Mentally Processing Quilt National

Most of the artists and attendees from this year’s Quilt National are now home or on their way there (Del Thomas, I’m thinking of your 5 days to GET there). For the artists, I’ve seen lots of messages about trying to process the trip, or still floating in the air from the experience…many of us are trying to process photographs at the same time (long gone are the days when we dropped the film canister off and waited patiently, sometimes over a week, for the photos to be ready.), trying to get posts up of the experience, trying to process what we felt, what we thought, what we saw.

I have lots of photos, but I’m also very anal about labeling them with the correct name of artist and piece, and also linking it to the artist’s website or blog, if I can find one. That takes lots of time. It’s honestly time I don’t have right now. I missed two days of school last week and I have professional development off campus tomorrow. I was at school today for almost 2 hours, going through the pile of stuff the sub left me from last week, prepping for tomorrow’s sub, and then doing the science dishes. I needed to wash all the dissection equipment to get it ready for the frog dissections later this week, and I needed to wash all of the slide stuff from last week that didn’t get done before I left.

I came home and input grades, prepared a lesson plan for the frog dissection (which I’ve never done before), and got all the stuff together for the kids who won’t be doing the unit on human reproduction. I have ten tons of grading to do, as always, and the end of the school year brings a boatload of planning and activities and parent meetings.

I’m feeling incredibly overwhelmed.

That said, I’m also feeling inspired, as I’m sure many of the artists are. I spent the weekend looking at beautiful and amazing artwork and having long discussions with artists about their lives, their processes, and their artistic histories. I heard about techniques, materials, inspiration, and major life changes. Some artists were bubbly and excited, some were very technical, and some came to tears as they talked about their piece or their journey…or just their own feelings about being in the presence of the rest of us.

I find when I’m at an opening or a weekend full of events like this that I have a hard time even taking pictures. I did better this time, because I had multiple chances to come back in the space and take more pictures. I will probably find I wanted more than what I have, but in general, I think I did OK. The hardest part of the picture-taking is that my camera viewfinder is defective. I’ve known this for a while…it comes and goes. The viewfinder goes into this weird mode that is almost all black…you can just barely see things that are very light, and they are dark red on the viewfinder…so I can’t focus on anything or frame the picture properly. That might explain some of the photos when I post them (maybe tomorrow?). Yes, I should (1) get the camera fixed (time without a camera seems a problem) or (2) get a new camera (money is definitely a problem). Both are in my mind, especially after this weekend. It hasn’t done it in a while, so I’m not sure what prompts it. Removing the battery or card don’t seem to help. It’s not some funky setting…literally if you change the position of the camera, it might go back to being normal. It still takes normal pictures…you just have no idea what they might look like until later.

Did I mention all the great conversations I had? None of them were about my camera.

I’m also really tired right now. My body is not really adjusted to either Ohio time OR California time. It’s on sleepy time. Recovery time. Stress time.

So I will post photos with links and all those pretty things that people want to see…I just can’t handle it tonight. I have only been home for 24 hours. I have to go to school tomorrow (or at least to work, if not to my actual school…well, except we have a parent meeting, so I do have to go to school). And the tiredness just hit me upside the head…hard…like a wrecking ball.

I’m still mentally processing. Seeing the pictures come off my camera was exciting…but not exciting enough to keep me awake. More later…