Hello Saturday morning. You started a little earlier than I wanted (whiny animals), but you’re bright and sunny with wispy white clouds flitting across. And at the moment, you don’t have a whole lot of stuff muddying those blue skies in your head. A hope for drawing time. Realization that you will have to grade some shit. Hunger, but no desire to cook. A long to-do list, but doable with three days off. That’s the real issue. If I had a 3-day weekend every week, maybe I could keep up? Well no, you know the work would just expand to try to fill it. But today? Today I want to go buy some dirt and plants. It’s warm and I want to plant some stuff. It’s Spring here (well, sort of). There’s this nursery that’s a ways out, but it has a million plants. It’s where I got my Christmas tree, the one that’s currently living on my deck. But then I remember I have no money, literally nothing for the rest of the month (well, I’m working on that…I almost took on a huge copyediting job, but then the reality of WHEN I would do that. Ha! No. Not happening.). SIGH.
It’s OK. I got this. This is like when I was a freelancer and would have no money for months and then one month, I’d get ALL OF IT. I’m waiting on a retro pay check from work, plus some other stuff. It would help. Meanwhile, all the bills for kids are due. Sometimes it’s scary how close to going under I am. STILL. After being divorced for how many years? I make decent money. I don’t know how some families do it. (They don’t send their kids to college and help them. I know.)
Anyway, I got this. I do.
I’ll hold off on the gardening. I can draw for free.
Last night, I graded the second period of videos and projects.
Simba helped. I’ve done the two biggest classes…I’m hoping to do the two smallest today, then the last class tomorrow.
Simba wants to play a lot. He’s looking traumatized here. He’s not.
After dinner, I managed to get in here and finish the ironing. There’s a line of leaves in number order, so I can pick the fabrics for each one. Yeah, they overlap, so they can’t all be the same color.
I am that crazy.
I went through my pile of gray/black crazy-quilt fabrics from a million years ago to find a 3rd metallic fabric…I realized I needed a darker one.
These are fussy fabrics. I’m going to have to be careful with ironing them. But they should turn out cool…hopefully.
Then the last thing I ironed was the bones of her back, where she had the surgery…lots of little bone pieces…might be the most important part of the quilt.
Here’s all the fabrics I used…although I’m still waiting on the iris color for her eyes. That’s 115 different fabrics…
It’s a lot…but it will be worth it. Now comes the cutting out…pick a show and binge watch it…it took 11 hours and 39 minutes to iron everything down. That’s kind of a long time, but not horrendous.
Probably it will be 5 or 6 hours to cut all these out. So I could finish this weekend…and then start ironing the quilt together? This is coming together quickly. I guess it’s not huge, is it? I’m debating trying to finish another piece by early April…for me to pull that off, I’d need to finish this one early plus get all my grading done. Yeah. I don’t know that I can do all that AND go to work every day (tempting…I have a LOT of vacation days).
OK, some grading, maybe buy the dirt (I have stuff I can transplant), sit out on the sunny deck and draw for a bit, then start cutting this thing out. I can do that.
*Five for Fighting, 100 Years