There are nights when I just want to keep ironing (or tracing, or cutting, or sewing)…when looking at the clock makes me realize an hour just passed and I didn’t even notice, and now it’s after midnight, and if I don’t stop soon, I might never stop. That was last night. I think I was in bed around 12:30. Not sure. I had the next two figures to iron down; I had decided they would be a different range of flesh colors than the other figure, but not different from each other, so that meant choosing all those pieces in one go. It took a couple of hours. This is what it looked like at about the halfway point; I had the entire male figure laid out…
And this lying on the table…the pieces up at the top are for later. They need to be ironed onto non-flesh colors…there’s a chair and a box and some bones and lungs and eyeballs and hair. The male doesn’t have much in the way of hair.
Then with the female figure added…that was probably 45 minutes later. It’s not a fast process. I look at every piece number, figure out what part it is, what it’s next to, does it need to be light or dark, etc.
Here’s all the number 1 pieces…the lightest ones…feet, arms, heads, knees, legs, butts…
That’s all I have left of that fabric…it’s obviously made it into a bunch of quilts. The biggest pieces tend to be out of the lightest colors.
Here’s the current pile ready to be cut out…probably need a bigger box soon.
I know I ironed pieces from the 300s, 400s, 500s, and 600s, but not all of them. That will be tonight…all the little fussy pieces that belong to the body but aren’t flesh tones. I’m about 6 1/2 hours in…I’m not sure how much is really done though. I can’t definitively say I’m halfway…too many loose pieces…after tonight, I should be halfway.
These are the current fabrics I’ve used. You can see the first figure’s flesh run on the bottom left, and the next two figures are in the top left box, on the bottom of it.
One’s more peachy than the other. It probably doesn’t make that big a difference in the long run, but in my head it does. I might be the only one who notices.
So today is a long day, with a 2-hour curriculum meeting after school (I tell you, this week sucks), so I’m hoping to get at least an hour done of the ironing, but I can’t guarantee another 2 1/2 hours like last night. Last night, I was on a roll. It was hard to make myself stop. Even when I’m tired, art brain shuts all that off and wires my brain off normal time and onto art brain time. I seriously remember looking at the clock at maybe 10:15 and then it was almost midnight. I love that…until I have to get up to teach the next morning.
Calli’s foot is still bugging her, so I’m going to try to find a vet appointment for her in my crazy schedule…not sure how. She does still sleep well…
She’s a goofball.
*Arctic Monkeys, When the Sun Goes Down
Kathy Nida 