Next I Will Need the Blues…

The reality of the kids coming home in just over a week…means I have to clean that room in there. It’s amazing how long it can take to go through years of stored art materials and projects. I spent some time last night and found more stuff I’d forgotten about…like this little quilt. I can’t even tell you how old. I wanna say around 2007-2008, because I was doing these small drawings with body parts and birds, and Birdhead was before this and it’s 2007…

I guess I never felt compelled to quilt it. Silly really. It would probably only take a couple of hours…and then a binding and it would be done. It’s funny, because what I really look at is I don’t want to waste the fabric in it by never finishing it. There’s some awesome fabric in that. It needs to become a quilt.

Then I found this…barely started. I have a smaller one I used to embroider on when I traveled. I don’t actually remember starting this…

In the old days, about half the time I made quilts, I just Wonder-Undered a bunch of fabric and hand cut shapes out and placed them on the backing and ironed them down. This is one of those. Old school Kathy.

I went to IQA in Long Beach once and took some classes. I really LOVED this class. Couldn’t tell you the teacher’s name. Or when I did it. 2008? or 2010? Hard to say…but it was basically mark-making on fabric and paper. It was very cathartic…

I have a bunch of pieces from this…

Then I took a class from Yvonne Porcella, who is an amazing artist. But the teaching? Yeah, not so much. I got this much done…

And again, there’s some awesome fabric in that and I don’t want to waste it…here’s the drawing…

And I realized I totally don’t work this way and I want to go back to the way I DO work and finish this, which means tracing it all onto Wonder Under instead of tracing paper. Because this is nuts.

I found this piece of silk velvet I had hand-dyed…

And then I gave up cleaning and started ironing the current quilt again.

I’m still working my way around the outside of the bathtub, but I’m almost done…this is a pile of underwear and socks.

I laid out the stuff for the next hundred…you can see how much is done on the right…

I’m in the 300s and about 4 1/2 hours into the ironing. I’m trying to do 100 pieces a night. I’d do more, but I’ve been grading an assignment a night before I’m allowed to iron. I’ve gotten through three assignments in three nights, so I’m doing well. Catching up. Feeling less pressure…except so many kids still aren’t turning stuff in.

Here’s everything I’ve used so far…heavy on purples apparently. We’ll be going into flesh and bathtub colors next.

And I closed the one blue drawer, forcing Midnight to sleep in the lower drawer so I could get to the grays without squishing her.

She seemed to accept the change easily enough. But next I will need the blues…I’m wondering if I can just open another drawer and entice her into a different color. Who knows…