I’m trying to get back on my planned art and remodeling schedule this week…I had a real hard time last week being motivated. It was too much, I think. But finishing the ironing on that big quilt and realizing how many hours of stitching down, quilting, and binding remain on that one and the other one, PLUS needing to do some other art things, made me realize that I have to stay focused. I’m not really ON vacation. This is my other job and I have to take advantage of the time I have to get that work done, because it will become increasingly harder to do that as the summer progresses into that crazy hell we call Fall…it really is FALL…from sanity (what little I have).
So Focus Goggles on. It’s easy to say that right now, because I’m not actually awake yet. I mean, yes, it seems like a reasonable hour for people to be waking up at almost 9, but I really can’t get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 at the moment, and I had to get up early to go to the lab and have them take my life force (aka blood). Fun stuff. Now I will freak out at regular intervals during the day when I check my results. I’m not expecting them to be good right now. Oh well.
So I had wanted to have some small quilt tops of birds ironed by this Thursday…that was my original deadline…so I started ironing Wonder Under to fabric yesterday. The plus with these is that they’re small and quick…
The minus is that they are so small that it actually takes me longer to pick the fabrics because there’s only like 5 of them and I get fussier about their going together in the way I want, because there’s nothing else to distract you from them. In a huge quilt with 80 fabrics, you wouldn’t notice if one gray was slightly off, but in something this small, I would. Maybe you still wouldn’t. Anyway, so that’s slowed me down. That said, I got 5 of them done yesterday…which isn’t bad.
I start with the drawing and the tupperware with those Wonder Under pieces in it…
Then I lay those pieces out and try to figure out what colors I’m using. I picked these as possible backgrounds, but there are more…
I’m trying to keep it simple, so I am reusing some of the fabrics in more than one bird, like the beak colors and the whites of the eyes.
This one actually really threw me with the grays for a while. I thought about finding a picture of the original quilt and trying to copy the fabrics, but I didn’t.
On this one, I actually pulled up the picture on the iPad to try to figure out what I had used in the previous quilt, but that’s because the person who likes this one liked the original bird…
Not all of these birds are in existing quilts. Some were just pulled from drawings that are in the quiltmaking queue.
On the next version of that bird, I changed it up and used different fabrics.
Eleven fabrics for this one…amazingly small number of fabrics for a Kathy quilt. Granted these are smaller than I ever work.
This one is very muted…looking for a different background for it.
So 5 down, 5 to go today, once I get my refi signed. Oh yeah, and the wall painted…
I’m just going to paint and see if the texture is irregular enough to pass with a couple of coats of paint on it. I’m not sure I care enough to spend more time on it. The wall under the window doesn’t show at all and most of the rest of the wall will be covered by bookshelf or art. Plus it will all be a lovely unifying white. I put a second coat of plastery stuff on it yesterday and then sanded it and washed it down.
We have to paint this little section too…
Not a problem with the texture here…it did much better for some reason…no mastic maybe helps.
Once all that is done and the carpet is in, I will still need to deal with putting in shelves to the right of the fireplace and finding something for a mantle. I have a decorating friend who might be able to help with that, but it’s going to have to be cheap…in fact, I’m thinking of raiding my dad’s wood supply and just throwing an old barn board up there. Not really. But I don’t want fancy; I want natural.
This is looking back at the rest of this area, which is been in chaos since school got out.
It’s getting there. Slowly. Sitting on the couch is not happening much at the moment, unless you’re willing to climb in and be crowded…which we all have done (we are nesters). We’re still eating dinner on the deck. We started moving boxes and some furniture out of this area, just so next Tuesday will not be so heinous, but it’s hot and trying to find room for stuff is challenging. Girlchild just exploded all over the place when I asked her to deal with her stuff, so that makes it so much more fun. We did get the giant box of my CDs down into the garage, and then in trying to find a shelf that it would fit on, boychild started tossing stuff (he did ask first), so we filled a trashcan with stuff and found 6 boxes of clothing that either needs to be sent to the cousins up north or to the thrift shop…so that is girlchild’s job today, to go through those boxes.
At which point, my dad asked me when I’m going to clean out the garage. Holy crap, man. I can only handle so much chaos at a time. I need to get the art stuff done. I have another quilt I haven’t started yet that needs to be significantly started before school begins. I need to DRAW that. I can’t even trace Wonder Under until the carpets are done, but I need a drawing soon. Like before next week.
Yeah. So. That. Not happening right now. But thanks for asking.
Kathy Nida 