Out of the Pit, into the Cave

Depression is an interesting beast. It’s so prevalent in our world, has been for years, just read some Romantic poetry or wallow in Russian literature for a while, and you’ll realize how not-alone you are in this feeling that never seems to go away. I’ve seen it described as a rain cloud that follows you around, the big black dog, a pit, a hole, a cave. We come up with these personifications, these illustrations, to try to make it something we can look at, distance ourselves from, maybe even fix. My meditation guy wants me to look at my whole brain that way. Like I’m a private detective, leaning up against that lamppost in the dark, lighting the cigarette and watching the brain (hey…shouldn’t smoke!). Watch what the brain does, make notes in a little book, process it, spit out a report at the end. This is what happened, this is where it went, dry and dissected, no emotions.

I wish my depression was the big black dog. I know how to deal with dogs. It started out as a pit, a hole. It’s been that before. Prior to my divorce, back in 2000 or so, it was a giant hole, and once I had dragged myself out of it, with no help from my husband at the time, he tossed me back in. But I got out…probably because I had spent a couple of years trying to deal with my brain and what it was doing, and I had enough tools to build a ladder out of there fairly quickly. I had some control over the situation.

Not so this time. This time I didn’t even see the pit before I got tossed in. I thought it was way behind me, filled in, totally safe ground to walk on, and I blithely continued on, carrying my little beachball of work stress and hormonal disruptions…which yes, caused a minor depression, but it was completely treatable. I just didn’t know I needed to deal with it. I think it would have eventually worked itself out with the right supports (which I wasn’t getting). But then a giant maw of a deep dark hole opened up and I just tumbled all the way down. And I can look back now and see how deep I went, how bad it was (sometimes still is).

They tell you that once you’ve experienced one depressive event that you are more prone to them later on. Great. Appreciate it. Didn’t ask for this. Mine are event-based. This isn’t just random shit being shot out of a cannon, like some people’s depression, which I can see would be much harder to deal with, because you can’t pinpoint the cause. It just is. It’s that brain chemistry out of whack. No, this is because of what other people have done, and in each case, it is out of my control. I am just the one dealing with the aftermath. It seems unfair, but I know that life is not set out to be fair…there is no arbitrator of fairness and karma setting out punishments and rewards. You may believe otherwise…feel free…but I don’t.

So once I’m in the pit, the deep hole, I have to find my way out. Sometimes it’s medications, which didn’t work this time, it’s always counseling, it’s always a time of deep reflection and artmaking for me, which makes me somewhat lucky, in that I can actually create while down in the pit. I know plenty who can’t, who are hogtied by the depression to a point of not being able to even pick up a pencil. I guess I’m glad that when my brain goes into that hole, she takes her sketchbook and her pens with her. I guess that is a learned defense against the depression.

And it really is me, the private dick, still leaning up against the lamppost, checking my watch, adjusting my hat against the misty rain, waiting for the brain to show herself again, logging her activity.

I guess the plus is that she’s moved out of the hole. Well, she moved into a cave recently, I guess…I don’t know why the visualization changed, but it did. It seems easier…she can just walk in and out of the cave, no need to build a ladder or scramble up the sides of a muddy pit. She hunches over, my brain, and she brings a bowl out into the light, gathers some leaves or berries (I’ve been eating a lot of berries lately), she blinks, squints up at the sky, sees me and drops her chin, acknowledging my presence, and then shuffles back into the cave. Brings tears to my eyes. There she is. She was out. She tried. She’s going back in for a while, because it was too much.

Some day I’ll talk about the current quilt and its title. Because it is the hardest part of this depression. I know what was in my head as I drew it, and…it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever had to deal with in my own head. Yes, only one. Sad but true.

I’d better find a way to do something restorative tonight, beyond exercise and meditation. Because…ouch. Bad place.

Earth Stories: Sticking It Together

My continuing saga of how the Earth Stories quilts came together…

Once the pieces are trimmed, I iron them all together. I do this by putting the original drawing right-side up on the ironing board and putting an applique press sheet on top. You can see the lines through the sheet, so I pull the paper backing off the pieces one at a time, line them up, overlap them where necessary, and iron them down.

On a quilt this big, I needed multiple sheets going at a time…the quilt is 72″ wide and the sheets aren’t.

I try to iron big sections together, but not necessarily all the pieces. I need room for adjustment later when I go to iron it down to the background.

When I have super-small pieces, like in the skeletons, I often don’t cut those pieces out until I’m ready to iron them. Otherwise, I lose them. I’m not sure WHERE I lose them…it’s like that extra sock you can never find. Sometimes I find them two quilts later, a randomly numbered piece that has no home. So sometimes during this stage I have to redraw and recut a missing piece.

If I can get away with it, I just make a note about the missing piece…they often show up later in a different bin.

This section below has about 250 tiny pieces in it. It was a little crazy.

Oh yeah. This was also crazy. There was a lot of crazy with this quilt. It might have been funny if it weren’t so crazy.

Earth Mother’s face coming together…and her heart. Her heart didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted. I remembered that when I did the next heart.

And here’s the main character in the dream bubble…

I actually divided the sky in half, but ironed both halves on the same fabric…

Did I mention crazy? This is corn. I’m not sure in the end product that it was worth the level of crazy that I drew, but there it is.

You can see the little corn tassels and leaves above ready to be ironed. If you ever see this quilt in person, please appreciate the corn.

Then I pieced the (huge) background and laid it out on my entryway floor…which it filled. My mom’s entryway is bigger, so I have done this at her house too. If I ever move, I will need one big empty floor…

I lay the pieces out on the background and make them fit together. This is sometimes a really long and painful process. The dream world bubble was all one piece at this point…much easier to deal with.

You can see I had the Earth Mother figure divided into three main pieces…top, bottom, and belly.

Here’s most of it in place. I iron it down, best I can on a lumpy tile floor…I just need it all to stick together long enough to get it to the ironing board. Did I mention this is 72″ square? Yeah.

And then I transfer it to my ironing board and spray each section with water (hoping fabrics don’t run) and put the heat on for 30 seconds at least, trying to get all the layers to fuse down.

It took almost 31 hours to iron this sucker together. I worked from July 11-31. I should add that I was going through a significantly traumatic event while this was happening, so I know I wasn’t working very well or efficiently. Technically you’d call my mental state shock. So I guess I should be impressed that I can create anything while in shock, although this task is really just about getting it done, not about being creative. An assistant could probably do this part. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing to distract me from the other crap, but I had a really hard time doing that well. I really didn’t care if it got done or not, except that I had committed to make the quilt for the exhibit, and I’m usually pretty good about commitments like that. I’m not a flaky artist. So I did it. It was, honestly, something to do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months…just making the art, even though it doesn’t feel good…there are other things that feel worse, and this seems to occasionally make me feel at peace…so I keep doing it.

But just looking at that piece lying on the floor brings back how awful I was feeling. I would get out of bed, trudge down the hallway, sigh deeply, and just keep going. Every day. That’s not a life. But it’s the life that birthed this quilt.

Next post, stitching it all together.

What’s That About…

I mentioned that I had some drawings pop up in my head in the last few days. One has actually been popping in and out for about a month. It thinks it wants to be the equality quilt that has to be done by November, but I’ve already told it that it’s not what I want, it’s not appropriate. It’s interesting, because I had picked gender equality, because that’s a big issue for me, always has been, and the image that’s popping up is not a good one…and I really do believe gender equality is possible…eventually. But some shit needs to change. The boychild is an editor on the newspaper at his high school and one of the writers (female) wrote an article about why we need feminism, and there was nothing new or earth-shattering in this article, being as it was written by a teenaged girl who hadn’t really experienced much of anything, but she obviously knew the code words and the issues…but another student (apparently) at the school wrote a comment, a huge long diatribe against feminism and women, claiming she was a 17-year-old female, showing enough knowledge of the school that our guess is that it’s the PARENT of a student, but because of some of the stuff in the comment, they can’t post it online as is (because if they could, me, my SIL, and half my friends would be commenting on her ass, for sure). The assumption is that every women CAN have whatever she wants, that nothing gets in the way of that, but then some stuff about being a proper wife (oh dear, well, I’ve blown that…in fact, I can’t even be a proper girl, or woman, in her terms…and I’m so totally OK with that).

So I need my drawing to be on the good side, the positive side of what gender equality is going to look like, because I have to believe that can exist, despite some of the shit I’ve seen throughout my 47 years (as she wrote about her vast experience of 17 years). So that drawing…it will happen, but the bad version of it might need to happen first. The one where despite what people SAY, they still believe in the lame divisions of who does what, with no understanding of the work involved or the assumptions behind it. If you want me to cook for you dammit, then pick a meal and go buy the supplies, and THEN we can have a discussion…don’t drop all that shit into the lap of someone who cooks all the time and thinks of it as just more work when she is already overwhelmed…do you know how many nights I make TWO dinners, one for tonight and one for the next night? Cooking is not my friend.

On Saturday’s hike, someone (male) slapped my ass. I didn’t say much…not sure what his assumption was, but I refrained from saying something…well…rude, honestly…but it certainly reframed the conversations we’d had over the last two hikes. Women in general will talk about almost anything on hikes…I talked with women about hiking, knee surgery, hysterectomies, teaching, raising children, artmaking, sleep, hormones, allergies, the view, hiking again, shoes (hiking, not the other, plus sandals for post-hiking), diabetes, and food…and that was just today. The men? Always a different conversation. We never know what they do for a living, unless we ask (women tend to drop this info quickly and easily). We don’t know whether they have kids half the time (they rarely talk about their children…we talk about our kids constantly). They appear to have no lives. They probably would say they come on these hikes to get AWAY from their lives, but you know that shit follows you…you might as well let it out.

So if he slaps my ass again, I will probably have to say something, but I’ve learned enough from dealing with middle-school kids that I have two routes: embarrass the crap out of him (burn! as my students say), which is sometimes effective, or grab him on his own and explain that I don’t like it. Either way, I am now that feminist, eh? And I’m OK with that. So my dad and I had a conversation about that and he said there were some women who slapped his ass (which he does NOT mind, the old lech), which I think is just as bad, personally, unless you know the person well and this is part of your interaction with them. I don’t know this guy well. And that’s my ass. So get off of it.

Sigh. There I go being all confrontational again.

So instead of drawing gender equality last night, I drew one version of the bathtub that’s been in and out of my head since I saw Frida Kahlo’s version…

reminded of George Bush’s version (it scares me that I keep remembering art that George made)…

and it’s not done, and I don’t even think it’s right, but it is. She needs a head though.

There’s a lot more that needs to go into the picture. I need at least a half a page above this one. It’s funny…I remember being in 4th or 5th grade, Mrs. Westcott was my teacher, and she was an artist on the side as well…in fact, my parents have a portrait of me that she drew, pastels I think? Anyway, she would get so frustrated with my inability to stay ON the page. My drawings, paintings, etc. always fell off the page. My tree trunks would extend so far up the paper that there was just the bottom part of the leaves showing. I distinctly remember her pointing that out to me, and telling me I needed to look at the page and try to FIT on it. Didn’t happen. I need paper that extends automatically. Anyway. I drew. That’s the real point. It felt good. It’s such a good place to be in my head when I’m drawing. Everything else goes away.

That woman standing in the bathtub…she was a skeleton when I saw her for the first time in the drawing Saturday. Before that, when I saw this drawing, she wasn’t there at all. So I’m not sure what that’s about.

I had another low-blood-sugar event yesterday, the first since I went off the apparently offending medication. It was a strange one, too, and I’m starting to pin these occurrences on hormones instead of anything else…I was feeling nauseous but knew I needed to eat, so I had some fruit with frozen yogurt about 30 minutes before, and then it crashed…which makes no freakin’ sense. Basically I ate pure simple sugars there, and my body flipped out. Sigh. So I logged it and dealt with the ensuing exhaustion that follows, and the blood sugar came back, but it just annoys me that I do everything I’m supposed to and it still doesn’t behave. Story of my life.

So I didn’t get much cutting done, because I drew instead (plus I graded a ton of papers, which I really needed to do)…

But there are the bins…some slightly fuller, one slightly less full. It’s not a short process…it takes for-freakin’-ever, basically. I had hoped to be done cutting out last week, though, and you’d think with having a full day off for fires I could have pulled that off, but my brain and I don’t always agree, so I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to. I do have a goal for this weekend, though, so I should get that set up (means sorting pieces into bins again…that’s a truly boring part of artmaking). But before all that, apparently I have to be a ~~good citizen~~ ~~mommy~~ responsible adult and go to work.

Kinda Stuck

I spent a lot of time in my head yesterday, partially because I was on a LONG kick-your-butt hike where I was hiking by myself for a goodly amount of time (not fast enough to be with the front group and not slow enough to be with the back group), and also because it’s Saturday and I usually spend long swathes of time by myself on Saturdays these days. Some people tell me to fix that, because yes, I do find it depressing to be in my head that much, I should go out with friends to dinner or movies or just to hang out, and I do have those options, but you know what? I’m an introvert. Yes. I teach middle-school kids all day and I’m an introvert. It doesn’t mean I don’t like people…I do OK with them most of the time, although you have to be the right kind of person for me to get really close to you, but I can talk to just about anyone (as evidenced on these hikes). What it means is that too much interaction with people and I need to recharge. I need quiet mental space with a book or music or my art and I need it on a regular basis, like every day, and sometimes for many hours. I can handle my kids and close family, but more than that and I feel like I’m exerting energy I don’t even have any more. It’s exhausting. Because yes, the depression steals some of my ability to cope in social situations. It gets used up faster.

So I actually need those evenings/afternoons/mornings where I’m not expected to be a certain way or put out a certain amount of interaction…but because of how my life is at the moment, most of those moments are now alone moments and my brain reacts to those badly.

I’m a fairly self-reflective person (not with mirrors all over me…that would be funny…oh shit, that’s the THIRD drawing that’s popped into my head in the last 24 hours. That was a plus of all the hiking alone time yesterday. I did a whole drawing in my head…now to get it on paper), so I spend a lot of time (possibly too much) thinking about what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, and how to make it better. Yesterday’s notes to myself: When depressed, don’t watch movies where babies die unexpectedly. Also grocery stores on Saturday night are depressing. Always. Knock it off. Go another day. I don’t care how convenient it is because you have nothing else to do. I don’t care if you feel you HAVE to go Saturday because Sunday is a clusterfuck schedulewise. Find some other chore that needs doing so you’re not perusing the vegetables at 7 PM on Saturday when all you can think of is what you would have been doing then a year ago. A year ago doesn’t exist any more. Move on.

Yeah. Brain and I are not getting along at the moment. I think some of it is because there are still a couple of really high-stress things in my life that need to get handled this week, and they are overwhelming me, so I’m not handling the rest of life well.

Anyway. So I hiked yesterday, a really long hike, and my body is complaining today, but I managed yesterday to NOT have to take a nap (good). And yes, I went to the store (bad). But then I needed to do some cutting out of fabric, because I was too tired Friday night to do that after searching for about an hour for the title on my old car, which needs to be sold. So that now requires a DMV trip, which would be fine if they’d let me make an appointment, but they won’t at the local one, and I can’t get to the nonlocal one in time after school. Bastards.

I have the bins all set up on the couch…

I’m still working on using my new camera well…it’s fussy. There is a black cat in the back of that photo, but you can’t see her at all. The bin on my lap (which you can’t see) has all the trimmed-off trash pieces in it. The bigger bin to the right of me has all the pieces I need to cut out, and then the bin just past it has all the cut-out pieces. Usually there’s a cat somewhere in there too…eventually she moved to the couch behind my head (where she likes to be, because I reach back and pet her occasionally). I use an app (Task Measure) on my phone to record how long I spend each day on each part of making the quilt.

I cut stuff out for a couple of hours, putting me up to 7+ hours on this part of the quilt.

This is the stuff I still haven’t cut out…so the pile is getting smaller, but it’s still pretty big.

I get frustrated with some of the pieces because they’re so tiny (see all the skeleton bones, long skinny pieces?)…some I don’t cut out until later, so I don’t lose them, but these are big enough. These are all the pieces I’ve cut out so far.

So I’m getting there…both with the quilt pieces and with my life, although the latter does seem stalled in place at the moment. There’s some step I need to take but can’t. I know what I want but can’t deal with what I’ll have to do to get there. Don’t have the mental energy, the desire even to go there. So I will be stuck with the quiet Saturday nights for a long while, I think…I can’t really financially afford to be going out and doing stuff anyway, so that doesn’t help. I think sometimes you just have to accept where you’re at and that at some point in the future you might be able to make a change. I don’t like that waiting stuff, though, but until my brain figures out how to come out of the cave/pit/hole/whatever the hell it is that it lives in right now and stay OUT, I’m kinda stuck.

Earth Stories: Coloring It In

Once I have all the pieces sorted into bins (in this case, I had 21 of them…I actually had to go buy more), I start ironing Wonder Under onto fabric.

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Each bin has 100 pieces in it, and if I was really organized when I numbered the pieces, it gets ironed together in some logical order, often bottom (base) to top. I try to do all the body pieces together, but it gets problematic, so sometimes I just do all the flesh pieces and then all the inside stuff, like lips and nipples and lungs and uteri.

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This quilt had some weird stuff going on with it though, so the first thing I did was go fabric shopping. I bought the background fabric first (I always do, so I can hold each fabric that touches it up to the background to see if it’s going to work). I also bought a bunch of grays, almost whites, and then a big piece of bright sky blue for…well…the bright sky.

I hang the drawing up in my office, and as you can see, this drawing took over the room. I don’t leave the ironing board there while I’m ironing…but basically, the ironing board is perpendicular to the drawing, so I can just look to the right to see what’s where.

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Here’s ironing the sky…I did that first, because I knew it would be big and I just wanted it out of the way.

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Then how do I pick the colors? Usually I have some idea of the coloring of the quilt in general, mostly the main figure against the background. Because this one was about how the Earth was being damaged, I wanted the Mother Earth figure and all the people in the main part of the quilt to be grayed out. I started with her, making her mostly shades of white to gray, and then the smaller figures in the section were a range of blue-grays, which sit on the blue background. So I really thought this one out. That said, I never sat down with colored pencils or a computer and colored in a drawing. It’s all in my head.

As I iron the pieces to fabric, they all go in a bin.

Sometimes I have to pull sections out so I can hold them up to something that will be next to them or under them.

While I’m ironing, every fabric I’ve pulled for the quilt ends up piled on the ironing board…which got kinda overcrowded on this quilt.

That way, I can reuse fabrics throughout the quilt, which gives it a bit more continuity.

These are water fabrics in the base of the quilt, early days in the ironing.

I started on April 24, 2013, and worked on it a little bit each week until I went on vacation to Oregon with the kids after school got out…and then finished it up before July 4.

Just like with the most recent one, school nights only yielded an hour or two, if I was being really good. Here are all the rocks in the river bed below the ground.

And skelly pieces…I always have skelly pieces…

These are freakin’ tiny, I might add.

In the end, I used 137 fabrics, most of them grays…

A serious number of grays…

It took almost 27 hours to iron all 2000+ pieces down to fabric.

Then I had to cut them all out…to be truthful, I overlapped these two tasks, even taking a bag of pieces to Oregon with me to cut out while playing board games in the evening. Some of the super-tiny pieces stayed on their bigger piece of fabric until they were ready to be ironed down, just to make sure I didn’t lose them…

It took almost 29 hours to cut them all out…I think part of that was because I WAS doing other stuff while cutting them out, like playing games. But there also a lot of teensy weensy pieces that were just fussy to cut out. I cut pieces out from June 11-July 8. July 8 would have been my 24th wedding anniversary if that marriage had lasted. Yes, I think that every year. I keep thinking I’ll stop, but that’s not how my brain works. It marks events. It runs itself by days when stuff happened…some good, some bad. Then some dates I can’t remember at all.

Once they’re all cut out, I sort them back into the bins by 100s so I can start ironing.

That task in itself took 2 hours and happened on July 10, when I was the person previously known as Kathy Nida. I’m a different Kathy Nida now. This poor quilt survived my going through all that trauma. This might be one of the reasons I don’t really ever want it back in my house…but maybe I’ll feel differently in a year or two, after it’s traveled.

Next step? Ironing that sucker together…ironing during a Southern California summer…not the best choice of times. But we don’t always have choices.

It’s hard to write about this quilt. I have to go back through blog posts and photos that I don’t want to see, to think about how deep in the hole I was while I was making it. I had hoped that with 10 months gone, it would be easier, and maybe it is a bit, because I am managing to sit here and hold back tears while writing this, but only just. Emotional pain is such a strange beast. It’s so deep inside you, somewhere around where the art resides, quite honestly. They are closely linked and thinking of one evokes the other. I guess that’s a good thing. Hard to say. If I weren’t an artist, would I have bounced back, recovered quicker? Or would it still be me, and I would still be dealing with the pain, just without the added layer, perhaps therapy of the art?

All that probably doesn’t matter. I really was trying to make this a simple report of what happened to create this quilt, but it has so much ironed and stitched into it that it will come out, no matter what my plan once was. A couple more posts and you’ll get to see the final version…

A Strangely Free Day

So I was not at school yesterday because San Diego County is on fire. Nine fires, but most of them are in North County, not down here. We can occasionally see smoke plumes. They are affecting air quality a little bit down here, but nothing like the last two big firestorms in 2003 and 2007. So they closed all the county schools for safety reasons. Stands to reason, since school staff don’t always live in the same neighborhood as their school. Anyway, it’s like a free day for those of us not dealing with evacuations and fires (hope everyone we know is OK). So what did I do? I went to bed early (for me, before midnight) and tried to sleep in. Unfortunately, I have animals and they don’t agree, so I got up and dealt with their needs, made a cup of tea, and went back to bed with a book. I often dream of being able to do that, but I’d really rather train one of the animals to bring me the tea. Working on that.

Eventually I got up and fed myself, and then I cleaned floors. Seriously, it’s been driving me nuts. I haven’t had enough time to get them done. My kids are freakin’ useless lately because of the AP tests (which finished Wednesday! Yay! Now of course they will use the excuse of end-of-school projects not to help…cough cough…bullshit!), so nothing is getting done. I didn’t get home Wednesday night until almost 9 PM because of a union meeting, soccer stuff, and car stuff, so I was exhausted yesterday anyway…that’s a typical scenario, so that’s why nothing gets cleaned. I made an effort last week to sort out all the returned quilts and get stuff cleared out of the entryway. Today, I loaded up all the thrift shop bags into the car and cleaned those floors…it looks so much better. I wish I could afford a cleaning lady (although it might stress me out more knowing I had to straighten up for her)…I just can’t keep up. Yes, I’m lame. I’m constantly picking up after the teens, though…they will do it if reminded (well, one has to scream at me first because she was going to do it anyway but then I had to remind her and that just pisses her off, even though if I never reminded her, it never would actually get done), but since they’re only here half time, it just doesn’t work well.

Anyway. I didn’t do any fabric stuff Wednesday night due to exhaustion. Then I spent all day shopping with the girlchild, because she needs clothes (so do I, but I wasn’t particularly successful). At least the stores were air-conditioned, and she used up four gift cards (one only had $1.96 on it, which I was not informed of when we went INTO the store). Now I just need to get boychild suited up for prom, because, yes, he’s going, and no, not with one other person…but with a group, but I’m still pleased he’s going…the last school dance he went to was the Halloween dance in 6th grade. He didn’t like the noise. Anyway. One more thing on my list of things to do.

It was 105 degrees here too, so running around doing lots of stuff wasn’t a reality. I had quilt class last night, so I cut out pieces in someone else’s air conditioning…

And then I came home and cut more pieces out in my non-air-conditioning.

Those are actually the trimmings. I save them to make sure I didn’t drop a piece in there, because sometimes I do. This is going to take forever, I think. Actually, Earth Stories, which is bigger and has more pieces, only took 12 hours to cut out at this stage. I’m 5 hours in. It might just be another week or so.

I’ve been getting massive drawing urges. My brain is in the mood. I need it to get in the mood of drawing a specific thing for that next show, but it’s crotchety, recalcitrant. It doesn’t want to follow instructions, as has been patently evident over the last year. I’m planning on doing a life drawing session during the summer to try to keep the brain happy. It’s worried about all that empty time, which isn’t really empty, because I have 17 million things that need doing. But there’s no overwhelming school that is eating up so much of its daily time to wander. It helps. The brain needs focus, or it ruminates too much.

So I found this in my old car…

My forest adventure pass from 2006. You need one of these to hike up in the National Forest here…it has seen better days. There’s a newer one in there now…but I didn’t have one from 2006-2014. I didn’t get to hike much during those years. When soccer starts up again, it will be difficult for a while again, but she’s only got one more year. There’s already four summer tournaments scheduled. But I won’t hike as much in the summer anyway…too hot.

My mom made this while she was traveling in Australia/New Zealand…

It’s her first wool piece, I think. Someone should tell my brother that I’m inheriting this one. (Notice the magazines…Consumer Reports, AARP with Patrick Stewart on the cover…NO! Is he OLD? And Sunset…all OUR magazines are food-, quilt-, and education-related.)

So the fires are still going, although some are under control, and our local schools are going back today…which makes sense. I had to move the test for today…although I’m not sure a test on Monday is a good plan for middle-school kids who will completely forget about it over the weekend, but maybe more of them will do their study guides (ha!). I think my schedule for the next two weeks is now completely fucked, but that doesn’t really matter. In fact, none of it really matters. Any questions? They’ll learn whatever I teach them on some level. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t get through it all, because we never do.

OK, so we had one day off and it was too hot to think straight, and the plus was that I got some of the house cleaned up and all that thrift shop stuff out of here, and girlchild will leave me alone about shopping for a while, although next on her list is altering clothing, which drives me nuts, and I did a little grading and art stuff, and if I’m still feeling mopey and down, it’s because that’s what I feel most of the time. I even got more sleep than I usually would have and that’s a good thing. So I should stop pretending that this is NOT a school day (ugh, do I HAVE to go?) and remember it’s air-conditioned there and it’s only one day and then I can come home again. Not that home is a solution to the mopey and down feeling. SIGH. I need a change. I just don’t know what that change is.

Earth Stories: Tracing the Pieces

Once I have the drawing done, I number all the pieces, so I can put them back where I found them. I use a red pen because it’s easier to see with all the black lines around.

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Plus remember that I will be reading those numbers upside down, because I trace on a light table with the drawing upside down, so they are all reversed.

Then when I lay them out and iron them onto fabric, the fusible web will be on the back of the pieces.

It seems obvious to say all that, but I’ve done it wrong before…I traced one whole connecting piece for the Sightlines exhibit backwards…so I can remake those fish/blood vessel quilts backwards now. I have one whole quilt that I traced backwards, and yes, there are words in it. It made sense to me to not fix them at the time.

This section of the quilt with the little people in it is about 8″ square and has about 250 pieces in it. That’s what happens when I draw pieces to size. They get insanely small.

When the numbers are circled, it’s to remind me that where the number is, is NOT where the piece is…or that the piece continues under another piece, in which case, I usually add an arrow pointing in the direction it continues. These also were just too damn small to fit written numbers into, so I had to write outside the shape. It took almost 3 hours just to number all the pieces.

This quilt has over 2000 pieces. And some of them are freakishly tiny.

I do trace the overlaps (well, underlaps really), so hopefully there are no gaps between pieces. That means I have to keep track of what’s on top and what goes underneath. And I suspect those are bone pieces above, because they are all the same color and I think the skelly in the uterus is in that picture…those are probably finger or toe bones.

It’s kind of amazing what my brain is capable of doing sometimes. It took 24 hours and 7 days to trace all the Wonder Under…kind of crazy, if you think about it. What did YOU do over Spring Break? Yeah. That’s the conversation that only happens with people who know me fairly well. The rest would think I’m crazy.

Here’s all the Wonder Under laid out on the floor.

Each piece is about a yard, maybe a little more. Then I started cutting all the pieces out…

I was really efficient with that task…it only took 12 hours. I cut them out with a little margin around, so after I iron it to fabric, there will be a clean edge when I trim those pieces. The box on the right is the trash…I hang on to that until I make sure there’s no real pieces in there. Sometimes I forget what I’m doing and throw the wrong piece in the wrong bin.

Then it took me an hour and a half to sort all the pieces into 21 bins, one for each 100 pieces. Strangely, I don’t have a picture of that…I usually do.

Anyway, next, I’ll talk about the long process of picking fabrics.

Earth Stories: Drawing It Big

The Earth Stories exhibit opened at Michigan State University Museum in Lansing, MI, on May 11, and continues through November 26. The opening reception is May 16 from 4-6 PM. It then travels to the University of Central Missouri Gallery of Art and Design, Warrensburg, Missouri, January 19 – February 28, 2015. This means I will finally be allowed to post the pictures of this quilt as of the 16th…I thought I’d spend a few posts reviewing how these two pieces came to be.

I was accepted into the exhibit in October of 2012. I wasn’t even going to enter. I got into this huge discussion with the family, intellectuals all (although I qualify as an emotional intellectual…nowadays only barely rational apparently) about what could actually SAVE the Earth. The original plan for the exhibit was to pick a group or person who had made a significant contribution to saving the Earth, to keeping our planet livable, whole, sustainable even. I kept coming back to science in general, but the thought of doing a quilt of people in labcoats with microscopes and water-testing devices seemed kinda lame.

Then I watched this video:

It was Monique’s fault. She posted it. And it clicked a switch in my brain. A huge one.

Understand that I teach life science. I teach biology to 12-year-olds. I teach human reproduction. What do we need to do to save the world? We need to stop overpopulating it. We need to make sure that the available resources are distributed fairly, but also that we don’t overwhelm them with too many people (it may be too late for that, honestly). So when I saw that there were groups that were trying to help women who actually WANTED to control the number and timing of their births, the size of their families, to keep them within the constraints of what they could afford, of what they could handle, THAT was the group I was going to put the strength of my convictions behind.

That was the International Planned Parenthood Federation. They provide voluntary birth control to women in countries where it’s not allowed or where they have financial or religious difficulty in getting the medications they need to make sure they can take care of their families. They can decide how long to wait between births, which is healthier for both mother and child, but she can also decide when to stop having children. Imagine, giving women a choice? Plus helping to conserve our natural resources? All good.

Once I was accepted into the exhibit, which is an interesting story in itself, I sort of looked at how much time I had during the school year and how much time it would take to make a 72″-square quilt, and I planned my time. My goal was to have it drawn before Spring Break, traced onto Wonder Under during Spring Break, ironed to fabric before Summer Break, and then get the whole nasty beast done over the summer.

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men, and overwhelmed single moms who don’t even know what kind of shit might hit their fans.

I did OK with the first part, actually…OK, well, not really. I had about 4 or 5 mis-starts to the drawing…in fact, I think I started drawing in February (Spring Break being April). I already knew what position I wanted the main figure in, but I couldn’t quite visualize parts, so I asked the girlchild (who was running a nasty fever at the time that turned into the nasty flu that messed up her system for a while) to pose…

She was thrilled. As I’m sure you can see. Yes, my carpet is that beat up.

She didn’t have the right look on her face. She’s supposed to be Earth Mother. I decided not to make her old…mothers aren’t usually super old. They’re frazzled. Plus she had live trees on her, and it’s not supposed to be alive.

A few days later, I tried again.

Serious issues with the thighs. And the mountains are lame. Plus that left hand? Both hands…way too small.

I don’t usually fuss this much over drawings, but that was the thing with this one. I needed it to say the right thing and I don’t usually care so much that the viewer is getting the message. I figure they will get SOME message and that’s all that matters. On this one, the message mattered.

So I tried again…

Much better belly/thigh area (and the pregnancy finally shows up…notice it wasn’t there before). Her face, though…too spacey. Like she’s contemplating what color nail polish might go with those shoes.

I gave up for a while…a month actually. Then I realized Spring Break was bounding towards me, so I started again…

Ugh. Too small, arms suck. Whatever!

A few days later, though…BOOM!

There she is. There’s the start. Much bigger and the right look on her face…but I filled an entire page just with this part of her torso. I copied the bottom part and taped it to another page and then drew the bottom half…then enlarged those and taped them together.

I finally had the beginnings of this thing.

Now realize that light table is 3 feet by 4 feet, so it gives you a good idea of how big this thing gets. I started in a 14×17″ sketchbook. I think I enlarged the drawing 200-300%. Then I drew the rest of it to size (which is always a crazy tiny-piece mistake for me, and yet I do it every time).

I spent about 20 hours drawing this thing. I’d draw for a while and then step back and look at it (or stand on the piano bench and look at it, because it was the only way I could see the whole thing).

Most drawings take me a couple of hours, maybe four or five for a super-complicated one like what I’m working on now.

I had TV shows running on the laptop (the computer in the back is too slow and sound is an issue) to keep my brain occupied. Here’s me drawing the thought cloud that shows a happy world with plenty of food…

This is back at the beginning, right after I had taped all the extra paper around the enlarged figure to make it 72″ square.

It was a huge endeavor. I’ve never spent so long DRAWING a quilt, but it really did need to be forcibly pulled out of me…it took a good chunk of Spring Break to get it done. This was before all the shit hit the fan at work, so my brain was mostly OK for this type of task. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that now. It was really difficult. Maybe the art brain would prefer that level of involvement in a drawing to all the other crap I throw at it.

Next post? Numbering and tracing pieces…

The Many Hours of Quietude

There’s a fine line between quiet and quietude, between an uncomfortable silence that is sort of filled by television noises and to-do lists or a peaceful place of calm in your head. Quietude: a state of stillness, calmness, and quiet in a person or place. I’d like to achieve that. Sometimes I do, especially when making stuff. Art. Not dinner. Making dinner does not instill a state of anything, except expectation of food in the near future…assuming I don’t burn it. Depression brain is like chemo brain. I forget about stuff. I don’t hear the timer. I leave the oven on preheat. It’s a mental fugue that sometimes leaves me wondering whether my brain will ever wander fully back. Cooking requires more of my brain than is often available. Besides, I’m a lazy cook.

Perhaps I need to tempt it with more of THIS…

Girlchild made me cheesecake from scratch for Mother’s Day. It’s delicious. Delightful. Incredibly good. Really. She’s good at that cooking thing, and she likes it. Unlike me. I tolerate it. I put up with it because I like the products from freshly cooked food. I don’t like most pre-packaged stuff. So I cook under duress. I’m usually reading at the same time AND watching bad television. I’m glad she likes it. I hope that continues.

The kids also got me poles for hiking…

I’ve been borrowing dad’s old ones. These are lightweight and fold up much smaller than dad’s, AND…they’re purple. Very nice gift. They did well. I guess I was a decent mom this year, despite the brain mess. It’s nice that they listened to me.

I have a new car. My parents, dad especially, busted their butts to find me something…my car’s registration is up next week and we don’t think it will pass the smog test because of the catalytic converter. It was starting to be kind of a desperate issue, like I was going to have to start walking to school. Or not. But they did a bunch of internet stuff and phone calls and some trips to see cars, and it was delivered today. It’s still old, but has low mileage and will get me through the kids’ college years at least, and hopefully longer than that. It’s sad to be my age and not be able to afford to deal with cars and other stuff…but that’s the reality of being a divorced mom…the statistics show that we often never get our heads financially above water, even if we’re making decent money.

Anyway. It’s a bit of a relief.

I am now in the cutting-out fabric stage…

So I can get through all the saved episodes of shows on Tivo, right? I didn’t actually get much done, just an hour. I’m 3 hours in; based on the last few quilts, it’s at least an hour per 100 pieces, so it will be at least 18 hours. I suspect it will be more like 22…but maybe not, because a lot of the really tiny pieces I don’t cut out until I’m ready to iron them down, so I don’t lose them.

I need to put away all the fabrics I used and clean up the office. I’m thinking I might spend some of the upcoming 3-day weekend ironing the other quilt together. It doesn’t have a lot of pieces and I’d like to have a couple of things I’m working on at the same time. I like to feel productive. I also miss drawing. I haven’t drawn in a long time. I have a union meeting tomorrow…I often draw there.

My mood is really flat tonight. I think some of it is tired, but also I just don’t feel like feeling. The phrase “Use your words” keeps bouncing around my brain. I don’t know why. I haven’t been looking at enough art. I haven’t been reading enough blogs. I’m managing exercise and meditation and eating (damn, speaking of eating, my blood sugar is really wacky during the afternoon these days…annoying…need to remember to carry extra food tomorrow). Girlchild and I are still butting heads. Work is still a clusterfuck. It’s hot too…supposed to be 102 degrees tomorrow.

Anyway. The mood will go one way or another…improve or descend into that pit of depressoid bleck. Whichever. This flat mood is worse. I don’t know how to feel normal any more. What does it feel like to get up and not feel like the world is weighing on you, like your whole existence is a stupid mistake?

I don’t know. Make more art. Probably sleep more. Rejoice in the homemade cheesecakes of life, in the purple poles. Read a book. Take a hike.

Eagle Rock on the PCT

A couple of weekends ago, I did another small section of the PCT, this time with the purpose of seeing Eagle Rock. It was a warmish day…

But the first part of the hike, which leaves near the Warner Springs fire station, is mostly under big oak trees, running next to a stream.

It was quite pretty on this section…

We were not a huge group, but that’s because there was some race going on that blocked traffic from North County making it to Ramona, so we were missing a bunch of people who were supposed to go.

There were these great big meadows of grasses that stretched out under the warm sun…

This reminds me of the area near Sacramento, where I spent the first 7 or so years of my life (obviously imprinted on me).

Of course, that’s because things here turn brown very early…we haven’t had much rain this year.

There is a section that is more desert-like after the trees…

You can see mountains surrounding the valley…

We were blessed with a decent breeze for most of the hike…

Lots of far-off vistas and beautiful blue skies…there were many through-hikers of the PCT on this section…apparently Warner Springs has good pancakes and omelets, so they were motivated to get up and move.

This was not a difficult hike, about 6.5 miles, with no real climbing.

It is out and back…and I’m sure it’s very hot during the summer, so lots of water…

More of those grassy meadows stretching for miles.

There were lots of wildflowers around too…not that I took many pictures of those…this was the last hike my old camera made it on. To get it to take photos, half the time I had to remove and replace the battery. So yeah. That’s what finally motivated me to get a new one.

Not a lot of trees in this section…

Oh yeah, and it’s not a hike in Southern California without some cactus…seriously, this stuff grows everywhere.

All the while, I’m keeping my eyes open for something big enough to be called Eagle Rock…

More flowers…notice how dry the ground is? These won’t last long…

It’s not a wide trail…

Rocks? In the distance?

These were actually west of the formation itself (which is not on my PCT map at all)…

And there we are…you can’t see this from the PCT…you see the back end. It looks like someone did some selective chipping to the beak area, but otherwise, that’s an eagle all right…

It’s big enough to stand on. No group photo this time…not enough motivation for that, I guess. This is looking south towards the PCT. Someday I’ll do this section…it’s supposed to be nice.

More southerly looking…

Giant flowers…seriously, bigger than your hand, just growing right out of the rock.

A view to the west…

And back towards the south…there was a steady stream of through-hikers on that section.

Thistles…

Rocks…in case you’ve never seen one.

People eating lunch on rocks…we actually hiked this really fast, so it was more like brunch on the rocks.

Bird…refused to turn around and pose.

I think this is a blue-belly (despite the lack of actual blue belly showing)…I had a lizard expert helping me stalk these around the rocks…we heard a rattlesnake under one of the rocks too, but we never saw him.

More sitting upon the rocks…

A spiny granite lizard…there were a bunch of these, but they were photo-shy. This one did push-ups for me.

No photos please…

After a short stop, we hiked back the way we came…

It always looks a little different on the way back…

One of those big flowers ready to bloom…notice the lavender tint.

And those big old beautiful oaks…

More flowers, even on cactus…

Back through the desert wash area…

And into the meadows and trees again…

I could live out here…except for all the hikers. And the summer heat. And the fire danger.

We made it back quicker than it took to get out there…

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Here’s the sign for food at the Warner Springs stop for the hikers…they must be good for business.

Like I said, it was hot and dry…over 80 degrees, but a nice breeze kept it bearable…

This would be a great hike with kids old enough to make the distance…just be careful of snakes, especially around the rocks. Oh yeah, and if you just want to see the rock, you can drive up very close and do a super short hike to see it (wimps!). It took us about 3 hours, I think, to do the whole thing…it took longer to get OUT there and park, because yes, it’s in the boonies if you’re coming from San Diego proper…but definitely worth it. Crossing it off the list and trying to figure out how to hike the section south of it next…