Diverted Destruction Details

So I can’t post final pictures of the two Diverted Destruction pieces here until the end of May, since one will be in a magazine and I don’t know why not the other, but whatever…the photographer has finished, so here are details of both pieces.

This is Upholstered Nude, finished back in March…

It was made entirely of recycled upholstery fabrics from those annoying sample books, except for the background, which is from the stash of my friend Mariah.

Mariah supplied all the fabrics for the second piece, By All Means…

Forcing me to work with a range of colors that weren’t really planned, but also to use leftover blocks and strips and bits and pieces from her previous quilts…

Cuz, honey, y’all know I don’t piece my backgrounds.

I will be posting the full pieces the end of May…not sure which one will be in the show, because I don’t get to pick that, but the opening is the end of June in Los Angeles. Will let you know details as we get closer to the day.

I’m just glad to have them both done EARLY. How strange.

The Cutting of the Wonder Under

Mothers Day: the only day of the year children will try to feed you and clean up for you. Well, apparently the girlchild last did those two tasks at Christmas, but I’m fairly sure I helped. She did good. Food was wonderful…we will miss her when she leaves. I just don’t pay close enough attention when I cook to do it well. I’m always trying to escape the kitchen to my studio.

I did a couple of drawings this weekend while watching the end of True Detective, which was good. At some point, I couldn’t draw because I was concentrating too hard on the show…always an issue.

But before that, there was this…

Which I actually want to do over…and this…

Which might be OK.

And the other 15 drawings are still roaming around in my head, creating havoc with my ability to remember how or when to do anything (or maybe that’s menopause…hard to say).

And then at night, after dinner and cleanup and exercise, I finally got around to this…

The very titillating Cutting of the Wonder Under.

Stay tuned for many pictures of piles of paper cut out with fusible web on one side. Très exciting.

State testing starts today, so I have to be at school early, because I have duty and I have to get my room set up and all my stuff located. I’m completely unprepared, unfortunately. My brain? Mush. Dammit.

This Mood

So many things achieved. I hate when my mood doesn’t reflect what I’ve gotten done…some of that is moody hormones, unfortunately, but some of it is getting bogged down by other crap that just won’t leave me alone. The little stuff is really getting to me at the moment. Need to dump that mentality. Must be getting to the end of the school year.

My two quilts are going to the photographer today…I dehaired and ironed them this morning, got up a little early to make sure I had enough time. Probably won’t finish writing this before I have to go, but that’s OK. I graded papers last night too. Girlchild and I were going to go to this art and music thing, but it was canceled for the rain (yes. we had rain. a miracle.), so she went off to dinner with friends, while I watched the series finale of Sons of Anarchy. Sheesh. Well, it’s done anyway. I think it’s hard to end a series well (Sopranos for example, not as an example of ending well). At least they got to make a decision about how to end it, instead of just not being renewed.

So I finished tracing the Wonder Under on Bathtub 2 last night…

And no, Kitten wasn’t helping. She mostly sat around on the papers I needed and then rolled around presenting her belly for petting. Then attacked. It’s nice when she comes out though.

It took almost 8 hours to trace this quilt, which is more than I would have guessed, but there are some whopping big and complicated pieces in the bathtub and water that took more than a minute or two to trace. I usually figure about 100 pieces an hour. Tracing big pieces takes longer than small.

The next step is to cut them all out and then move on to the ironing. I need to clean up the studio first though. There’s some stuff in there that’s been there so long, I don’t know what it is. Time to get it out of the way. Summer cleaning is how teachers think. We don’t Spring Clean. There’s no time. Summer is when our brains like to get rid of stuff and reorganize and move stuff around.

So that’s on the list. Even starting now, I think. I can’t iron fabrics for the next quilt without some major cleaning in here.

I’ve had some conversations about smaller quilts I can make for sale this summer. I don’t want to do all cats, but I will do some. I’m thinking of a different owl and maybe a raven…and possibly one like the cancer donation quilt I did with the hands and the heart, but simpler. So I’m finalizing all that in my head and figuring out how to fit in at least three major quilts between now and the end of September. Ha! Wow. Crazy much?

Honestly, though, I’m kind of looking forward to putting some sort of plan together for summer work on quilts. It helps school feel less crazy. It helps quiet nights at home seem less lonely. It helps with the frustration of my job. It helps temper the teenaged mutant attitudinal beast who is currently on my couch, bitching about everything I say or do (walking away, my sweet. I love you, but I’m not in the mood). I’m crying at the drop of a hat these days, stupid hormones. Fuck. Going to draw today. Seriously. They’re whirring about in my head, causing strife and stress and nausea (oh wait, those are the hormones, right?). My photographer gave me some really positive comments about the quilts I dropped off…not that I didn’t like them, but I keep having this discussion about pretty versus significant. I prefer the latter. Most people like the former. I have to find the happy place between them for the stuff that sells easily and then keep making the big stinky stuff to keep me sane. Like sanity is my strong point! Whatever.

This mood. Sheeit. Dammit brain, I finished all this stuff. Would you back off for a bit? Sigh. We can engineer bridges, put humans in space for months on end, we know how to replace a lens in an eyeball without stitches, but we can’t find an acceptable treatment for menopausal crap? This world we live in. Don’t tell me it’s equal. It’s not.

Please Don’t Call Freud

Pouring rain. Heaven to California. Won’t be enough. Never is. But I can turn my water off for a week (to the plants…not the showers). I’m going to save water next year by sending the second kid to another state, a state with no apparent water issues…a state that makes its own water. Who thought greening the desert made any sense?

I have the end in my sights…which end? Lots of them. The end to tracing Wonder Under on this piece, which is strangely making my hand sore. I wake in the morning and it’s stiff and swollen. Probably this is more getting old or menopausal effects…because I never had issues before and I’ve traced for much more than an hour at a time. I’m up to 6 hours…

There are too many large, long, and convoluted pieces in this quilt. It makes tracing difficult…I hate wasting Wonder Under. It will make ironing difficult too.

This was the worst piece…

Crazy. Totally should have cut that up into smaller pieces. Oh well. So I’m at about 450 pieces done…didn’t do many pieces last night, even though I worked for over an hour. Of course, it probably took longer than normal because of pieces like that one above. So I need to think about the background for this one and whether or not I want to get more water or bathtub fabrics. Because that piece alone is a significant chunk of a half yard…and I don’t always have that sitting around…certainly not in water color. Whatever water color is.

I keep meaning to go to sleep earlier. I’m tired. My body protests the mornings, but some more than others. You’d think I’d be half dead this morning…stayed up later than the last few nights and it should all be catching up with me on a Friday, but I’m strangely OK. Headachy, but awake. Had headaches all week on and off. Thank you weather systems. Or students. Or financial aid. OK. So headaches could be caused by many things. They are NOT caused by donuts (don’t disabuse me of my notion please).

Totally have drawings rambling chaotically through my head. It was my monthly stitching meeting last night and they plopped a few more in there for me. It’s crazy how much stuff is piling up in there. My artist brain is rushing around, trying to record the ideas on these giant pieces of paper that she piles up in the corners, and then they all slip down and start sliding all over the place. She’s trying to keep them from getting in the way of going to school and remembering the parent meeting I have and that I have duty and it’s currently pouring rain and that I’m giving a test today and there’s that kid who can’t sign into the state testing but we think we figured out why so I have to check that today. All that’s being covered up by these giant slips of paper with intricate drawings of exploding uteri and fetuses reaching towards overloaded pregnant women and crones being pushed aside by perky-breasted skinny beasts with not a creative thought in their brains.

Yes. It’s on overload. Need to deal with that. Please don’t call Freud in on all that. I know exactly from whence it all came.

But it’s always good to just sit and stitch and talk out all your worries and amusements and giggle about stupid stuff, even though I’m old and wrinkly and decrepit and that’s not what society likes.

All I did was stitch feet.

OK. That’s not true. I stitched around eyes too. Two hours of feet though…basically.

Sometimes that’s the best kind of stitching, because it’s just kind of brainless. I can do bullion knots in my sleep now. And we talked about how to make phones do things and I’m trying to figure out how Siri can make dinner or lunch for me, because shit, I don’t have time for that, and she seems to have endless amounts of time. And then we talked about how Kathy can make money and the Other Kathy reminded me that I used to be an editor (crap, I forgot about that…no, I really did), so I’m looking at that possibility for extra work, plus they both voted for small cat quilts this summer for sale. So I need to go pull drawings with cats in them and start reinventing that wheel. Which is stressful, but not as stressful as trying to find hours in the day where I could drive to a job location and work there after being on my feet all day at school. Because my foot is killing me, despite the attempts to rest (ha!) and elevate it (double ha!) and wear an ankle brace, which a student thought was an ankle bracelet and I was on home arrest. At school. Trust me, sometimes that job totally feels like that, like now, with only six weeks to go and the hardest test of the year today and two weeks of state testing looming over us.

Big fucking sigh. I’m good. I can do this.

Thunder and pouring rain. Kids will be absent today because of that. Stupid.

An Hour a Day

Things that are good right now. Right this second. The dog is sound asleep behind my chair and is not eating the girlchild’s underwear. I am only teaching Punnett squares for about three more days and then I am done done done with the stuff that is apparently so hard we can’t do it. I had an awesome book club meeting last night and a long talk with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I have another social meeting tonight. Grades are done. I think I have uploaded every stupid-ass document Cornell needs onto the financial aid system. The boychild is coming home in less than two weeks. It’s supposed to rain. There are leftovers in the fridge for my lunch today. Google Classroom finally updated so I can grade assignments from my iPad. I’m wearing jeans to work today (this after a long work dress code discussion at book club last night). My foot hurts but it’s not a broken bone. I already had an ankle brace in my stash. I still like Cheerios for breakfast after some 48 years of eating them. Two of my quilts are traveling with the People and Portraits exhibit, and now they will be at all four AQS Quilt Weeks in 2016.

Deep breath. See. That’s all ok.

I had book club last night. This is a group of smart geeky women, the two oldest besides me are a good 10 years younger than me, but they are accepting and funny and sarcastic and intelligent. Some of the best conversations I have some months are at these meetings, no matter what the book is (we panned the book…Mass Midnight by F. Paul Wilson…lousy dialogue, messed up the story, didn’t even make sense at one point, not pleased with how they dealt with anything, except that the vampires didn’t get all sexy or sparkly). I don’t make it to all of them, because of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but I do have a good time when I go. I had a long conversation afterwards with a friend there, and it got me home and dinnerfied late (thanks to the girlchild for making dinner), but I did manage to get off the couch and do art. I almost always manage to do that. I’m not a couch sitter really. I’m usually grading papers (did that yesterday too) or sewing or cutting stuff out or drawing if I’m on the couch. Girlchild’s new TV obsession is SVU, of all things. Kind of a mental shock for her to go from weeks of watching Friends (which almost drove me bonkers) to the Law and Order offshoots. I suggested she start with L&O and she just looked at me like I was crazy. She finished the second AP test yesterday, so she’s a little braindead.

So I traced…

Only for about an hour. That’s the key. I think some people are like, well, I’m not going to get very much done, plus it’s late, and then they never get up. I regularly do about an hour a night, or try to anyway, and when I have more time (and energy, honestly), I do more. I can do almost 4 hours in a good night, but that’s rare, except on weekends and vacations. But an hour a day is 365 hours you didn’t spend on art before. An hour a day when you figure about 7 hours to trace all the Wonder Under for this quilt? That’s a week. That’s nothing. And I wasn’t always this good at it. I had to push myself to get here. I used to put it on my calendar, just like I did the blog writing. And then it became habit. And now, I have to be sick or out of town to not be making art, and even then, I’m probably drawing with the latter.

Which reminds me, driving to the book club venue last night, a drawing related to the Barton thing I showed you yesterday popped into my head. Like BING! And it’s still there, because I didn’t draw it last night. Aargh. I need a full day just of drawing I think.

So 4 1/2 hours in, I’m 400 pieces in as well. Only a couple hundred pieces to go. I’m feeling better about this piece. Progress. It helps.

Keep doing the work. Keep getting up off the couch.

A Thousand Drawings in My Head

OK, so I had a picture sent to me via one of those Facebook friends I’ve never met (which is fine…I’ll meet her someday, and we have quilt art in common) of this painting by an Australian woman, Del Kathryn Barton. And it’s hard to see up close, but here’s the link…and it’s the center panel my friend was pointing out to me (did my brain explode with ideas? Fuck yes, it did.).

So I went searching out on the Interwebs and found this video, where she talks about her process…

And Oh Holey Moley. You thought I had an issue with detail. There we are. Her stuff is amazing. And crazy.

It’s very hard to persuade myself to go to work right now, because (1) it’s hard and (2) I’d rather stay home and draw. Is that an option? (No, it’s not)

I was a good girl last night and graded for about 2 hours before doing art stuff. I spent about another hour prepping for the rest of this week. I only traced for about an hour. It was mostly large pieces of bathtub rim and side…

Very exciting. Actually kind of a pain in the butt to fit on the Wonder Under. I had to cut one in half. It was too big…which makes me wonder if I will have to shop for bathtub fabric this weekend. Hopefully not.

I’ve spent a little over three and a half hours tracing at this point…

It doesn’t feel that way though…I’m only at piece 280-something. Slow. But I guess I’m halfway done, or close to that. I might finish by the weekend.

I don’t feel totally into this quilt yet. Maybe it’s because of all the other stress hanging over me. Too much on my plate. Can’t keep track of all of it. Really would just rather sit here and watch more art videos and do some drawing and sleep longer.

Sounds like summer vacation? Except it never works out like that. The to-do list over the summer is even worse, because I know I have huge chunks of time to get the stuff done that I didn’t get done all year. Ugh. Even cooking sounds like hard work. I think this is stupid hormones again. I think there’s a drawing in that too. Sigh. I don’t have near enough time in the day to get done all the art stuff I want, let alone to try to fit it in amongst all the other drivel. Work, groceries, clean, yardwork, errands, manage kid stuff. SLEEP? Whatever. I need a staff. Not a wooden one…one which will do my bidding.

Wah. OK, going to work. The head is full of tiny details that want to manifest into a thousand drawings. Such is the life of a modern-day, semi-responsible artist.

Spiky Balls

Head is a stress mess, filled with tax forms and crazy requests from financial aid departments and school crap. Please explain how I should get a signature from a kid who is 3000 miles away? I should fly there? Gaarrrr.

It happens every year. Deep breaths. Couple that with trying to finish grades and girlchild starting her AP exams…she cooked, but I had to clean up after her. Repeatedly. Even her lunch stuff. When APs are done, we are having a (heated probably) discussion.

By the time I was done with everything (or as done as I could be, which felt pretty damn done, by the way, but surely isn’t, because I have to call New York this morning, except they’re only available for 4 hours today, and those are the hours I’m at work)…I didn’t have much energy for artmaking…especially when said artmaking required more standing.

There is just nothing exciting about pictures of me tracing pieces. Really boring looking. Except you can see that I have filled in many of the blank spaces now. I stopped there because the next piece I needed to trace was huge and would need its own piece of Wonder Under, and I didn’t have the energy to do that. To cut a new piece, to start tracing something really huge, like a bathtub. I like stopping somewhere logical, so I can figure out where I was the next day, and that was a logical stopping place. So I stopped.

Plus it was past 11 and I was still dealing with drama.

UGH. But I feel like crap this morning, and it’s not just because now I’m stressed about financial aid paperwork (I am) or the thing that happened at school yesterday that’s really freakin’ stupid but that I will still have to manage, or that I’m trying to get everything into their heads before we start testing officially at my school, or that I can’t possibly fit everything in, who the hell was I kidding, plus the headache? Plus maybe someone could tell me if this is really a broken bone in my foot, because I wore different shoes yesterday and holy ouch!

It’s morning now. I’m drinking tea. I’ve eaten my Cheerios. I made lunch. I printed all the stuff I needed for the reproduction unit, so I can get it copied for me and the other teacher. I will bully through Punnett squares for another 4 days and then we’ll be done (well, sort of).

Really, it’s better to try to think of the other things…I am tracing Wonder Under for a new quilt. I need to call the photographer about getting those two done…wait, now I’m back into stress mode, too many things to do, the headache is spreading!

I make lists. Lots of them. I put reminders on my phone. I have post-it notes everywhere. I put papers on my doc cam so I know I’ll see them in the morning.

I’M JUGGLING 50 SPIKY BALLS.

Sigh. I don’t even have time to go through my meditation program this morning. I have duty before and after school for the next two weeks. I hate duty. It’s just more stressful management of crap. Being an introvert and a teacher takes careful management of peace and quiet throughout the day…few and far between.

Deep breath in for four. Slowly let it out for four. Y’all wanna know how I get through it all? There. Breathe. And take Motrin.

Making Time

Grades are due on Tuesday, just progress reports. Really, in the old days, I would have started working on them Friday night and finished them Saturday, never leaving them until Monday night. Eh. Whatever. They’re mostly done. I did get some grading done yesterday, documented some stuff in the gradebook that I keep track of, more to force them to do it then because it’s super-important to understanding science…teaching kids good habits, those that will pay attention. But I’m not done. And sometime around 10 PM last night, I quit being a teacher and started being an artist.

OK, realistically, I never stop being an artist. My brain is always working on art stuff, even when I’m stuck in a 2-hour staff meeting on a Monday afternoon (ugh…today is Monday). It’s one of the things that keeps me going. Car drive, art in head. Waiting in line at the grocery store, art in head. Waiting for the X-ray technician, art in head. They did X-ray my foot on Friday to see if the pain I’ve been feeling is an unlucky broken or fractured tiny bone instead of just a sprain. I vote for a sprain.

So at this point in my life, I just have to make time for art…I don’t have to stand around, pushing fabric around my office, waiting for the muse to appear. She’s always there, waiting. I know I’m lucky for that. But it’s really not luck. It’s making sure that I’m doing something artistic almost every single day. Do that, and she will stay…at least most of the time. Significant depression or illness can drive her away, but if you’re lucky, she’ll stick around.

I went back and looked at the long skinny drawing to see if it needed more. I drew three different cats in pencil around the existing drawing, wanting to fit one in, but not sure if I should. One of them stayed…

Then I proclaimed it done, because honestly, I could keep adding stuff, but it would take longer to finish it, which will be an issue as it is, and I think it would actually detract from what I’m trying to say. So I stopped.

And then I started numbering it…

It actually had more pieces than I thought it would…partially because I drew it to size instead of enlarging it, so I kept drawing these stupid tiny pieces. And then while I was numbering it, I thought about adding some more cracks around, but I stopped myself…for now. Looking at that photo above makes me want to add more though. It currently has 543 pieces. Who knows what it will have at the end. I have some time to think about it, though, because it is not the next one on the list…it’s the one AFTER the next one.

So I started tracing Bathtub 2, which is the next one on the list…

I can’t remember how many pieces it has…hang on…this is partially why I have a blog: to document my own shit because I can’t remember it. (Kathy scrolls back through the blog)…595 pieces. Oh. Hey. Not bad.

Anyway. I traced for an hour, and now my right hand is sore…

Which is kind of pitiful really. Although I did use the same hand for numbering. I didn’t even get 75 pieces done. See the big long skinny tree pieces? Pain in the butt. And yet I keep drawing them. You’d think I’d learn. But no. This one is going to have some big bathtub pieces too.

I’m using the new Wonder Under. It’s very plasticky. It sticks to the paper when I trace, which helps in that the paper doesn’t move as much as it used to, but then it doesn’t let go of the paper either. Kind of different…but the paper’s not releasing from the fusible either, so that’s a good thing. I’ll probably be tracing all week. I’ve got a bunch of stuff on at night this week, so I won’t get a lot of art time, I think…although I do try every night. It doesn’t have to be more than 30 minutes though. Last night, while tracing, I got a thunderstorm running through town…thunder, lightning scared the animals, and then it rained heavily for a while. We need it. Plus it’s kinda cool to be awake really late and see the light flashing and hear and feel the boom…then waiting as the quiet pitter patter turns into waves of rain pounding down.

This morning, though, there are no such natural phenomena…today is just overcast and a bit humid, with sounds of hairdryers and water heaters in the near distance. And a job that calls me, kind of rudely, reminding me how I pay the bills.

States of Terror…

I had someone ask me recently what I do when I’m not teaching or making art (and it’s obviously not sleeping), and there’s a wide variety of things I like to do: the movies, obviously hiking (on hiatus until I find out if this is a broken bone in my foot), art opening, reading, and sometimes (although it’s been a while) a book reading. Last Saturday, I went to this…

to hear a friend of a friend read (because how else do you hear about these things?). I had never been to Digital Gym, although I’ve been invited to a ton of things there, so that was interesting. They have a nice outdoor space for these things, but it started to rain, so they moved us inside into the computer lab.

The reading was part of the release of this book…

Volume 1 in a series of stories about monsters in every state (available on Amazon). Certain creatures seem to inhabit territories, and each state seems to have a list of those monsters that are most known there. The authors picked monsters and states and wrote, and the artists illustrated. The reading was a sampling of edited stories (for time), and was definitely worth the trip.

I tried to photograph each author reading, but missed the first one, and then they did some weird backlit scheme, which didn’t help my photos, but here they are…

I missed Jessica Hilt…my camera was deep in my bag, but here’s the art for her Frogman story titled Punctuated Equilibrium…

The art is by David Ferreira.

Here is Sunny Katz reading her scary Mystery Box…

About a dog that can sit on the ceiling before it eats you.

Ed Farragut reading When You’ve Seen Beyond about the Dover Demon…

Hanna Tawater reading Wakiya, a surreal tale of snakes who could fly…

Jim Ruland reading Flesh Air, the story of the Bunnyman…

Julia Dixon’s story of a weeping mother looking for her lost children, La Llorona, She Weeps with You…

Ryan Bradford’s The Desert Climate…a story about a missing wife and maybe some aliens…

Rachel Lee Taylor’s Route 351, the story of Charlie No-Face…

And finally, the man we came for, Alex Bosworth, whose story Old Foukey made everyone laugh out loud with his sarcastic tale of a balding monster with an enormous penis…

I took the obligatory weird leg photo…

And saw this art in the book…by Emily Dumas…

I’m totally giving that little guy a hug…

All in all, very enjoyable. I’m looking forward to reading all the stories and seeing future readings as the rest of the volumes come out…only 18 stories were included in this one, and they plan to do all 50 states.

She Got Legs…

Yeah so I finished the quilt. No final pictures to be posted until something…um…I think we’re supposed to wait a week or so. Plus it hasn’t been officially photographed. But it took me a few hours last night (ok, almost 3, because I was really slow apparently) to finish the binding and sleeves. I debated putting only one sleeve on it, because it’s not huge, but figured it would still hang better with two, and it’s easier to put it on now than later. All these practical things that flutter through my head.

When I was done, I wanted to draw. Probably (based on how I’m feeling this morning) should have gone to bed, but I’m not sure the brain would have shut down last night. School was a stress ball, not because of kids (well, a little because of kids), but now it’s done and I really don’t want to think about it. It’s my job and it sucks up too much energy. So I headed for the drawing in progress…

Which was being inhabited by a very black, hard-to-photograph cat. Hi Midnight. She’s the same cat that was trying to lie on the quilt earlier (if you’re on my Instagram, you would have seen her). Basically, she wants to be all over my stuff. Like cats do. Clean clothes, the papers I’m grading, the quilt under the machine, the book I’d like to read. Yup. You know if you have them what evil beasts they are, and they love someone who works with fabric and paper. This is not a light table…it’s a cat staging area.

Anyway, I pulled the drawing out from under and she stayed there and I drew around her.

And this is where the shitty day went back to OK, because dammit, I rocked those legs. I did exactly what I wanted to. I am incredibly happy with the damn legs…

Can you tell? And then I stopped, because…well, I could stop there and be done. But that’s unlike me. I want to add stuff to it, like cats and cups of tea and trees growing out of weird places. But I don’t know if it needs it (and she already has stuff coming out of her head). Maybe it’s OK to just stop there and make that quilt.

I don’t know though. So until I do, it’s still in progress. Which is fine, because I think I have to do grades tonight anyway. UGH. OK wait. You keep having these epiphanies about Art Good and Work Semi-Bad, certainly don’t let it take your sanity…so maybe grades yes, because progress reports are due, but maybe also something else. Maybe I’ll pull out the big drawing and work on it tonight. I seem to be on a roll with that.

I’m also considering a new batch of smaller quilts, a la the birds of last year, except maybe cats? I don’t know. I’m also looking around for a summer job, part time, one that doesn’t suck up my brain too badly. Ha. So not teaching. Sigh.

With all that cheeriness in mind (fuck! no! You drew awesome legs last night!), I need to go to work. It’s Friday. I can survive that.