I’ve been struggling for months now, ever since election day 2024 (well, actually for far longer than that), to figure out how I would respond, as a person and as an artist, to a second Trump presidency.

And for a long time, I had… nothing. No way to voice or express my outrage, fear, despair, depression, disgust.

Those of you who have followed my work for a while know that I created an entire body of stitched resistance to Trump 1.0. I stitched “THIS IS NOT NORMAL” for every single day, from Inauguration Day 2017 through Inauguration Day 2021, creating two huge Cloths of Resistance and five Flags of Resistance. After Trump left office and through the first year of the Biden administration, I continued my daily stitch practice, this time creating a calendar on which I stitched, every day, what struck me as the most important headline of the day. Headlines in 2021 included the January 6 insurrection, the ongoing pandemic and tragic death toll, the rollout of the COVID vaccines and attendant controversy, the murder of George Floyd, and repressive anti-abortion legislation in several states. By the end of 2021, after five years of this daily stitching, I was completely exhausted and depleted. (To see all of these works mentioned here, see my Resistance gallery.)

The First Cloth of Resistance. I stitched a small piece every day for the first 100 days of the first Trump administration. This First Cloth is made up of the pieces from the first 50 days.

Even so, I couldn’t quite stop. In 2023 I began my temperatures project, which continues to this day. I am needlefelting the daily high and low temperatures for Burlington, Vermont (the nearest town of record), using different colors of wool to represent 5-degree temperature increments. I plan to continue this project indefinitely to create a visual record of climate change in my little corner of the world. (The most recent blog post about this project is here).

2023, left, and 2024, right, high and low temperatures for Burlington, Vermont. The months are in columns left to right, the days run vertically. For 2023, the highs are the circles, the lows the surrounding squares. For 2024, the upper triangles are the highs, the lower triangles are the lows.

2025, January - April. Again, highs are the upper triangles in each square, lows the lower triangles.

But now this. We are all aware of the tactic the current regime is using. Flood the zone! Break so many things in a short time and the people will be overwhelmed and just give up! Well, yes, we are definitely overwhelmed, but so far at least we are not giving up. People are using whatever power they have–writing/calling/emailing their Senators and Representatives, marching, rallying, dropping their Amazon subscriptions, boycotting companies that support the regime’s agenda, and so much more.

And yet, I worry that the overwhelm will get us anyway. To combat that, wise people counsel that we each choose one thing to concentrate on–climate change, immigration, LGBTQ+ issues, reproductive rights, racial justice, whatever–and let other people concentrate on other issues. But how, I wondered, to choose?

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

My house is on fire.

Flames leap from every window.

Black smoke billows,

Sparks explode like July Fourth fireworks.

I stand here with a bucket of water.

Where should I throw it?

Throw it at the room

That means the most to you, I’m told,

The fire is so big and you mustn’t get overwhelmed.

But how do I choose?

I love all the rooms in my house, and besides—

People I love are trapped in every room,

Choking on the smoke,

Feeling the heat.

Where should I throw my bucket of water?

There are other people watching this house burn,

People with buckets of water just like mine.

It is their house, too.

Maybe if we all throw our buckets at the flames,

Each at the room we value most—

Maybe it will be enough?

Maybe we have a prayer of putting out the fire

Before the house burns to the ground,

Before we all burn up with it,

Maybe?

Or maybe not.

So where should I throw my bucket of water?

And then, it came to me. If we don’t have a democracy, we can’t save any of the rooms in the house. If we don’t “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, then everything else is lost, and our house will be destroyed. So that is where I will throw my bucket of water.

To do this, I will read the Constitution, transcribe it onto fabric, then carefully and painstakingly stitch it, word by word, letter by letter, onto large panels of cloth, and eventually join them side by side by side. It will take me many months, maybe even years, to embroider the 7591 words that comprise the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the other amendments. I will regularly share my progress, slow though it may be, here and on various social media platforms, so that other people may see and read and perhaps be inspired to fight for this document that is absolutely central to, well, everything.

There will be one or two other components of this project, including a crowd-sourced community stitching project, but I’m not quite ready to reveal those—watch this space!

This is a massively ambitious project, and I admit at the outset that I might not be equal to it, that I might run out of steam long before it’s done.

If we lose our democracy and the country descends into authoritarianism and dictatorship, then this project will stand as my statement of resistance and defiance. And if we are successful in preserving democracy and defeating those that threaten it, then this project will represent the ideas and ideals embodied in the Constitution that will have united us, and will inspire us in the future not only to take better care of our democracy and not take our rights and freedoms for granted, but also to be sure that in the United States that comes AFTER Trump, those rights and freedoms must be shared by us all.