her house for their upcoming move left her little time for her art. I told her what little I knew about my Owl Woman and how her collages with the unusual animals and people with big eyes had inspired me to turn her into a fabric painting.

We talk about the vaccines and who is getting them.

After finishing our drinks we walked through the neighborhood. We tried to stay on the shoveled sidewalks, but often one of us ended up in the street while the other plowed through piles of snow.   Layered and bundled against the cold, our faces covered with masks we could hardly see each other anyway.

Finally, we stood on the corner of Main St, where the sidewalk was cleared and the sun reflected off a storefront window.

I was surprised when I got back to the car we had lasted an hour outdoors, like cats finding the warm spots then moving on when it got cold again.

I didn’t open the gift that Emily gave me till I got home.

A  collaged yellow tulip sprouting pollen like a doorway into spring was on the front of the card. Words about gratitude for our friendship, that I could have just as easily written to Emily were on the inside.  In the box were six of Emily’s signature cupcakes, each topped with homemade candied pomelo (I had to google pomelo).  There was even a snowflake card from Emily’s daughter who I get to see every once in a while during our Zoom Studio Chats.

It would have been so much easier to be in the warmth and comfort of our own homes, talking to each other on our computers.  But because of Emily’s schedule,  the opportunity for us to actually see each other in person is rare.

“It’s going to be very cold, I’m fine with it if you are. Emily texted me the day before we met.  Screw the cold!  I texted back.

I’ve always valued having tea with a friend. These days it’s more of a memory than a reality.  And something I don’t easily pass up.

Meeting The Mushroom Fairy On Line At CVS

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The line reached into the aisle of cold medicine and decongestants. There were three people ahead of me.   I had an appointment for 10:30 to get my Covid Vaccination but we got stuck behind a tractor on the way to CVS  so I was late.

Now I saw it didn’t matter.

What I didn’t know was that I’d be standing in line for an hour, having an unforgettable conversation with and 80year old woman.

I don’t remember who started it,  but by the time the pharmacist called my name I had gotten her  life story.

She was shorter even than me.  A fit woman well dressed  with short gray hair,  just the right amount of makeup and a sparkle in her eye.

She’s been a nurse for forty years, and took care of her husband when he was dying. “After I retired I knew I couldn’t be in my house with nothing to do all day long,” she told me, “so I started volunteering.” She smiled,  “You know how that is,  once they see you’re good at something they don’t let you go.”

After getting her covid vaccination she told me she was taking a refresher exercise course.  She’d been teaching exercise to seniors for years a the local library and every year there was more to learn.

She also got in trouble because she spends too much time talking to the people who she brings meals too.  “You’re only suppose to stay for ten minutes, but some of the people are so lonely they just want someone to talk to. I always feel bad leaving them,” she told me.

During covid she had to give it all up since every place she volunteered shut down.  She told me, with great sadness,  about a friend whose husband and son refused to get the first covid vaccines and they died two days apart from each other from virus.

She lived in town her whole life, but in a few years she had plans to move into an In-law  apartment at her daughter’s house in the country.  She bragged about how well she and her grandson get along and that he is a teenager who isn’t afraid to cry.

When it was my turn to get my shot,  I turned and waved at the woman as I walked away.  She waved back and that was the last I would see of her.

I never did get her name, but for days after I kept thinking of her.

She was one of those people I think of as angels.  Not that they aren’t real or of this earth.  But they come along at a particular time, and are for one reason or another unforgettable, then they seem to disappear.

I left CVS thinking of how much I admired this woman who for some reason told me her life story.  I loved her spunk and love of life.  How she was determined to help other people and not feel sorry for herself.  How she was thinking ahead and being practical about where she was in her life.  Being realistic about what she was capable of and what she would need to change. Acknowledging what she might need to leave behind.

I only knew her for an hour, but this small woman in CVS had become a role model for me.

It was only when I was driving home that I thought about the mushrooms.

“And you should see all the mushrooms in the woods where my daughter lives,” she said to me “I never would have imagined there were so many different types, so many different colors.  My daughter sends me pictures of them.”

Of course, I knew just what she was talking about.  As she talked about the mushrooms I was in the woods, surrounded by all those  wonderfully strange and colorful fungi.

That’s the moment that comes back to me.  As if she reached into my own life to cement the connection between us.

Now that I think about it, there was something fairy-like about her. Something magical.  And it made me think that I don’t have just one mother in this life, but if I open myself up to them, there can be many.

People who enter my life for years or just minutes who have a bit of wisdom to share, something I need to hear, or learn, or an affirmation of what I already believe.

Lulu And The Fire

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photo by Jon Katz

It’s 9 pm, the day just beginning to fade.  We sit at the fire and watch it crumble into itself.

Our Solstice bonfires always chase the sheep and donkey to the far pasture.   But now Lulu and Fanny are slowly making their way around the old stone foundation.   They stop on the other side of the fire opposite us.  They are standing on the bare ground where we had last year’s fire.  The place where they roll to take a dust bath.

Lulu stays, her ears up when Fanny wanders back to the sheep.

I get up from where I’m sitting and go to her.  Standing beside her,  I scratch Lulu’s neck, hypnotized by the soothing repetitive movement and the steady glowing flames.

It’s hard to put into words what happened next.

It’s more image and feeling.  What I saw seemed to come out of a fairy tale.  A moving illustration of a woman and a donkey walking together.  The colors are intense. Primary blue, green, red and white.

I am the woman and Lulu is the donkey.  We are walking where the fire should be but isn’t.

Without words, Lulu is relaying to me that existence is timeless.  For a moment I know what eternity feels like.  She “tells” me that we’ve done this before, we’ll do it again. There is no divide between the past, present, and future.

And then, like waking up from a dream, it’s over.  Lulu walks away and I go back to my chair by the fire.

I try to hold onto the feeling of enchantment, the peaceful sensation that everything is ok.  That life doesn’t just begin and end, it’s larger than that and all in a moment.

But it fades like the passing clouds.

I turn to Jon.  “The strangest thing happened with Lulu just now,” I say to him.  I can feel a slight smile of wonder spreading on my face. I try to explain, but my words are lacking.

Jon saw it though, he took a picture of me and Lulu standing together. Talking without words.

My ability to describe what happened is still lacking, but it will have to do.

I  have a feeling that the fire helped open me and Lulu up to each other. That standing before it somehow allowed for our communication. That it is a day before the actual Solstice doesn’t seem to matter.

Now, if I’m very still and concentrate on my belly, I can find a whisper of that feeling. Then the corners of my mouth curve slightly up and I know it’s somewhere inside of me.

A place to go, to know everything is ok.

Pigeons, Information and Curiosity

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I took this picture of Iris this morning. It seems to me she’s looking right at me.

“There’s a woman on my Nextdoor feed who has a nest of 4 little roadrunners. 3 hatched around the same time, but #4 took another week. She assumed it wasn’t going to hatch at all, but it did.”

This was the message I got from Jill.  Susan also emailed me telling me how the barn swallows that nest in her carport develop at different rates.

Of course, now that I think about it, it makes sense all the birds in a nest don’t necessarily hatch at the same time.  And they don’t all grow at the same rate.

I read about how pigeons incubate for 28 days then leave the nest after another 28 days and I take it literally. Maybe not to the day, but still, I make the assumption that there is precision in the natural world according to the man-made construct of numbers.

There I am trying to fit nature into a neat predictable package.  I know from my own life that kids growing up in the same family can perceive very different experiences of the same events.  So why do I expect baby birds to all hatch at the same time and develop equally?

I suppose it’s comforting to believe I “know” something whether it’s about nature or my own life.  I’m looking for some kind of certainty, something I can depend on perhaps to ease my underlying anxiety.

Or maybe it’s just the unpredictable nature of life that makes me crave the known.  The more information I have the safer I’ll be.

I think it’s my curiosity that saves me from getting too comfortable. From allowing me to believe that just because I read a book or two about pigeons, I know all about them.

Because it’s my curiosity that led me to climb a ladder and take pictures of the pigeons from the time their parent built the nest to the time the baby pigeons leave it.

It’s observing the birds in life that leads me to ask the questions and start the conversation often right here on my blog.

How often is it with me that information shuts the door and curiosity opens it again?  It doesn’t have to work this way. Information, when not absolute can become knowledge.  And knowledge with a dose of awareness and curiosity can become wisdom.

Gathering Rust

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The hallway at the Eye doctor’s office

“I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost altogether.  I know not what manner of stuff they are of,… How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it,  I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all.”   from “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau

I pull at the leaf of hay, each stand so tightly bound to the ones around it.  They’ve been this way all winter.   Bundled together with two orange plastic strings and stacked in the barn. Now that they are back outside where they came from the resist coming apart without some pulling and shaking.

In no time I feel the soft pressure of wool on either side of my legs.  Even if they push too hard, they never knock me over.  It’s like being pressed between giant balls of raw cotton.

The wind picks up loose strands and scatters them across the barnyard.  Later when the feeders are empty the sheep and donkeys will graze on the windblown hay.

Before leaving the barnyard I stop, my eyes reaching toward the mountains on the horizon. I pull off my hat, open my jacket and let the wind touch me. It pours through my hair releasing it from gravity.  I lift my face and hold out my arms letting the wind bathe me.

I think of the woman in the eye doctor’s office where Jon and I spent some hours this morning.  She leaned heavily on the rolling table with the laptop on it waiting for the doctor to say something she was supposed to record.  He eyes glazed over, her skin waxy, her expression dull.

Her work is important.  She has to be accurate, to get it right.  But it looked to me as much about the art of waiting.  Of staying alert in the windowless, beige dimly lighted room.

I know I was projecting my feelings onto her.  For all I know she finds her work fascinating and has learned how to hear what she needs to and block out the rest.

I’ve been there, in the office job playing the waiting game, and found out early on it’s not for me.  But I also understand that people love it.

My high school friend couldn’t wait to work as a secretary (what it was called back then) taking the Long Island Rail Road into New York City every day, sneakers on her feet, and her dress shoes in her bag.

A stand of hay had found its way down my shirt.  It scratches at my stomach and I know there will be a red mark where I itch it before pulling it out.  I’m allergic to hay but I still love the way it feels in my hands and how it smells even though it makes me sneeze.

The older I get, the more I walks in the woods and spend time in the natural world, the more I understand Thoreau when he writes..  “I, who cannot stay in my chamber a single day without acquiring some rust…”

The rust I gather from being out of nature too long is more in my head and heart than my limbs.  So I welcome the wind, and rain and sun and snow.  I will take what nature has to offer me to keep the rust away.

Buy these! YOU CAN PURCHASE MY WORK IN MY ETSY SHOP >

Full Moon Fiber Art