String-Pieced

Hot and humid. Sitting on a purple velvety couch. Sweating like a beast. Fan is on, blowing directly at me, but not TOO high, because I am ironing small fabric pieces that tend to take off in the wind. I’ve made it to 15 1/2 hours of cutting, about 6 of them yesterday. Probably I have another 8 to go. My right hand (the scissorhand) is not happy about this. At the end of the night, I had this…

Still to cut on the left (a much smaller pile), trash in the middle, and cut out on the right. Some of the super tiny pieces just stay until I’m ready to iron them down…otherwise I lose them in this process. It’s easier to cut them our right before they go down.

I bought a new pair of scissors today…because of this…

Not only is my hand sore today (to be understood), but that is a dent in my finger from the scissors. And to the right of it? I now have a callous. Weird. Sore. Crampy. It would be better if I were not in such a rush to get it done.

But now I have another project, and the opening is in 36 days? I think? (Let’s not consider getting two kids off to college and school starting, OK? Because that just makes my heart tremble in a truly uncomfortable way).

Last night, I met my conspirators in crime, er art, er they are music folk, so really, I should call them collaborators. I’m making a human-shaped quilt that will hang from these ceiling beams…

It’s a 16-foot stretch approximately…

And they will create a soundspace for the people who come in. Their group is Cradle to Grave, which goes along with my female imagery.

We will be at Space4Art in downtown San Diego, in the back, in the Educational Building. The opening is September 12 from 6-10; stop by if you can.

There will be lots of sound artists around and some other cool stuff too.

It won’t be like what I normally do. At all. Well, I drove all the way home last night after seeing the space and listening to them talk about sounds, and I had multiple images popping through my brain, whirling around, and I tried out and discarded a number of things (in my head), including 3D boobs and a stabilizer. I think the way the piece is constructed, regular batting will work fine and I can piece it from all the long leftover bits I have hanging around here. The 3D boobs I think are too much. I’m actually considering a dinner plate type breast, maybe slightly stuffed, maybe not. And I’m string-piecing with the stuff I don’t use. Or don’t need. Or whatever. So it’s going to be kinda wonky. I am considering putting an eyeball on there (just one?) and maybe a heart…dunno. Gotta get the base fabric prepped first.

There’s 21 ~~yards~~ feet (dammit) of muslin (on sale!) in my dryer right now. I just need to figure out where I’m going to lay out the figure to cut it out. There’s always my classroom. The floors are currently clean. So I might go in tomorrow AM to do that. I’m still debating whether to cut it all as one piece or to divide it up in separate parts: head, torso, legs, arms. I’m not drawing it first. There’s no pattern.

My head is swirling with stuff…kind of a string-piecing of ideas in there at the moment. Hopefully it will all coalesce in the next few days so I can get it started before school completely takes over. It’s interesting to let the creative brain run with stuff like this. If I don’t force the issue, put myself in a position where I have to change what I’m doing, mess with my process, my product, work with other people, then I will just keep making the same things. So this is good. Stressful, time-consuming, but good.

Not Tidy Nor Magical

So I spent a short amount of time reading that popular Japanese book of tidying over the last couple of days, and after I almost gave up about two pages in, I settled in to just inhabiting her crazy and laughing my ass off. First, of course, I thanked my bra for being so uncomfortable and yet supporting my mammary glands so spectacularly. I then thanked my dishwasher for probably needing to be fixed again, and my daughter (via text, because she’s not here) for making a disaster area of my smaller living room, because without her actions, I would not appreciate the tidy that will ensue once her ass is in Massachusetts.

Seriously. If you are a minimalist, you might like this book…

If you’re normal like me, read it for the amusement factor. It’s short.

It’s true. I need to tidy. I really do. I just need everyone else to leave so I can do that. And stop sending me paper in the mail too, assholes. Don’t want it. And I don’t want receipts and bags and all that shit. It’s hard, because as a teacher, we were talking about flipping everything online, but it’s true that I am less likely to feel pressure to grade stuff if it is all hidden in folders online than if I have a pile of paper in front of me. That said, I’m going for it. I may hate myself halfway through the year, but without change, there is no progress.

I can’t possibly tidy, though, until all this crap is boxed up, and honestly, I’m not the one going to college and I don’t feel like doing this…

Aug 5 15 002 small

On the other hand, I want all this out of here and I want her to leave and go to college. God dammit. I hate these mental dilemmas.

I mean. I love her. I do. But…oh, no, she does not get to take the level with her. That’s mine. Somewhere under all of that are a couple of frames I was trying to get finished. But I can’t find my drill. I had one. It’s disappeared.

So yesterday…yesterday was a lot of work and poking and prodding (ah, the annual boob-squeeze of pain). But I finally managed to get some cutting done…

I only did about an hour and 20 minutes last night. There wasn’t much time at the end of the day.

Today, I had chiropractor (hallelujah, she felt my neck and it felt like hell…now it’s awesome)…and then settled down to cut…

Still to cut on the left, trash in the middle, and happily trimmed (and thanked) pieces on the right. It was about three hours today…so far. But I have an art meeting for 2 or 3 hours tonight that will mess with my free time. I’m 11 1/2 hours in. Probably that’s halfway. The problem with cutting is that my hands start to hurt. They cramp. They swell. So it was probably good that I started cutting last week in between ironing. It gives my hands a rest.

Certainly, if I have to pick up every item in my house and determine if I get a spark of joy from it, then I will never get any art done. I really do think that the people with clean houses are not the ones who are single moms of teens who are incredibly useless (apparently) and make art and have a job that is a total timesuck. And I don’t just craft on a Sunday afternoon…I make art almost every single day, and this quilt is probably 130 hours of work. That means instead of caressing each piece of junk mail that comes in the house and thanking it for filling my mailbox, I make art. Instead of praying with the vacuum cleaner about the cat and dog hair it is about to pick up, I make art. Instead of thanking my digestive system for making feces so my toilet paper has a purpose, I make art.

My real problem is time. Always has been. And with that, I’m off to a meeting that will take up time about making more art, some more experimental stuff with collaborators and stuff. Stretching, changing it up. Not tidying. Not thanking the driveway for supporting the car. I will thank the fan for moving the 90+-degree air around. That’s legit.

I Can’t Stand It…

Oh Holy Hallelujah, the ironing is done. Last night. When I thought I could stand no longer. When I was too tired to move. I ironed. Dammit, I wasn’t ironing for another day. I was a gonna be done. I finished at 11:46 PM. Here’s part of the pile before I organized it…

I really like the color-organized bins at the very end, when I count the fabrics…

Because that’s 151 different fabrics used. It took 23 hours and 49 minutes to pick fabrics for about 1875 pieces. That’s it. No biggie (cough). Earth Stories took longer (had more pieces). Last year’s biggie took 22 1/2 hours to pick fabrics. Makes sense. This one is about 100 more pieces. Which means I only have about 80 more hours to put into it (oh dear. I’m not sure it helps to know that number). It’s OK. I have no life. And in 3 weeks, the timesuckers leave for college. Ignore the job, right? And the other art project? It will be fine.

Here’s the pile that still needs to be cut out…

It’s not insignificant. You know, I was at school today and it all felt…well…rather overwhelming. As does my house at the moment, being full of half-finished projects and things that need to be shipped to college or driven to school. I’m a little wacko at the moment. Can’t handle it. And no, there is no easy way to migrate 39 website links from our old school website to the new one. And no, you will not have an email sign-up button for parents to click. And no, you don’t really need a history teacher on your team. It will all be OK (calming voice). Breathe in. Breathe out. Remember that all they will remember of what you teach is sex ed, and even that, they will only remember what they want to remember. So no, the pregnancies and STDs are NOT your fault.

Boychild has been doing wood projects for me. He now knows how to sand, stain, and varnish.

Hopefully someone with a drill (because mine has disappeared) will help teach him how to hang shelves.

I joked I was going to clean one square foot of the house a day after the kids left…which would be fine if everything was on the floor. So really, it’s a foot cubed and that space is much larger than I’d like to consider. Ignore garage. I’ll tell you later about the book I’m reading, which alternately makes me want to purge my entire closet (like really. All of it) or break out laughing because it’s so hilarious (and no, it wasn’t supposed to be…I think).

I am so tired. It was a long day. And it’s not over. But I gots shit to do. So more tomorrow maybe. But expect me to be cutting shit out for days. And cleaning. Because I really can’t stand it.

Art. Think Art.

So. Yeah. Didn’t get much done yesterday. After cooking dinner for the whole family, I came home and girlchild had a meltdown about going to school (she doesn’t want to go any more.), then I had almost zero energy for anything. I sat a lot. I didn’t even cut stuff out while sitting. Yesterday was a fail on the art completion game. Today may be more of the same. Stupid teeth needing to be cleaned by that woman who will never shut up. Ugh. And then hours of shopping with girlchild to get stuff for school (where she doesn’t want to go). She really is different than the boychild…has a list of stuff packed to ship, a list of stuff she needs, and a list of stuff to put in suitcases. Plus a list of stuff to get when she arrives. It’s all silly stuff like nail scissors. She just uses mine. She can’t take mine though, so she needs her own pair. Her roommates are texting back and forth about buying a mirror (they are all traveling to school). So yeah. I understand why she’s freaked out, and I expected it…but when she says she doesn’t want to leave but she does want to be independent. Oh sigh. Yeah. I know baby girl. I know.

I really really really want to be done with the ironing. The pile in the box still needs to be cut out…

The empty boxes are covering the loose pieces so a cat doesn’t sit on them, although the two I have now are not really bad about that. Midnight sits on the other table and Kitten sits on the chair.

I did cut out a lot of grays last night…in fact, most of this piece is grays, city grays, road grays, sidewalk grays, smokestack grays. Gray.

Here’s a different view of some of the fabrics…I didn’t clean up last night after ironing…

I think I only ironed for about an hour and a half. I didn’t even start until almost 11. I think I did some earlier in the day, but not much (I did). I’m 21 hours in. Based on my estimates, I could finish in a couple of hours. I do actually think that’s true.

I cut out nothing yesterday…

Here’s what’s cut out so far…

That’s 7 1/2 hours’ worth of cutting. No seriously. It is. Sad but true.

School is starting soon. It always feels like it’s looming over me this time of year, even though officially I have Two Full Weeks (that’s nothing…it really is nothing). It’s because the team communication starts (OK, this summer, it never stopped) and we start meeting and doing professional development. Plus we start worrying about lessons and syllabi and all that crap. PAPER! Or how to get it all online instead. Tomorrow, I will be migrating my old school website to my new one. I think. Or they will do that and I will fix what they fucked up? It’s hard to say. Plus there’s an issue with everything being on Google…I hate that I have to sign out of one Google account completely to sign into another one. Why can’t I keep my home Google account and my school Google account open at the same time on one computer? I think that’s idiotic. I should be able to have two tabs open to do that, and not have to keep two browsers open (which is what I do at school when I need to be on two systems at once). Because my school is NOW (after one year? Two? on Outlook?) switching over completely to Google, which is fine, but then they kept the old school email but used the Google password (we had a different Google email last year). SIGH. Much confusion to all my saved passwords etc. on all four devices. Five. (One I don’t use that’s in a locked cabinet at school. OK. Sometimes I use it at school when I’m desperate.)

Art. Think art. School can wait (until tomorrow at 8 AM when I have to be at a training).

Running Out of Flesh…

Yesterday was weird. I had a bad dizzy reaction to restarting my diabetes meds for some reason…I had to stop them because they interacted badly with the contrast they used in my fibroid procedure. I was also still really tired…it’s hard to listen to my body when it’s projecting all this exhaustion noise, because normally I don’t listen to it, and the difference is now that I’m still recovering (enough already. I’m ready to be well.).

I wasn’t in the mood for food though, and even less in the mood to waste time eating it. There are so many times when food has been an issue for me that I honestly wish I could just swallow a nutrition supplement once a day and it would take care of that, so I don’t have to stop making art to forage for something I don’t really want to eat (right now, I’m eating a bowl of cherries. No really. I am. Life is not like a bowl of cherries, by the way. Not at all.).

And the house is a disaster area. I keep trying to clean up and throw away and organize, and I think I should just set fire to the place and run. Seriously, all those organizing/tidying specialists? I don’t think any of them are artists. I’m sure there minimalist artists out there (and I don’t mean artists who make minimalist art, but artists who only have JUST the materials they need to make art and nothing more, not an extra piece of paper or pen or eraser. Just Enough. OK, I don’t really believe that.), but I’m a collector, a stash-builder, a semi-hoarder. I’ve gotten rid of tons of art materials over the years…in fact, I read some blog post about that where she listed 10 things you should do to help minimize the stash, but I’d Already Done Them. I chalk that up to being 10-15 years older than her, but whatever. I think I’m up for another round. Actually the next art project I’m doing is collaborative, and I don’t plan to buy anything but muslin and some sort of batting/stiffener for it. I’m going to use all my own fabrics. Think string quilt in human shape. I can DO this! We’ll see how that works. I’m thinking cacophony of color…my collaborators may not.

Anyway, yesterday, after helping the kids buy school textbooks (OK, boychild didn’t need any help; he’s on round 3 and pretty smart about it), which really meant standing around with credit card in hand (boychild is buying his own this year), I was finally allowed to iron stuff, so I went for the fleshy bits on the second figure…

Unfortunately, just like with the other figure, I had numbered all the bits and pieces on and touching the figure at the same time, so I had to sort through pieces 1121-1750 or so to find all of them.

Here’s all the stuff that still needs to be picked out: heart, lungs, piping, roads, electrical thingies (there’s a word for those, dammit…transmission towers)…

and buildings on the bottom, plus some cars and nuclear power plants.

I didn’t have enough of the fabric I picked for the lightest in the flesh range…

In fact, after I cut those out, this is all I had left…

Yes. I should throw those out. I know. I did find another similar fabric for the rest of the pieces that needed to be lightest, so I got all the flesh ironed yesterday…I’m at 19 hours. There was another color where I almost ran out as well. Still not close to done…closer…but no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

I also cut some stuff out after my dizzy spell…I’m glad I’ve gotten to the point where I have stuff I can do while sitting (or semi-reclining)…

Kitten is in here with me. Yes. That’s an open window. I’m totally paranoid now and when I leave the house, I shut way more windows than I used to. And that’s the slope where I thought I heard her Thursday night as well.

In the process of trying to clear stuff out of here, Kitten benefits from boychild’s administration of a scratching tool…

I should take that to school and scare unsuspecting 12-year-olds with it, shouldn’t I. Yup.

So the shopping is done and I have about an hour and a half before I have to start packing up for my parents’ house. I’m hoping girlchild is on her way home from soccer…oops, just got the text. Nope. They won. She’s got finals. If I were feeling better, I would have attempted going to this tournament, but the thought of lugging a chair any distance and sitting in the sun for hours is exhausting.

Gonna iron…hopefully…if not, I’ll cut stuff out. It’s all getting stuff done I guess. Running out of time, of flesh, of pieces? Hopefully by the time I go to bed tonight, it will be the latter…because the first is definitely true.

Back to (Semi) Normal

So yesterday was mostly normal. I finally ironed and cut stuff out the way I should have been all week, interrupted by many sessions of Kitten petting and loving. She’s not a lap cat or a cat that likes to be held much, but she did follow me all over the house, even asking to be on my chair with me (which yes, means I perch on the edge while she takes up the rest). She disappeared at about 7 AM this morning when I was letting the Incredible Peeing Dog back in, but girlchild found her (yes, I panicked. Even though every window was closed). She was in the hanging sweater container I use for smaller older quilts. It’s in the closet…perfect size for a small cat.

I’m so glad she’s back. It’s amazing how much emotion we have tied up in these little creatures who are only around for 10-20 years (or in Babygirl’s case, only 2 1/2). Kitten’s 6th birthday is next Friday. She’s supposed to be with me for the next 7-10 years. I hope she knows that.

Yes, I am a crazy old cat lady. But as everyone starts warning me about empty nest syndrome and I start thinking about how to fill all that time with some social stuff, so I don’t go hermit crazy (I’m an introvert, yes, but I still need human interaction beyond my 175 12-year-old students), I realize that I do come home and talk to the animals and they help when I’m sitting there on the couch, cutting out a trillion tiny pieces of fabric. It’s the difference between alone and not.

I picked fabrics for a little over 4 hours yesterday…including these feather shafts that I wanted to shade from one color to another…

I finished the larger of the two figures and the bird above her. I’m ready to start the smaller figure. I wanted to be done with ironing today, but I’ve gotten through about piece 1120, so there are at least 700 to go. I don’t have 7 hours today, so probably tomorrow. I have 16 hours in so far…and I guessed about 21. Think it will be closer to 23. Maybe not. There are more Things That Are Alike in the second figure. The first figure had all these tiny animals and plants that needed to be picked out separately. That shit takes time…and sometimes research. What color are a bee’s legs anyway? You’d be surprised.

I was tired yesterday. Didn’t sleep well enough the night before, plus I’m still recovering, and Thursday’s drive all over San Diego County plus tons of walking and stress basically kicked my ass. I took a nap yesterday and when I was too tired to stand, I would go sit on the couch and cut pieces out.

I did about 2 1/2 hours of cutting stuff out yesterday…

The cut-out pile is on the left…after 6 hours total, it still looks awfully small. The bin on the right is the stuff that still needs to be cut out. You’ll notice that swirly flesh color has been in there for like the last three posts, mostly because I never get DOWN that far. So I’m ironing faster than I’m cutting. That’s OK. I’ll get to the flesh eventually, probably early next week.

August 5 is looming as a deadline (for something?!) because I know I’ll probably be starting work on a new major project with a September 12 (well, that’s the opening, so earlier) deadline, and that whole school-starting thang is popping up as well, and then there’s the two kids I need to get to college. One needs jeans and the other needs Everything in the World. Or is that just what is piled up in my living room? Hard to say.

I have made zero attempts to clean up the house this summer. There is no point until they both leave. Actually, the boychild does clean up after himself.

Here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far…

As I’m going through, I do try to pull from what’s already there to tie everything together, so although now I’m working on the city girl, some of those reds and whites and grays and yellows will show up in her as well. I will need more gray though. And I haven’t made a flesh decision yet, but will be doing that probably in the next 20 minutes or so, because the next stuff I pick is her feet.

So there we are. The panicked end-of-summer creativity surge of an artist who teaches science to pay the bills. I’ve mostly ignored school all summer (that is such a load of crap…there have been at least 200 texts about school and a host of emails, plus I did a bit of Google Classroom), and that will have to stop. Damn job. Why are you messing with my ART??? Yeah, OK. Whatever. Seriously though. It’s August 1, and this is the first day I allow myself to consider school schedules and lesson plans and copies to the print shop. My team lost its history teacher (again!), so the three that are left are meeting Tuesday after my first professional development of the year. Next week is an appointment clusterfuck. All the teeth-cleaning, boob-squeezing, meaningless followup with an OB/GYN I’ve never met because I had the procedure done and my insurance has their crazy followup needs (I’ve already seen my primary care doc…so this really is pointless)…all of that is this coming week. I seriously have no day without at least one appointment on it, most with two or more.

Remind me to take up meditation again. Right now, I’m doing the best kind of meditation…fabric picking. Makes me smile.