Maria Wulf Full Moon Fiber Art

Between yesterday and today I pieced together some Potholders.  I was inspired  by the two boxes of fabric that Deb sent me.

I also decided on the fabric  I’m going to use in my latest quilt  to stitch the words, “I became the woman I kept to myself.”

It’s my drop cloth that I used when painting my Vintage Hankies for scarves and potholders a few years ago.  I’ll cut the drop cloth into pieces and stitch each word separately then figure out how they will fit into the quilt.

I’ll finish up the Potholders (still to be named) next week and have them for sale in my  Etsy Shop by the weekend.

For the past five or six years my friend Kat and I have been going to the North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show at the Bennington Museum in Vermont.

We get there early in the morning,  and always go after berry season is over so we don’t have think about meeting any bears.

Up the hill, past the wildflowers and berry brambles into the field. Then into the woods and returning through the flowers again.

My description of the path probably makes it sound longer than it is.  It takes us about an hour to leisurely walk around,  look at the sculptures and plants and talk about them.

Some of the sculptures held our interest longer than others, either because we liked them or we’re trying to figure them out.

Today we saw three or four sculptures that at first we didn’t think much about.  But the more time we spent with them,  looked at them and talked about them, the more we liked them.

“Ah,  painted ladders,” I though when I first saw Resistance by Eileen Powers.  But after reading the title and looking again, I now saw the free standing ladders as a symbol of  coming together and  standing strong in defiance.

Although there are usually some sculptures in the exhibit that are political, this year it seemed like there were more than ever.

It was the titles that often gave the sculptures  meaning that I might have missed.  Like Merzon’s hosta sculpture Hosta Luego, made of shovels and bolts. Where I saw  not just a play on words, but a reference  to the ICE raids and deportation of thousands of people.

Or  Silvina Mizrahi’s round mosaics set in a semi circle on the ground.

I didn’t think to walk around them and really look at each one until I learned they were called “Under the Same Sun.”

Last night I dreamed I had a baby…

…I wasn’t raising her, my mother, and siblings were.    I had no memory of being pregnant or giving birth,  but when I went to my family’s house, which was full of people I didn’t know, and saw her,  I knew she was mine.

When I picked her up she looked at me and her eyes sparkled so much the sparkles hovered over her face like crystals.  She smiled a knowing smile.  

As I looked at her I saw a picture in my mind of her inside my body.   She was telling me she  knew I was her mother even though I hadn’t ever seen her before. 

The baby radiated so much joy, I can still feel it now  as I write this.  I knew that the baby had come from me, but that she didn’t belong to me.  She already seemed her own person.

I didn’t want the baby,  but when I saw her and held her I knew I could have cared for her if I had the chance.

But she was taken from me with my consent.  It was just assumed, by my mother and siblings, that I didn’t  want her and wouldn’t have been able to take care of her.

I got angry and told my mother that I knew I was in debt to her for taking the baby, but that she should have asked me if I wanted her and not just assumed that I couldn’t or wouldn’t  take care of her.

She didn’t reply and I left the house  thinking, at least now the baby would have lots of mothers not just one.

The baby had a presence about her,  as if she was a wise woman already. 

The house was in a city and when I left it, I looked down a side street I’d never been before.  Up to that point I never ventured off the mail street  because I was afraid of getting lost.  But now I walked down the side street which was filled with small shops and restaurants, no longer afraid.

I know this dream came from the quilt I started making yesterday.

It’s as if starting the quilt opened up something inside of me.  I’m not surprised, my art often tells me about myself, gives me insights.  And I’ve come to see, through sharing  my art on my blog, my ideas are more universal than I would have thought.

What I got from this dream is how my feelings of  self-worth and incompetence come from the people I grew up around.  That they believed they knew me, but in reality, I had hidden myself (much as Julia Alvarez writes about in her poem The Accident) from them to protect myself.

In my dream I was able, (as I wasn’t in life) to confront my mother and tell her that I was angry about what had happened.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t respond.   What mattered was that I was able to let her know how I felt without the fear of hurting her feelings or of her getting angry at me.

I knew the baby was safe, she was already her own person and wiser than I’d ever be. It was because of the baby, of who she was and that she had come from me, that I was able to speak my truth.  That I was able to leave the house feeling more secure and confident than I had ever felt before.

I think of the fabric I used to begin this quilt, how it had been put aside for so many years.  When I brought it back into the world it came out of hiding.

Just like Julia Alvarez writes about in her poem about becoming “the woman she kept to herself . ” She had to hide who she was from her family, they didn’t want to know, didn’t like  who she really was.  But she didn’t give that person away, or forget about them.  She came out when it was safe for her to show herself.

I never wanted to have children, but I do sometimes dream I have a baby who I have forgotten about.  I always think of that baby as a symbol of my art.  How I put it aside for so many years until I was able to dedicate myself to it.

It seems to me this dream is a continuation of those dreams. Only now,  I was able to stand up for myself, and see that this being who was born from me, like my art, affirms who I really am and the joy I experience from being true to myself.

I used up the last of my “Keep the Good Alive” packing tape today.  I waited too long to get more because I had to find someplace new to buy it from.

The company I used to get it from did a good job and made it quick and easy to upload images and get the product.

But the owner of the company has gotten into politics and is running against Blake Gendebien, a farmer from northern NY,  to fill the seat that Elise Stefanik is leaving.

I didn’t mind doing business with his company before he was running for office even if I didn’t agree with his politics.  (Especially when I’m asking them to create something that flies in the face of the hate politics that he supports, like my Not Going Back Magnets and my Keep The Good Alive packing tape.)

But he’s basically a mini-Trump and is  using most of his own money in the campaign so  I don’t want to be supporting that even if it is just $30 for a roll of tape.

I did order more “Keep the Good Alive” packing tape from Vistaprint, but it will take two weeks to get here.

So for the next two week, the repurposed boxes I send my art out in will look a little different than usual.

I’m curious to see what I come up with to make them my own without the packing tape.

There was something inside of me that needed to come out.  I just didn’t know what it was.

So I walked around my studio, letting my intuition guide me, trusting that when I picked up a bag of scraps and went them all only to put them back in the bag, that it’s what I needed to do.

Then I hit on the right bag, one that Dee gave me a few years ago.

Most of the fabric in it was old, some hand stitched quilt squares.  It had been in the bag, waiting, for a long time.

There was  a stack of felt images of flags from around the world, some gossamer fabric squares,  a pile of hand stitched quilt pieces and then some fabric cut into triangles and squares.

This was what I needed today.  Something that I didn’t know.  Something that I couldn’t predict.

But before I started sewing I pulled out a poetry book  by Julia Alvarez, from my self.  I haven’t looked at the book in a long time, so I opened to the page that was dog eared to a poem called  By Accident… 

“Sometimes I think I became the woman
I am by accident, nothing prepared
the way, not a dramatic, wayward aunt, 
or moody mother who read Middlemarch, 
or godmother who whispered,” You can be
whatever you want!” and by doing so 
performed the god-like function  of breathing 
grit into me.”

There’s more the poem, and toward the end Alvarez writes… “I became the woman I kept to myself” “

A few days ago I heard an interview with Marlon James whose new book  The Disappearers is about being gay in 1980’s Jamaica, and the dangers of it.     Marlon, who is gay, said that as a kid he learned how to hide himself.   He leaned to become invisible because it was safer for him not to be seen.  Not to be known.

I am not gay, and the danger is different, but I knew listing to James that I did the same thing as a child who didn’t feel safe in my home.

Jon often says that I hid myself to protect myself when I was growing up.  Reading Alvarez and James I see how true that is.

What I love about Julia Alvarez’s  poem is that the poem itself,  the book I’m reading it in, is evidence of the child she was and that it is now safe for her to be herself.

I haven’t pulled it all together yet, but I do know I’ll be stitching Alvarez’s words… I became the woman I kept to myself, into this quilt that I began today.