Damaged Goods

Before you get all freaked out about the title, which surely is appropriate for so many things at the moment (the exercise bike is currently duct-taped together because boychild went a little macho on moving it…and then there’s my brain, which I would use duct tape on if I thought it would help), I got invited to this last night…

It was great. There were three writers who told their stories while 3-4 dancers interpreted…well, the boychild was disdainful of the phrase “interpretative dance,” and I wouldn’t call it that…I would call it a multimedia presentation: words, video, dance, a little music/sound. Kind of like a play, but not really. So the dancers were part of the act. It was put on by the Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater with So Say We All, which you might remember from the winter, when I went to a couple of their events where writers read their pieces on a particular theme, often with powerpoint pictures in the background, illustrating their words. This was similar, except the dancers were not illustrating…or really interpreting…but adding another facet to the literature. During the first piece on PTSD, Justin Hudnall spoke passionately about what PTSD feels like, while the dancers became the feelings, vibrating or falling, or at one point, grabbing his limbs and torso and lowering him to the floor in uncomfortable positions.

In April’s story, April Ventura tells about being diagnosed with an STD and its effects on her life, with an amusing twist, while the dancers interact with a shopvac. And in the last one, Brian Simpson tells a story of a gun and being in foster care. All three writers/speakers performed their stories well, with a touch of sarcasm and humor in all the right places, because their topics were uncomfortable, and the dancers did not shy away from enhancing that feeling. The dancers were Rachel Holdt, who also did the videography, Liv Isaacs-Nollet, Zaquia Mahler Salinas, and Trystan Loucado.

It was a good last-minute invite. I have always enjoyed dance, more the modern stuff, for the movement and ideas it puts into my brain for drawings, how limbs move and fit together. Storytelling has always been a love of mine, so this was the best of both worlds.

It did mean I didn’t get as much done yesterday as I had planned, but that’s OK. I had a good reason. I came home tired, but also to teen drama, so that didn’t help. I guess it says something that she already knew she was in trouble.

Earlier in the day, I managed some quilting, finishing Bird 5…

And then Bird 6…

I spent some more creative energies on quilting 6 because the quilting shows better on the lighter backgrounds. Plus it’s in the air, flying, so I wanted to emphasize the movement of the wings affecting the space around it.

At some point, the machine was doing that stupid excessive thread-breakage thing, so I fussed with it, changed a needle, used something on the thread, which is probably old. Tried to slow down. Less herky jerky.

I set up for Bird 7, but didn’t find the time or energy to get going on it. Maybe today. I’ve already been to one game in a soccer tournament, at least two to go, maybe four.

When I got back from counseling (yes, twice this week, which might give you a clue as to how things are going in my head; basically I summarized it to the counselor as alternating between raw blinding pain mixed with gut-wrenching sadness and completely numb. Neither seems right. Or healthy.), boychild had emptied like 8 boxes of books into 3 bookshelves. He’s super-efficient…

whereas I’m sitting there with that one tiny bookshelf, trying to decide whether I need all these books, finding one acrylic painting book from my dead great-aunt where she had obviously torn out half the pages in the book (huh?) and it was mostly useless. We worship books in my family. It’s very hard to trash anything, let alone get rid of it, especially if it seems to have some historical significance. So in my section, everything is piled up on the floor as I try to decide what to do with everything.

Piles of sketchbooks too…I’m trying to reduce the crap here. Anyway. No, I’m not done. Leave me alone. And I find if it’s not out where I can see it, I forget it exists.

When I got home from performance, I realized that waiting around all day for the plumber who never showed meant that I never copied the drawing from the night before. The copy place doesn’t close until 11 (score!), so I left teen drama central and went and did that…so I can maybe work on it tonight? I want it done!

I’m trying to leave space at the top for the tree. But they need feet too. Or do they? Have not decided what happening at the bottom. Actually. Wait. I lie. I have decided. Just now. Huh. The brain works well sometimes, at least on things of significance, like finishing drawings. Cuz that’s gonna save my world.

And then I finished my book, another of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. I’m ignoring his sexist crap for now, because I think he truly believes he’s on the side of women, although that is another topic of discussion, as I’m reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, current CEO of Facebook, formerly of Google. And doing that drawing. And wondering about how comics treat females. Or for that matter, how anything treats females. And wondering if I can drop that whole issue into my own book somehow (how many major issues can you have? Probably not a lot). I actually like the Dresden Files…I just know I’d have to knee him in the proverbial balls if I ever met him…Butcher, I mean…not Dresden. He’s fictional. He has an excuse.

So lots on the plate for today and tomorrow…forcing myself to consort with humans and return house to normal…but also pushing the art stuff in there to keep the duct tape in the right parts of the brain.

You Can’t Be Trusted with Feathers So Hollow…*

In my original plan, the whole house would have gone back to normal today. Everything would have been put back in its place, all boxes emptied, all furniture in a permanent home. I even have it on the calendar: “House back to normal.” (not really. It just says Furn Move.)

I should know better.

So it’s still chaos here. New moldings are in, but I can’t paint them until tomorrow morning. Well, I could paint them right now, but that seems a bit crazy. Then we can move some stuff back, but it seems we will be culling big pieces of furniture. I think I’m OK with that. There’s some things to solve, some issues with where to put things and whether we actually need certain things, but it will all work out, right? We also got a new screen door installation out to the deck to replace the piece-of-crap thing that’s been falling down for 10 years or more now. I remember when the kids were little that I read if there was something they were doing that was driving me nuts that I should find some way for it to go away. So when the boychild felt a need to remove all the CDs from the shelves two or three at a time while screeching, I finally put a baby gate up in front of them. He continued to screech for a while, and then gave up. Well, then he headed for the bookshelf, so everything important went up a few shelves and we bolted the damn thing to the wall so it wouldn’t fall on him. Remove the frustrating item.

Hence the screen door. Of course, if I really apply that theory to my WHOLE life, there won’t be much that survives. But I keep doing the things that help the frustrations be smaller. My credit card number was stolen earlier this month and over $1700 of charges showed up, so when I went to pay the bill today, there was a bit of a shock. I don’t know whether to blame meditation or depression or both, but I just dealt with it (again…this is not the first time) and made a list of the companies where I would have to change the autopay card number when I get the new card.Reported it. Fixed it. Moving on. No panic. No anxiety. Deep breath. Move on. Who the fuck cares. It’s just one more thing to manage. So I managed it.

I guess I have the mental distance to do that now. It’s interesting, because the sadness is right there, about to spill over at a moment’s notice, but the stress…I’m about 10 steps away from it. It’s over THERE. I can watch it, but I don’t have to BE it. I guess that’s good. It would be good if I could do the same with the sad, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards at the moment.

I finished stitching down the Menopause quilt today.

It’s really long. It took almost 8 hours to stitch it down. I was comparing it to the Celebrating Silver quilt, which is about the same size, but I did some research on that. First of all, it only took 5 hours to stitch Silver down. Plus it only had about 1237 pieces and this one has more like 1764 pieces. So it took 14 hours to quilt Silver…I’m thinking it will be more like 20 hours to quilt this one. So that’s gonna take a while. I’m hoping to sandwich and pinbaste it tomorrow, assuming I have a big enough piece of batting. I can piece a backing easily enough. I’ve gotta kind of work around a plumber visit. Apparently he is a born-again Christian. Possibly this quilt taped to the entryway floor might perturb him. Hell, it might perturb me. I’m going to quilt the Mammogram one first anyway. It will take less time.

I quilted 4 birds today…about 45 minutes per bird…

These are the smaller ones…

They don’t take long.

This one…I wanted it to look like the bird was diving through the air, so I tried to quilt it so it would look like that.

Maybe he’s just falling.

Six more to go. I thought I would work on them this evening, but after the gym and dinner, I was in a sad mood again…plus I know I need to finish this drawing for gender equality…or maybe I should use the word ‘equity’, because I’m not sure equality is the right word. No wait. Equality is right. Equity is nice, but Equality is right.

So drawing seems to help when I am depressed. Quilting and stitching down are problematic because they don’t engage enough of my brain to shut up the whiner, depressoid part. Tracing Wonder Under does. Ironing fabrics does. Cutting stuff out does. Maybe that’s why I need to get this drawing done…so I can balance the quilting with the tracing Wonder Under…have days with both tasks, and when my brain starts to wig out, to fall into the depression hole, I can do something else to bring it back out, or at least hold it on the edge…keep it out of the soul-sucking mud at the bottom.

Sigh. Big Fucking Sigh.

So here’s the drawing…

I need to go copy it and draw the rest of it to size. It’s actually smaller than the one I’m working on now. I guess that’s a good thing. If I can get it to the ironing stage by the time school starts, I think I’ll be OK. And by next Thursday’s meeting, I want to have all the birds quilted, trimmed, with binding on and ready for hand-sewing. Remember what I said about setting crazy-ass goals? Yeah, well, I can get close to that, despite this weekend’s soccer tournament and all the furniture that is still inhabiting my hallway. The office could use a serious clean-out too, but that just sounds crazy when I have all this quilting to do. I still have one, maybe two major projects to get done before the end of August. And the teachers I was hanging out with today reminded me of an online thing I need to do soon as well. School. Damn. I’m not supposed to think about it for another two weeks. Fuck.

Midnight’s not thinking about it.

Funny how the carpet changes colors during the day. It’s gray, it’s blue. Here it’s brown. And it’s really not.

Blog title from Rufus Wainwright’s Go and Go Ahead…

Rufus and I also have a troubled existence. I love him, but he reminds me of many things that just cause me pain. I wish I had gone to see him in December, despite all the shit that act would have dealt me. He is an awesome performer. Concerts. One more thing I can’t afford to go to…movies too.

Speaking of things I CAN afford to do…I’m still writing this crazy book. Over 14,000 words done. Meeting with a group about audience on Saturday. Not sure whether meeting with people really helps me write, but maybe. I don’t know what helps. Telling myself to write. A little every week. At this rate, I will have a finished book (within the acceptable range of words) by the end of the year. Maybe sooner. Probably I should figure out how it ends by then. I know what I want the notional ending to be…but the real-live ending? That’s something different. A story within a story. What I care about versus what readers will care about? No, that’s not it. It’s like the art. People are so, like, “Oh, you’re an ARTIST, that’s so cool, you make ART, and that’s COOL.” Yeah. I make art because I have to. Because if I don’t, I get sick. I make art because there’s some weird chemistry in my brain…actually, I think of it more as a steampunk/techno device that forces the issue: YOU WILL DRAW…OR YOU WILL DIE. You think it’s cool because it’s not like that for you. It doesn’t solve world hunger. It doesn’t fill an empty heart. It doesn’t cure depression. It doesn’t make an empty house feel better. It doesn’t stop you from hurting or crying. It’s just art.

Yup. So there we are. Hollow bones. Hollow life. Really the key is “you can’t be trusted.”

Brain Wanders Off…News at 11…

Interesting day. Bad anniversary. The word anniversary seems like it’s supposed to be good. There should be a different word for bad anniversaries…like anniversaries of someone’s death or planes crashing into buildings or bombs going off. We shouldn’t use the same word that we apply to getting married or hired or being born. It should be like a maliversary or a downerversary or a shitversary. Better, huh?

Yeah, whatever. It’s all about distraction for me at the moment. The whole summer, a distraction attempt. I fail.

I stitched a lot of things down today while listening to Pandora. Pandora and I have a troubled relationship. Sometimes she rocks my world and I get up and dance around my office, out into the hallway, where if my kids look up from computers or phones, they see mama gyrating, pumping fists, in the hallway, yelling out (scary huh?) But so often, she’s lost in this young girl YOLO mentality or romantic shit that I don’t believe in anymore. Maybe I never did. Pandora, when you get like that, I don’t want to hang out with you any more.

That’s wrong. I did. I’m not sure I will again.

So I stitched for almost 4 hours today…and I almost finished.

I probably have an hour left, maybe two at the most.

View of sewing machine and yard while filling yet another bobbin…

It was hard to force myself to keep going. It’s really hard to do this part. But then it got late and I just wanted to finish, but I have to be up early again tomorrow, so I stopped.

Seriously, though. I could just stay up all night. Why not? I have no life. I can just stitch for 24 hours straight and then go to bed. Whatever.

Who’s gonna care?

I got on a roll at some point. But then I had to stop and deal with girlchild’s wisdom teeth. Apparently she is too wise and they have to come out…

There they are. What sucks is that we can’t get her in for the surgery until the week I start school. And boychild leaves (aargh). I am not going to be a good or happy person that week. I am going to be a mess. Naw. My counselor says not to assume anything. I am actually really good at that now. I just don’t think I will be or do anything. I just show up and go from there. I go with the flow and if I don’t like it, I step right out of the flow and watch everyone continuing on. And I crawl back into my hole and hang out there for a while. Hermit is the antiflow.

Yeah. I didn’t say it was the healthiest thing in the world to do. It just is what I do at the moment. I set a goal every day and I try to reach it. Most days I don’t, but that’s because I have high expectations for myself. I guess that means I should be regularly disappointed in myself, but I don’t think that way. I think, Oh Hey, you tried. You’ll finish up tomorrow. It’s OK. Because none of it is life or death.

So yeah. My goal to finish stitching down today didn’t happen, but I got close, so I’m OK.

The back…

And more of the front…I just have the head and the thinking bubble with the yelling face. That’s it. Then I can sandwich and pinbaste it as well. I don’t know if I’ll get to that tomorrow, just because of what’s already on the plate for that, but definitely Friday. So that’s good. It’s progress. I won’t think about the show I didn’t get into. I really don’t care. I don’t. I will keep entering. Eventually I will get in. That’s how you know the maliversaries are going badly…because I’ve progressed past the constant crying (not that it’s stopped) into not feeling at all. I’m not sure which is worse. They both worry me.

Go read another book. Anaesthesia for my brain. Side effects? No engagement with reality. You know, you can’t see the cat in this picture…

But you can see the yelling face. I love that face. I mean, I don’t love it because I know what it means, what it represents, but it’s so well done. The angle is perfect. The teeth. Midnight agrees. But she wishes I would stop making the desk vibrate. She doesn’t like it.

So the carpet went in today…part of why I had so much stitching time. I was trapped in my office.

I couldn’t distract myself by moving stuff. Until later. Padding going down…

They were quick. They asked permission to play music (conflicted with mine, man). It was funny…they played the same stuff the girlchild listens to, except they were way older than her.

Speaking of girlchild…she experiences new carpet in a different way.

We moved a bunch of the big stuff back in the house, but girlchild wants to try a different furniture layout, which probably means getting rid of some furniture. Might not be a bad thing. It’s just a storage issue with some of it. I have a lot of thread and other supplies in the living room that probably don’t need to live there. Or they can live there in a different way. We agreed to try her way out…

This is not it. Grandpa has moldings to put in tomorrow, so nothing can go anywhere really at the moment. I have a couple of places to patch. We need to make some decisions about bookcases and the TV and other stuff. Honestly, I felt like I had already made more decisions this summer than I could handle, so I just gave up. Maybe I will have more of a brain tomorrow. Maybe not. It certainly seems to have wandered off. Unfortunate.

Insert Quote about Tomorrow…

Stitching down. I had to negotiate with myself to keep stitching tonight. I started late…today was exhausting and I didn’t sit down at the machine until almost 10 PM. Tomorrow will hopefully be better. I have 3 1/2 hours into the stitching-down process and I’m about a third of a way through. I could finish tomorrow. Maybe. If I’m crazy and don’t listen to my chiropractor. Place your bets now.

I had to re-iron some stuff because it won’t stay stuck. It’s humid here; in fact it was raining yesterday afternoon and misting this morning. So the Wonder Under is releasing.

I’m still down in the water section…I think of it as the aquarium section, like she’s sitting in front of a giant aquarium, except I think she’s really IN the aquarium. There’s a lot of stitching in there…

Those damn octopus tentacles…

Those fucking beautiful octopus tentacles. So I made a deal with myself that I would stop when I finished the water section, except then it made more sense to finish the silly boat above the water…

So that was the new deal with myself, except my self kept trying to say I’d stop at midnight, because I have to be up early to deal with carpet people, but mostly because this stitching-down stuff is mentally and physically difficult and I get upset and bored. Anyway. I finished the fucking boat. That boat that is the bane of my existence. All my pain rides in that boat. And it can’t even face me.

Sigh. Have I told you how much this month sucks? Please time travel me to a new place and time. I’ll even deal with Dr. Who if I have to, but only if it’s this one…

He looks like a nice guy. The others, not so much.

Hey, signs that you raised a Geek Girl (besides the fact that she’s seen every Dr. Who episode): She wanted me to sit with her on the floor this afternoon (I actually fell asleep down there with the dog curled up next to me…she was also freaked out by the lack of furniture)…and was reading me stuff from a Harry Potter Pinterest board. Yup. That’s a geek.

SIL, she says change is good. I don’t argue. It’s usually true. Except when it’s not. I know the change in my house WILL be good; right now, though, it is sorta hellish. Maybe the change is good once the changing part is done, and the process of change is just painful and torturous.

All the furniture is out except that damn light table (and the girlchild)…

The light table would have to come apart to get out, and it’s just not worth the work. They say they can move it around as they work. It’s not that heavy. It’s lighter than the piano and we moved that.

It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get everything out…on the deck, on the driveway, and in a variety of rooms…and as soon as we did, girlchild brought in a pile of pillows and blankets and complained that we hadn’t reconnected the TV properly. There was a web of cords back there, and we untangled it, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get it back right. It may not matter. There were two cords that were attached to one thing but not another.

Why I fell asleep on the floor with the dog? Stayed up too late last night, plus all that work. I was tired. My doctor called me her hero because of my blood tests. My A1C is normal. Let’s ignore my daily blood sugars. But we’re reducing another med. My liver says thanks. My diabetes is CURED! Not really. No one cures it. Stop telling people it’s cured.

There’s at least two places on the walls that are already damaged and there’s a molding issue and boychild’s damn dirty feet already made one wall dirty (seriously?). I think I’m going to hang a sheet where his dirty feet go. The kids want a new chandelier (and so do I, because this one is uncleanable), but that’s not on my list at the moment.

Although it’s fun to Google those…

Maybe I should make my own…

Because these aren’t wild enough…

It’s a big space.

All those white walls, all they do is make me want to go grab a bunch of spray paint cans and graffiti the shit out of them (reasons why you shouldn’t let me help you remodel), but then some sense of reality takes over and I realize I don’t ever want to do this again, so I leave it alone. White will do. I actually HANG art on my walls, unlike most people, so it will not look this blank for long…although the boychild likes this and girlchild complains about the dark furniture.

The great Rift Valley…where the carpet seam was, where the dogs nibbled and feet wore away at it. These carpets are from the early 80s.

I did actually sit in the middle of the floor by myself for a bit to eat my dinner. I’ve been sitting at the table on the deck since we started painting, but it’s hard to get to at the moment. I was visited by two different cats, seriously confused and perturbed by the lack of furniture to (a) scratch, (b) hide behind, and/or (c) lie on.

You can see we managed to get the piano into the entryway. Boychild likes the acoustics there (less fabric, higher ceilings), but I’m not leaving it there. Maybe I should take up piano again.

Tomorrow we get carpet. Then we move everything back. Well, I’m reconsidering some of the everything. But I’m not sure how much I can really not move back in.

I’m trying to keep control of the emotional landslide I’m currently living in, so I’m being good about food, exercise, and meditation. I suck at sleep, but there are other factors that affect that, like my thyroid meds, which I’m trying to be better about taking as well. Because that was the one number that was off…STILL. Meditation has gotten easier, in that I don’t have to focus on someone I’m not happy with any more…instead I’m taking on the whole world and taking in all their pain and suffering and “sharing my feelings of joy and happiness.” Um. Mr. Meditation, I don’t have any of those. I have feelings of relief sometimes. Some mental peace at times. Some thoughts of, Oh, Thank God, That’s Done (when the couches made it out of the house and no one died). That’s all I got. Perhaps someone else who is meditating can forward me some of their joy and happiness so I can share it out.

Things that made me cry today:

1. The season finale to Sons of Anarchy (yes, I’m behind in watching stuff). Dammit, SOA, I count on you guys for a good dose of violence and none of that pulling at the heartstrings shit. This is why I watch you and X Files. Don’t fuck with me. Oh yeah, and that fork thing? You jumped the shark. Plus I knew you were gonna kill her. It was the meanest thing.

2. Elton John (goddamned Pandora)

3. Meditation (see above)

4. Random shit at the gym, including a sweet kiss between two people I used to work with in a former life, who weren’t together then but now are. It wasn’t a bad thing that they kissed. It was sweet. So I guess that’s my issue. Sometimes things that make me cry are all about what’s missing.

Tomorrow I stitch. Tomorrow, the world rights all the wrongs in my living room. Tomorrow, I can start putting it all back and the Hoarder house will go away. I’m hoping that helps.

Lost Cause

I sat down this morning to write a blogpost and even resized the one single picture I had and then realized the mood I was in and decided, no, no, no. Do not write now. Live the day, try to change that shitty mood that dragged you up out of deep blank sleep, or at least dreams that you don’t remember, change it and then write.

So I set out to change it. (BTW, WordPress, WTF? Way to completely change everything. I am weirded out. Totally new interface. Radically different.)

I can’t say that I was entirely successful, but since my counselor saw me today (to make up for missing last week) and told me multiple times that I was feeling all the normal feels and nothing was crazy talk, except the part where I call myself a loser, but that’s crazy talk from a year ago that I can’t seem to shake, and we talked about the two parts of my brain and how sometimes one part wins over the other, but the other, more practical and mature part of my brain is still there, talking away, shaking its head at the stupid drama, saying “I’m not crazy. I’m just tormented at the moment.” Odds are I’ll get over it. Someday. That’s the shitty part. The Someday Part.

There are other shitty parts, but believe it or not, I don’t write everything I’m feeling on here. Some of it just gets cried out in the car on the drive between here and there. The worst of it, you never see it. Think about that. I really wanted to be in a different place by now, but you can want things all you like, and you can even be one of those perky people who think that if you just WANT it HARD enough and SMILE a LOT, then it will be YOURS. (Fuck You, by the way)

Those people have not lived my existence. They are not negotiating golf clubs with a teenager at 11:30 PM. They are not determining if an axle boot needs fixing. They are not trying to decide how much weight the deck can hold. And they are certainly not trying to decide whether it’s possible to just stay asleep, deeply asleep, blindly and blankly not dreaming, for at least another year or two, until it doesn’t hurt to wake up. Because it still does. And I can’t even describe to you how much that sucks. How much I want it to stop. And there’s no magic that makes it stop. Just like there’s no magic to stop the tears that are falling down your cheeks as you drive up to your destination.

Thanks, by the way, to my chiropractor for the second emergency appointment in two months. Am I stressed? I guess. I don’t know. Was I crying in your parking lot? Damn straight I was.

I often wonder if people know I’ve been crying. Yet again. Because that hasn’t stopped. That’s the new me. Crying Kathy. Woo!

Anyway. So I set out to make the day at least…well…um…insert adjective here. Not unhappy. Not depressing (impossible at the moment).

I finished stitching down the Mammogram quilt…

And then I sandwiched it and pinbasted it.

Which meant I had to clean a floor first, and that floor promptly became dirty again, but that’s OK. It’s gonna be worse tomorrow. It was a temporary clean. I wanted that done before the carpet guys came, in case I finished stitching the Menopause quilt down before Wednesday, because I’m expecting to get a lot of stitching done on Wednesday, since I’ll be trapped in my office pretty much. I’m OK with that. I need more of that…because then I can’t see the chaos in the rest of the house.

I can’t tell you how much I need that chaos gone. It’s transmuted into my head. I think it’s making everything worse.

Once that was done, I started in on the ten bird quilts…pinbasting all of them.

They didn’t take long…

Five minutes for the smaller ones…

They all have the same backing fabric, an old cotton from before I was really sewing quilts, but when I made fabric frames. I wasn’t sure if it was cotton or poly cotton, so I burned it in the sink.

It was really old cotton. I really don’t need to be buying more fabric right now…

Although I’m a bit concerned about bindings. The dark quilts are easy, if I have enough of the dark fabric left. Although that one could do a green or orange binding and be OK.

And this one could do black…maybe.

But I need to quilt them all first.

That could take a while.

But they’re all ready now.

The longest it took to pinbaste one quilt was 12 minutes.

The day was still shitty after all that. I’m in the middle of writing a post about art and why I do it and how it doesn’t do magical things like solve all my problems and make me leap out of bed in the morning and sing joyous songs during the day. So art helps, but it doesn’t really make everything OK. It’s there. It saves me in many ways, but it doesn’t make everything pretty and nice-smelling. I think people who are not artists and really want to be think it’s so cool that it must solve everything and make everything fucking awesome and they really wish they could be an artist like me, but they don’t realize that it’s not something you choose to do…it chooses you. And it doesn’t make it good. It just makes it. And. I don’t know. It’s not magic. I keep saying that. I want there to be magic. I really do. I’m Scully though, not Mulder. I wish I were Mulder.

Girlchild has been fussy lately and keeps wanting me to sit with her while she watches television, like while dinner was in the oven tonight (she did cook)…so I can’t quilt during that time and today was so bad I had thought of drawing about 17 times, so I grabbed this drawing and finished it up…

This is good. It needs to be a quilt. Not anytime soon of course. Really I should have been drawing the other one, but apparently I can only work on that one while sitting in a wine bar waiting for teenagers to get out of concerts. Or something. I wasn’t going to draw a penis while sitting next to my daughter on the couch. I knew what kind of commentary that would produce.

After dinner, I started stitching the Menopause quilt down…that’s not its real name, just its inspiration.

Cracked skull and all…I’m about halfway up into the water…this is gonna take a while.

Which is probably OK. I sorta persuaded Pandora that it should be playing young angry-man rock instead of that mopey shit that makes me cry. Of course, when X-Files makes you cry, you know you’re a mess. So there’s been a lot of Linkin Park and Nirvana. So that might tell you a bit about where my head is at the moment.

And this song…was the last mopey song Pandora played before I fucked with it and explained my current mood…

Beck’s Lost Cause…”There’s a place where you are going…” Hopefully that place is into a deep sleep with an easy wakeup call.

Never Feel Bad Anymore*

So Friday night, I was going to iron more birds, but I like to watch things while ironing (it keeps the bad/sad parts of my brain occupied so they don’t make me cry) and the kids were hogging Netflix. So I decided to stitch stuff down instead, because I’ve got plenty of that to do, and I listen to music while I’m doing that, but it doesn’t do a very good job of occupying the bad/sad brain. In fact, I think it brings it out more, which is not necessarily a good thing. That said, this part of the quilting needs to get done and I’m just going to need to suck it up and stitch…and let’s be honest here, I cry while stitching. I try not to. I try to distract myself with stuff in my head, I try to pseudo-write the story I’m working on, I try a lot of fucking things that don’t fucking work at all, so maybe I should just accept that this is the crying stage. And just make sure I am well-hydrated.

I started with the mammogram quilt because it’s got fewer pieces and will take less time, and my plan was to get it done and sandwiched before the carpet guys come Wednesday, so I could quilt Wednesday if I wanted to. Not that I’ll be done with everything else, probably, but it’s good to have plans…

I got about halfway done before I got tired. It was late at night, almost midnight when I quit.

I fold it up on the machine, because otherwise I will find a cat laying upon it at the first opportune moment, and then I will have to remove all that cat hair. It will take about another hour to finish this, so hopefully I will get to that today. I’m sitting here, only sort of awake (sleep is a real bitch at the moment…can’t fall asleep, then nightmares wake me up, then can’t fall asleep again until early morning. HATE IT), trying to persuade myself to go to the gym, and the quilt brain is like, “Don’t go to the gym. Stay here. Sew. You know you want to.”

It’s true. I want to finish that one and then do all 10 birds. But I need to go to the gym as well. Grr.

So yeah, I finished ironing birds yesterday…Number 6 was a strange one…

but its shape appealed to me…

In the actual drawing, there’s a face next to it. That drawing does not exist as a quilt. Then I did number 7, which is actually on the Mammogram quilt that I’m stitching down at the moment…

I think this one has the fewest pieces…

Number 8 has the most pieces, with 61, and is also kind of the weirdest one…

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I liked the feathers though. Making these little quilts is really about my messing around with pieces of my work, which I don’t usually do, but someone liked a bird and thought they might like a small bird quilt. So I figured it was worth a try.

I don’t really know whether I like this process or not…it’s quick, but it’s like Quilting Lite to me. No depth to it. I’ve always had that problem with smaller quilts.

I think that’s why I don’t make very many of them.

They’re too easy and I don’t engage in the process.

That might be why I made 10 of them…it makes it a large enough project for me to have to pay some level of attention. And I think it’s funny that one of the most complicated birds is the one that’s getting the most attention…

First owl I’ve ever done was this one on the Celebrating Silver quilt. I looked at a bunch of owl pictures to draw this…and decided there’s definitely a Harry Potter feel to it as well…

Anyway, the next step is to stitch them down, hopefully today. These will all be for sale, and some people are already in line for choosing one, but I’m not allowing any of that until they’re finished and priced, because I know that might be an issue. I do value my time and although these are small, so far the smallest ones have taken almost an hour to do (not bad, but only about halfway through, if that) and the largest ones have taken almost three hours to do. So I’m trying to be fair to myself and keep track of the time so I don’t rip myself off.

Anyway, more of that today.

On Friday, we also did a lot of moving stuff out of the living room area, prepping for the last bad day before the carpet guys come. We needed the entryway clear (which is why it would be a good time to get that quilt done and sandwiched, because that’s where I do that), so we moved all the boxes and books out of there into my bedroom mostly. Then we moved anything smallish or that would fit in my bedroom or the hallway, plus the piles of stuff we had stored in the little living room as we cleared out the dining area for painting. I am glad to announce that I could in fact have a full Hoarders house, complete with really skinny hallways full of crap.

Seriously, I get totally claustrophobic walking through this…

I could not be a serious hoarder. I would go crazy. My bedroom at the moment is like some sort of junk cave…

The cat is freaked out by it and so am I. That’s the view back down the hallway toward the more open part of the house. I will be so glad when all this is done and I can move everything back and put it away. It will be a pain in the butt, I’m sure, but I am going nuts living like this. No earthquakes please.

I hiked last night, which was nice (will post it later)…still no knee pain, so that’s good. But I didn’t get home until after 10, and then I showered and meditated (trying to be better about that), and then I had no energy for anything after that really, so I came in here and stared at the computer, and the story in my head knocked at the door. So I started to write. And I kept trying to stop, because I was tired, my neck hurt, my fingers were still going, but I mentally was done, but apparently I wasn’t, because I wrote almost 4000 words before I could stop. I seriously tried stopping in 5 different places, and my fingers would keep going. I guess that’s a good thing. I’m hoping to do some more tomorrow, because I wasn’t really trying to tell my brain how to write this thing and it went off on a tangent, which is good, because I didn’t really know where the story was going next, and now I do. Well, sort of. I have a vague idea of what’s next, but it’s turning into something scarier than I started out with. I’m at 12,000 words. Not great, but not bad. A good solid start.

Then I went to bed and read for a while with the heating pad under my tweaked neck…same place as before, dammit. Might have to call the chiropractor again for another emergency appointment. I had to read because my brain wouldn’t shut down.

For the post title, I was looking for a song I knew I had heard lately about “can’t control my brain” and this one popped up. And the video is sweet, all puppies and kittens and wild animal babies, and it’s a nice sentiment. To never feel bad anymore. Weezer: Islands in the Sun…

I think I was originally thinking of a different song, though…not the Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated (although there is that sentiment), but there’s another one…tickling around in my brain somewhere, but these two are crowding it out. That’s probably a good thing…

Ironing Birds Very Very Flat…

It seems ironic to take something that can fly wherever it likes (well, within the atmosphere) and to make it flat and iron it onto a very flat piece of fabric. Those birds…some of them actually exist as quilt tops now! Except they’re so small, some of them could be potholders…the reviled statement about any small work…”Is that a placemat?” Maybe this is why I work so big…”Is that a bed quilt? It’s not the right size.”

So I ironed a bunch of birds yesterday, mostly because I was at Susan’s house and it was a portable thing, which most of what I have to do right now is not.

I started with birds cut out in tupperware…

Which I then ironed together with the drawing under the teflon…

And then I would try them out on a variety of backgrounds until I found the one I thought worked best…

This one seemed to need an asymmetrical background. I may change my mind later…

Most of the rest were a little more standard, wanting to sit in the middle of their square or rectangle…

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So then I had to decide, light or dark?

Bright or not?

This one looks really different on this background…I tried him on like 5 different shades of blue and this is the one that talked to me.

Here’s his twin with the eyeball…

Slightly different fabrics for him…including the background…

And one that’s not so square…

Seemed to do better with dark.

So that’s 5 done to this stage. I also cut out the other 5 yesterday afternoon and evening. It didn’t take long. I was hoping to iron the rest together tonight, and I may still get to that, but I’m not feeling well…combination of tired and hormones and cramps and crappy mental shit that goes along with a bunch of other stuff.

BLAHHHH. Exactly. That feeling.

I ironed the 5 above onto backgrounds in about 30 minutes between hanging out with Susan and friends and leaving for my monthly stitching meeting, the only place I work on this…

Girlchild’s Christmas stocking. It’s really slow. I gave up on trying to stitch the white AROUND the motifs and started stitching the damn motifs. It took a lot of counting…and then counting again, because we were talking about birds (shocking…real ones, not Kathy ones) and books and writing and movies and how I should make my own Meetup group of people who want to sit in the 2nd row at the movies and sit through the credits, and how I would still be the only one going. I must become one with my freak status. Even in the Art House Movie crowd, I am a freak. That is very sad.

In the parking lot, I documented these three (no, there are four) badly drawn penises…

Materials: dust, car window, finger

I’m debating doing a series of quilts a la Keith Haring with replicas of my students’ badly drawn penises, but then I’d have to give them credit, and that would probably lose me my job. See, I DO think these things through!

Then after that, I had to drive to North Park to pick up 4 teenaged girls at a concert, but we weren’t sure when it would be over, so I had packed my sketchbook, yes, the BIG one, because I have no fear (really, apparently I don’t) and I was just going to hang out near where the concert was, in like a coffee bar or wine bar or anything that had the word bar in it? And draw until they were ready for me. Because I told the girlchild it wasn’t safe for her to walk around down there, because of some recent assaults, but I guess I was safe because I had my sketchbook.

I had gotten the drawing to this point the night before because I was too tired to keep making art stuff, but I didn’t feel like going to sleep, so I sat in front of the computer, watching videos, and decided to be bold, rip the previous drawing out of the sketchbook…this one…

because the male figure just plain old sucked…reminded me of Draco in Harry Potter, and that’s not what I wanted. However angry I might be with particular males in the universe, my goal in this drawing is some vision of equality, of working together, of being different and yet on the same team. We can’t be the same. It’s impossible. (As I sit here dealing with menstrual cramping from hell and wondering if I can just go overmedicate myself and go to bed right now, I’m fairly sure none of the males in my life have ever felt this uncomfortable for any reason, let alone once a month, every month, for the last 35 fucking years…oh wait, I didn’t have my period while pregnant…but then I was just puking my guts out. That’s a separate hell.).

Plus the hammer bugged me. Not that there shouldn’t be a hammer in this quilt. There totally should be. Just not in his hand. She’s holding a baby. He’s holding a hammer. Not working for me.

So. I put the original drawing under a blank page and basically traced the female figure…

because she was mostly OK. I changed her tattoo, I added some arrows, because I had forgotten them the first time around, and I gave her lungs. Can’t breathe without fucking lungs, you know. Yes, I am venturing into the 1500+ piece range at the moment, and I need to deal with measuring this piece too, because it has to be a particular size. Then I made another pass at drawing a male…different hair, different mouth, stronger face. Better. But then what? I had an idea that I wanted a tree to be growing from them, between them, and that the tree might hold some things that would be relevant to both genders, that were maybe in the realm of male or female in the past, but could be either now, like hammers and aprons and lawnmowers and Valium. Wait. Not Valium. I also debated about what to do with their arms in the middle…I was going to put their arms across each other’s shoulders, but I wanted them joined, not necessarily leaning on each other…the arm/shoulder thing seemed awkward.

Really, if you had been watching me, there were short bursts of drawing, then long moments where I just stared at the drawing, and you couldn’t tell, but I was visualizing things (like arms over shoulders) and trying them out on the drawing in my head, rejecting some, setting some aside, deciding some might work. I still have some saved in my mental clipboard.

So when I got to the bar last night, I plopped my money down for a single glass of wine (I was driving 4 teenaged girls and it was already late) and sat down at a table in a mostly empty wine bar, pulled open my sketchbook and started to draw…and no one bugged me and it was dark (not necessarily a plus) and when I couldn’t visualize what their hands should look like (I guess it’s been that long since I’ve held a hand…telling, that is), I Googled stuff until I found a few and stared at them until it made sense to me again.

And I drew…

Yes, I stopped there. Not because I’m afraid to draw a penis in a wine bar. I’m not. It’s just that the girls had texted me that they really liked the band they were watching and we negotiated a pickup time and it was time for me to leave and go get them a half block away. (Actually, first they said they would walk to the coffee bar I was at…um…WHOOPS…not at a coffee bar) So I did.

There’s a couple things that need fixing, and it’s definitely going longer (although I don’t know how much longer…should figure that out). I didn’t work on the tree because I’d like to go taller too, and I don’t know if I have the space. So I’ll finish his body to the knees and then run a copy so I can continue the drawing down. And I will check the measurements before I do that. But I’m feeling much better about this project now, because I was able to get my head out of the shit in which it had been wallowing. Whatever my experiences in relationships have been, I do have an incredibly clear idea of what they SHOULD be…I always have…perhaps that is what gets me in trouble. I expect teamwork and cooperation and gender roles being questioned and negotiated with care for each other. I don’t have to be the cook just because I am a girl. I can mow a lawn even though I am a girl. You know, that shit. Hate that shit.

I expect both people to pay attention. I don’t really think those things are beyond most people’s ability…I just think most people treat other people badly. A good relationship requires attention and work, and if those things are diverted or ignored, then the relationship will fail.

I can believe in it even if I’ve never experienced it. Maybe that’s what this quilt is really about…a dream of equality for me personally, with the hope that my own children will get to experience something like that. It’s difficult to draw a dream…nightmares are so much easier. Reality…it’s pretty easy to draw as well. But hopes? Wishes? Dreams for something better? That’s harder to get right.

What It Takes to Iron an Owl…

Yesterday would have been my 25th wedding anniversary. I had actually gotten to a point in my life where I wasn’t reminded of the date every year post-divorce, but my parents’ anniversary is 25 years before mine, so it was the big five-oh for them this year and I forgot…or did not remember…or blanked it out…or something. So that kind of became an issue and reminded me of my own lack of anniversary. I apologized. Some part of my brain is still trying to figure out what to do about it. Apparently if I had planned ahead, I could have had the White House send them an anniversary greeting. That would have gone down well, I’m sure.

Failed marriages are not uncommon, and mine was not any more or less tragic than any other. I do wish that I had the support and relative stability of 25 years of marriage right now, between teen angst and one kid going to college (and leaving FOREVER!). But that’s not part of my life. I think, I hope, I believe it would make the daily struggle easier to deal with, but I have friends in not-so-good marriages who argue that it doesn’t. I’m not pro or con marriage…but a stable, loving relationship that provides support for the really bad days, the days where I really almost want to grab my keys and my purse and run the fuck away, just get in the car and drive and drive and drive and maybe come back in a week or two. Yeah. That. Because what really happens is that I internalize all of that, and sometimes I cry about it, but I’m really carrying it around inside me and I don’t know what to do with it. There is no one I can turn to and say, holy hell, I can’t do this, and they say, it’s OK…I’ll deal tonight. Go take a bath. Go to a book store. Just go. I’ll deal.

I figure I’ll just keep doing what I can to move this brain in the right direction and at some point I will be able to get through a day without it hurting. Like a WHOLE day. I can get through short periods of time, like on hikes or while ironing fabric down, but there’s no long-lasting effect. The chemistry in my brain is the stronger…it wins at the moment. And by then, the teen drama will have moved to a college dorm, where I’ll still get bits and pieces of it, and hopefully I won’t have to fly or drive somewhere and put all the pieces back together…hopefully, by then, she’ll have it all together and be able to deal on her own.

I’ve been watching my mood the last 4 or 5 days and realizing even more what affects it…the biological flows of receptors and hormones and all that crap, plus blood sugar wavering in response to all that. I can have brief periods of time when I can change those, with exercise or some moment of separation from the sad, maybe during a conversation or a good book or while painting a wall. And then it’s back. It’s no wonder that the book I’m trying to write is about biogenetics and human body chemistry and how to fuck with it. It’s what fills my brain. I keep having to research stuff for it though…I’ll think of something really cool, but I don’t want there to be bad science, so then I have to go Google things for the next three hours to make sure I’m writing accurate science, or at least believable science. At some point, I need to have a long conversation (or 10) with a geneticist. Or a botanist. Or both.

We finished painting the last of the walls yesterday. That should be a party in itself. We did two coats because we were painting over the plaster and the mastic. One area of the mastic actually needed three coats. So that part is done. It took a LONG time. I’m looking at my bedroom and the hallway, and anyone who thinks they can bang it out in a day, I will feed you pizza and beer while you do it. While I lie on the bed reading a book and eating bonbons (not really, because I’m allergic to chocolate). Because it gives me a giant-ass headache to even think about it (although it would be somewhat easier…just push everything into the center…as long as I don’t have to deal with carpet too…which of course, at some point, I will have to do that too). Now we can seriously concentrate on getting everything out of that space for carpet next week.

Meanwhile, a woman has art to make…Bird number 6…

I ironed the fabrics for 4 more birds…I only have the owl to go. I didn’t have the energy for it last night…it’s the most complicated one in there I think. This one isn’t…it’s the bird from the Mammogram quilt, which I hope to start stitching down today. That’s the next step in the quiltmaking process. This is Bird number 7…

I mimicked the colors on the original quilt…not quite exact fabrics, because that was too much like work.

A couple of these took 30 minutes to choose fabrics for, because they were actually semi-complicated. This one had 60 pieces in it. It doesn’t exist in a quilt yet…I’m not even sure what drawing it came from…Bird number 8…

This one is in a quilt and I looked at the picture because it’s a pretty old quilt and I didn’t remember what color I did the bird (um. Kathy. Really? It’s black.). Bird number 9 came from a quilt of my son…back when he didn’t have long hair, I think…

Here’s the drawing with the fabrics cut out…

I wrote the next paragraph before I went to the dentist and then came back and dealt with screaming and spiders and the cable company and a new modem and 9 bags of thriftshoppery and 37 pounds of clothes shipped to the cousins in Seattle and moldings that don’t match the old ones because they don’t make them any more and piles and piles of dust and going through a container of stuff to be filed from 2007 and 2008 and finding that damn title to the old car, which I was sure I didn’t have, and crying because I saw my itinerary for Alaska.

Fuck. Can’t even CLEAN without getting upset. That is just dumb. It’s lame. It’s stupid. I am not dumb, lame, or stupid. One part of my brain is. And it can just fuck the hell off.

So. You’ll see my plan for the day below…and then you can laugh with me…

So today I’m going to iron down the owl and start stitching the two quilt tops down. I’m hoping to have the presence of mind to draw tonight, so I can really get focused on the next big quilt…I need to be tracing Wonder Under by next weekend, which means about a thousand things need to happen first. I think I will cut out the fabrics for these birds tomorrow at my stitching meeting. I might be able to iron a couple of them down as well…I think I only have an hour and a half between the two stitching meetings, but these babies are small. We’ll see. Maybe I will pick backgrounds before I go over to my friend’s house and I will iron them there. They are not very complicated.

Most of the birds, it took about 15-20 minutes to pick fabrics. The most complicated one took 35 minutes.

Yup. It’s 5 PM, I’m sweaty, tired, and dusty. Every Single Thing in the kitchen cupboards where the moths have been reproducing has been removed. Everything with a trace of mothiness or that has expired got tossed out. The brown widow that was living in there (hence screaming) is dead (the cable lady got to hear the screaming while she was trying to help me get my phone and internet working again…I asked her to kill the spider too, but apparently she does not have the technology for that). The cupboards are clean of moth leavings, dirt, spider guts, and oh my god are those EGGS? Of WHAT??? At which point, the girlchild gave up, left everything on the counter, and left for soccer. The only reason I am in here now, typing this fucker out, is because I’m waiting for the cupboards to dry, so I can go back in and put everything away.

Plus I’m fucking tired.

OK. Going to put things away. No more excuses.

Then maybe I will come back in here and iron a fucking owl…

Thanks for Asking…

I’m trying to get back on my planned art and remodeling schedule this week…I had a real hard time last week being motivated. It was too much, I think. But finishing the ironing on that big quilt and realizing how many hours of stitching down, quilting, and binding remain on that one and the other one, PLUS needing to do some other art things, made me realize that I have to stay focused. I’m not really ON vacation. This is my other job and I have to take advantage of the time I have to get that work done, because it will become increasingly harder to do that as the summer progresses into that crazy hell we call Fall…it really is FALL…from sanity (what little I have).

So Focus Goggles on. It’s easy to say that right now, because I’m not actually awake yet. I mean, yes, it seems like a reasonable hour for people to be waking up at almost 9, but I really can’t get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 at the moment, and I had to get up early to go to the lab and have them take my life force (aka blood). Fun stuff. Now I will freak out at regular intervals during the day when I check my results. I’m not expecting them to be good right now. Oh well.

So I had wanted to have some small quilt tops of birds ironed by this Thursday…that was my original deadline…so I started ironing Wonder Under to fabric yesterday. The plus with these is that they’re small and quick…

The minus is that they are so small that it actually takes me longer to pick the fabrics because there’s only like 5 of them and I get fussier about their going together in the way I want, because there’s nothing else to distract you from them. In a huge quilt with 80 fabrics, you wouldn’t notice if one gray was slightly off, but in something this small, I would. Maybe you still wouldn’t. Anyway, so that’s slowed me down. That said, I got 5 of them done yesterday…which isn’t bad.

I start with the drawing and the tupperware with those Wonder Under pieces in it…

Then I lay those pieces out and try to figure out what colors I’m using. I picked these as possible backgrounds, but there are more…

I’m trying to keep it simple, so I am reusing some of the fabrics in more than one bird, like the beak colors and the whites of the eyes.

This one actually really threw me with the grays for a while. I thought about finding a picture of the original quilt and trying to copy the fabrics, but I didn’t.

On this one, I actually pulled up the picture on the iPad to try to figure out what I had used in the previous quilt, but that’s because the person who likes this one liked the original bird…

Not all of these birds are in existing quilts. Some were just pulled from drawings that are in the quiltmaking queue.

On the next version of that bird, I changed it up and used different fabrics.

Eleven fabrics for this one…amazingly small number of fabrics for a Kathy quilt. Granted these are smaller than I ever work.

This one is very muted…looking for a different background for it.

So 5 down, 5 to go today, once I get my refi signed. Oh yeah, and the wall painted…

I’m just going to paint and see if the texture is irregular enough to pass with a couple of coats of paint on it. I’m not sure I care enough to spend more time on it. The wall under the window doesn’t show at all and most of the rest of the wall will be covered by bookshelf or art. Plus it will all be a lovely unifying white. I put a second coat of plastery stuff on it yesterday and then sanded it and washed it down.

We have to paint this little section too…

Not a problem with the texture here…it did much better for some reason…no mastic maybe helps.

Once all that is done and the carpet is in, I will still need to deal with putting in shelves to the right of the fireplace and finding something for a mantle. I have a decorating friend who might be able to help with that, but it’s going to have to be cheap…in fact, I’m thinking of raiding my dad’s wood supply and just throwing an old barn board up there. Not really. But I don’t want fancy; I want natural.

This is looking back at the rest of this area, which is been in chaos since school got out.

It’s getting there. Slowly. Sitting on the couch is not happening much at the moment, unless you’re willing to climb in and be crowded…which we all have done (we are nesters). We’re still eating dinner on the deck. We started moving boxes and some furniture out of this area, just so next Tuesday will not be so heinous, but it’s hot and trying to find room for stuff is challenging. Girlchild just exploded all over the place when I asked her to deal with her stuff, so that makes it so much more fun. We did get the giant box of my CDs down into the garage, and then in trying to find a shelf that it would fit on, boychild started tossing stuff (he did ask first), so we filled a trashcan with stuff and found 6 boxes of clothing that either needs to be sent to the cousins up north or to the thrift shop…so that is girlchild’s job today, to go through those boxes.

At which point, my dad asked me when I’m going to clean out the garage. Holy crap, man. I can only handle so much chaos at a time. I need to get the art stuff done. I have another quilt I haven’t started yet that needs to be significantly started before school begins. I need to DRAW that. I can’t even trace Wonder Under until the carpets are done, but I need a drawing soon. Like before next week.

Yeah. So. That. Not happening right now. But thanks for asking.

OMG Finished!

I think that’s the level of excitement I’m supposed to have for finishing the ironing part of this big quilt. That Fake It till You Make It crap. You know. Smile until it’s natural. I actually smile all the time, when things make me smile, like goofy dogs and goofy kids and even Grumpy Cat in the Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, which is significantly dumb. So my smile is working…it just doesn’t stick. I can laugh at jokes and stupid puns too…I actually had someone tell me I couldn’t be depressed because I laughed at her jokes. They were still funny. It just didn’t stick. Depression means you can’t hold on to that feeling.

So. In my head since about 1:07 AM last night, I’ve been thinking OMG I’m FINISHED! See. Not really. I tried that last night and it didn’t work and then I had distinctly troubled and fucked-up dreams all night and I totally blame the OMG. That fake-it crap.

Not really. That’s just what my brain does.

So I finished the ironing yesterday (did you get that part?). I didn’t have much left anyway, about 100 pieces or so. I kept telling myself this thing had 1800 pieces, but it was only 1700 and something (ha ha ha…now see, THAT was funny).

This is Ivy. She’s dead two years now, so that’s why she gets wings. She’s the familiar, the protector animal in this quilt. Whenever the phone rang, she would jump up from wherever she was lying and race around the house, like it was an alarm for her to protect me.

She ends up ironed in front of the giant weeping eyeball.

I got those done before we went to dinner at my parents, and then came back to the tentacles…

Those crazy-ass tentacles. These were a bit of a challenge just because the pieces were tiny. I’m a bit confused though. I knew I had lost two of the larger sucker parts, and I looked for at least 20 minutes through all my fabrics trying to find the fabric I used for that and I just couldn’t find it. This is why I usually try NOT to put everything away until the quilt is ironed down, but they were just taking up too much room.

So I adjusted things so you can’t tell that two suckers are missing…

But if I was missing two of the larger pieces, why the fuck do I have four of the smaller darker pieces left over?

Seriously, you cannot explain that away. I tried. I gave up. It was not worth it.

In the end, I found all the missing pieces (and more! seriously, I found two pieces that must belong to another quilt, because they don’t belong to this one) except one, an elbow shadow, which I recut. I almost didn’t, but its absence bugged me.

And then I ironed the tentacles down where they belong.

At that point, a smart person would have looked at the clock and gone to bed. The total ironing of all the pieces was 21 hours and 15 minutes, but I still needed to iron everything down to the background. I don’t actually know what time that was, because I am NOT smart, and I did NOT look at the clock, and I was still wide awake. So you can’t give me shit about that.

I had two fabrics for the background and I laid both of them out and put some of the big ironed-together pieces on them and picked the one I liked better, which happened to be the darker one. Honestly, the lighter one probably was the better choice, but whatever. My brain kept yelling darkER! darkER! darkER!, so I caved.

The biggest problem was that normally I would iron this on my entryway floor, but that floor is Hoarder Central at the moment. So that wasn’t happening. I mean, if I’d been patient enough to wait on the ironing until today, which also would have meant going to bed at a semi-reasonable hour, then we were planning on clearing that floor anyway as part of the pre-carpet prep work. But NOOOO. I must iron immediately. So I started on the ironing board, which was probably a mistake…I tried to get the bottom section straight…

An hour and a half later, I had laid it out (sort of) on the floor of the studio, realized I was crooked, but had already ironed major bits down and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. It will be OK.

Total ironing time: 22 hours and 45 minutes.

What have you done lately that took that much time? Here’s the top section.

No pictures of the whole thing. First of all, there’s nowhere big enough to hang or lay it out where I could photograph it all…it’s about 43″ w x 80″ h. I actually have no clue what the vertical measurement is…that was a total guess.

I’m not stitching it right away. I’m going to pick fabrics for the bird quilts and then I’m going to stitch down the Mammogram quilt, and then this one. Stitching down doesn’t take as long as ironing, though, so hopefully I’ll have a chunk of all that done this week. I did add up all the hours on this thing so far and I’m at a little over 109 hours. Wowza. It ain’t small. It ain’t simple.

Yup. This is my crazy. I do this because I have to. I don’t do it to make me happy or to change the world. I do it because I have a drive inside me that is completely out of whack (instead of the mostly out of whack that is my current existence) if I don’t do it. I know a lot of people don’t understand…they think that being able to make art should make me happy, but it doesn’t. It just decreases the unhappy. It’s like the people who think my losing weight should magically cure my diabetes. Nope. It’s deeper than that. I know what I need to be happy; I also know I can’t get there until I can get more of the unhappy to wander off. So I will laugh at your stupid jokes and smile at the dorky cat lying upside down on my pillow and think good thoughts when the bad dark cloud sinks down over my face. And at some point, my brain will respond the way it’s supposed to.