'You're Overreacting': A 2025 Events Quilt Made in Pure Fucking Exhaustion
In November 2025, I started thinking about what my creative year might look like in 2026. I kept coming back to this idea of "documenting" America's first year back in another toxic relationship with DJT.
Could I make 12 quilt blocks...1 for each month? Could I choose the worst thing that happened each month? Could I turn the relentless awfulness of 2025 into a quilt?
It started to feel heavy even before I fucking started drafting my ideas. There was too much. How would I only choose 12 things? How would I decide which acts of cruelty, corruption, incompetence, destruction, censorship, greed, and plain old stupidity deserved to be remembered over the others?
So, in January, I reached out to some other quilters I knew who would be down to clown with me. I asked whether they wanted to make a block about something the Trump administration had done during 2025. And 20 of us eventually joined me on the project:
Beth Reeves, Erin Bauchan-Caprara, Pam Brisse, Kaia Kessler, Ann Whitehurst, Karin Rabe, Jane Doe, Shayla Wolf, Aynex Mercado, Jan Koehn, Tiffany Horn, Petra Johnson, Rebecca Halvorsen, Tara Evans, Rebecca Bratburd, Adrianna Jaffrani, Julie Eakes, Kelly Hull, Sarah Morris, Carrie Stout, and Allie McCathren.
YES, that is technically 21 names, as Allie took on the burden of free-motion quilting our 20 blocks. Everybody was mad. Our group chat was not like the most super fun place to be, haha.
The quilt became, 'You're Overreacting,' a common response a MAGA person might say to one of us when we are BEGGING them to use their eyes and see what's unfolding. And do not think we did not consider calling it 'Your Overreacting' to intentionally misspell it...because that's how they often spell it...
"This isn't a big deal...You're just being dramatic...You just hate DJT...You believe fake news..."
Meanwhile, harm is dismissed. Corruption is normalized. Systems are gutted. People's lives are treated as collateral damage. Each individual event is minimized as though we are required to consider it in isolation, separated from everything that happened before and everything still coming.
But 2025 was not just one bad headline! It's cumulative! It's disorientating and relentless! We woke up every day to discover another institution had been weakened, another public service had been stripped for parts, another group had been targeted, another obvious lie had been repeated until people treated it as policy. Even with 20 blocks, we still "missed" documenting a lot of terrible things. We could not fit the entire year into one quilt.
But we are paying attention, even as we are told not to trust our eyes, our lived experiences, or one another. We're overreacting? The fuck we are.
After the blocks arrived, I assembled the top and sent it to Allie to be longarmed. I then went through and hand-quilted the remaining spaces. I knew it still wasn't finished...
The front held everyone's "events", but I wanted the back to hold our actual voices. I asked every artist to send me a photograph of something written in their own handwriting: a response to a MAGA supporter saying "you're overreacting," or anything she wanted to say to MAGA in general.
Every statement was different.
I embroidered each one in black thread, preserving the handwriting. I love the backing of this quilt, yet I fucking hated making it so much, haha. It took so fucking long. But it was worth it. I wanted the back to tell more of our story.
The front...how we saw it...the back...how we say it.
If you ever see this quilt in person, you will quickly notice it is not perfect. Some areas are pretty sloppy. I intentionally did not bury all my threads (again, I will remind you, who the fuck cares!). This quilt is not for the quilt police.
Why would I white-knuckle my way through making such a terrible thing perfect? Is anyone in our government white-knuckling anything on behalf of regular people right now, other than billionaires?
Nobody fucking cares.
The imperfections belong, the loose threads belong, the uneven stitching belongs; the quilt needs to look exhausted because we are all fucking exhausted. It needed to carry the evidence of the bodies that made it.
I have zero plans to organize a 2026 events quilt like this. Truthfully, this took A LOT of time. But more importantly, it drained my mood. I did not enjoy sitting with this quilt. This quilt sucks. We made something visually compelling out of human suffering, but the point was never to make the suffering beautiful. The point was to refuse disappearance.
One day, everyone will have always been against this. People will claim they never supported it. They will say they did not know. They will say the warning signs were unclear. They will say the cruelty was exaggerated, the damage was accidental, the corruption was ordinary, and the consequences could not have been predicted.
We were never overreacting.
