These Are the People That’ll Break You*

Friday dawns clear and cold, a nice change from yesterday’s crazy weather…hail and rain and yuck. Hopefully the world will let us dry out (and warm up? apparently not) for a few days. Meanwhile, I have a whole host of emails from kids who just realized they haven’t been turning their work in. I have to laugh at the kid who sent me some comment about how he turned everything in before midnight…but the deadline is TODAY at midnight. OK, well at least he did it. And the exaggerator…”I emailed you ALMOST TWO WEEKS ago.” Um. You emailed me on the 13th. You know I can check that shit, right? Plus there’s the part where I told you all the makeup work would get graded this weekend…which might be a promise I can’t keep. There’s 94 emails so far, so you click on the assignment in the email, then it takes you to Google Classroom, then you have to click on the actual assignment, grade it, close it, wait for GC to acknowledge the new score, write it in the notebook, then close GC, and delete the email. For each one. I hate late work. I really do. But I can’t bring myself to disallow it. They’re 12. They need supports. Anyway. Gradebook closes for late/missing work today. Then I can take a week to grade them all if I need to.

It means we’re almost 2/3rds of the way through the school year though…it’s been a weird year with curriculum piloting and tons of meetings for that. There’s a huge long stretch to a very late Spring Break this year…53 days from now, to be exact. So plenty of work left.

Last night, I had my quilt class…I took my tried and true embroidery project, that is currently only being worked on for about 4 hours a month.

I finished the flowers and started working on the ox.

Two hours of work…not much, eh? This is why these take so long. Oh wait, I did the grass by the tree too. Four whole fly stitches. It’s relaxing though.

Then I came home and did some drawings. I’m trying to draw things that can be embroidered by hand. So I have to simplify stuff pretty significantly for that to be possible…the drawing on the right is the original, which will probably be a quilt some day (or some version of it will be)…the left is my simpler version.

It might still be too much…

But I like it. It’s hard to know what it will look like though without stitching it up.

Then I just drew for a while…messing around…simpler but maybe too simple.

Then this, which is OK…I might try this one again…a little smaller and different hair…

Plus make the eyes the same damn size.

I think this one might work too…

The harder part is color. I can only use 5. I either work all in black and white or I use 89 colors. So there’s that. Anyway, still working on this…it’s really hard for me to not go overboard on details.

Speaking of overboard…I don’t have to simplify this one…

It’s done except I need to decide if anything else is going in the sky. I couldn’t deal with that decision last night though, so I stopped.

I did her hair on both sides last night…and added the obligatory cat and teacup.

Plus some interesting (and relieving) news set those flying hearts back in motion.

The bottom was mostly done, but I added a plug and some lung details…

There apparently weren’t enough pieces. Can you imagine trying to embroider that? Yeah right. Someone would do it. (not me) Anyway. It’s close to done. I can’t promise anything for tonight, though…the guy’s band is playing. Plus it’s a Friday night, so I’ll be tired. I’m hoping to finish the drawing though. Maybe do some smaller ones. We’ll see.

*The Alarm, Marching On