The Mental Health Trifecta

I was going to go to bed an hour and a half ago, but realized as I sat down at the computer to write a post that I was depressed. I mean, yeah, I’m always depressed, but I was more so than usual. I spent most of the day running around doing errands or digging holes (seriously) or grading papers or inputting grades, and it wasn’t a very satisfying day. I don’t get any jollies out of all that shit, and in the old days, I would just shake that off and assume tomorrow would bring something better, and it usually did. Not so now. Because it usually doesn’t bring something better unless I force the issue.

And yes, it means less sleep, but I’ve said before that sleep doesn’t really make me happy. Well, at the moment, nothing makes me happy, but sleep doesn’t even bring peace. Or something approaching contentment…because that’s the closest I get to happy now. Happy is way over there. I don’t even recognize it. It’s wearing a disguise.

Anyway. So I stood up, went and got a drink of cold milk (because the girlchild infected me with the first illness I’ve had in 8 months and my throat hurts), and went in to the light table. I had recopied some drawings I call the triptych, which is interesting, because there are currently only two parts, not three, and I was originally planning on making three quilts that would hang next to each other, and now I think it should just be one really wide one that’s not very high. Not a triptych at all. Whatever. Maybe I’ll just call it that anyway to confuse people. I had tried taping it together a few months ago and it was a fucking disaster…nothing would line up and I just gave up. I needed to tape it together to finish it…I couldn’t see it all any more because it was on multiple pages and I couldn’t hold it all in my head.

So I recopied it. And I taped the two sections together, starting with the easier one…

Feb 10 14 006 small

It has fewer lines that have to meet up, so it taped together really well…and then I did the other one, the pain-in-the-ass-from-before one…

Expecting the worst. Except it worked. I think part of it was that I only enlarged it 200% this time instead of 250%. OK, I don’t know why that would make a difference, except that it takes fewer pieces to enlarge to the smaller size, so there’s less room for things to get out of alignment. That’s my current guess anyway.

I had originally drawn some connections between the two, so I redrew them on top (mostly because I couldn’t get the leaves above to behave on the copy they were on, so I cut them all off and used the other ones, so then I had to add what I had already drawn on the other page…confused? I’m not…and I’m the one who counts on this one).

So right now, I have a drawing that is about 68″ wide and 28″ high. I’m debating adding onto the left and a little on the right…and some below. Because that’s not crazy or anything. This thing has potential. I might be able to get my butt in gear and actually DO something with a purpose if I can get this to the next stage. Maybe.

I don’t have much focus at the moment. There’s no deadline that’s pressing on me. There probably should be one, but it hasn’t become urgent yet. It will.

I was drawing this disaster last night…the arm is wrong, the feet are wrong, the whole thing is a mess…

But I like y’all to see that I draw things, get this far, bang my head on the table, and move on. I may try again, but leave enough room for the feet to point the right direction or redirect the legs, and make sure the arm doesn’t look like it’s been attached after the fact…OR…make it REALLY look like it’s attached after the fact. Whatever. I was tired. And apparently coming down with sick. So there. You want to get better at drawing? Do LOTS of it. Assume about 90% will be awful. If you do better than that? You’re awesome. And then do it for lots of years, over and over again.

There. Now I don’t have to teach classes, because that’s all I would ever say…go make some art. Then make some more. Assume some of it is bad and will never see the light of day. Now make some more. Keep making it. Don’t stop. Get angry about some of it. Doubt yourself and your work. Occasionally take a deep breath and know you did good. Then do another one that sucks. There. You’re an artist.

I also dug some holes today…the septic tank got clogged again and we couldn’t even get showers or flush a toilet…which is a problem. You know. The leach field is being replaced on Friday, but we can’t really go without showers, toilets, and running water for that many days, so I had to pay to get it pumped again. This has been a really nasty shitty year for expenses. I keep breathing deep and deciding what job I’m getting for the summer…who will hire me for just 8 weeks? I don’t know.

I needed to save the $100 they would charge me to unearth the tops of the septic tank pumpouts…exciting stuff. So I shoveled myself…

Anyway. The plus is that my brain is in a better place after an hour of cutting up bits of paper and taping them to each other. Seems crazy if you ask me, but it’s a special mental state my brain goes into when it’s doing certain artmaking activities. It has to evaluate what it’s doing and it gets engaged with the process and the line itself and lining things up, and it really is a magical thing. Now if I could just get rid of that damn eye twitch…it’s back. I think it will leave when I finally get all the financial aid stuff out of the house. I hope. Or not. But at least I’m in a better frame of mind to go to sleep…I wish I didn’t have to keep reminding myself of the mental health trifecta. I seem to have the first two down pat…exercise and meditation…I just need to keep the third one in mind…make art, you silly woman, or you will be even unhappier.

Vacuuming the Brain

Another no-posting night. I was drawing instead…

I’ve done drawings of the bent-over figure before…but she has an umbrella this time. These are people who are weighed down by life, I think. My people are always damaged and cracked these days. Not surprising, I guess. Drawing is a way to move stuff out of my brain…to dust out the corners, vacuum the floors. I really should draw every day (time! not enough of it!).

Once I was done drawing, there was nothing left in my head but sadness, so I took that to bed, tucked it in, and tried to get it to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time. It likes to wake up around 4 in the morning and torture me. Sure enough, it did. I told it to shut up and rolled over, put the pillow on my head. That got me another hour or so of not-pain. That’s what these weekend mornings are now…painful. Work mornings are such a rush of having to get up for work and all that, so I can’t get bogged down in moody crap. Weekend mornings don’t have the same urgency. I’m tired, I want to sleep in, maybe lie about in bed for a while, but it’s a depressing place, so I don’t do it. Which in itself is depressing. Vicious cycle.

I get to this point in my head where I just say to myself that everything is depressing…move on. If you’re moving, maybe you’ll see something that’s not so bad. Maybe you’ll even FEEL something that’s not so bad. Standing still? Depressing. Don’t do it.

Whatever.

So yesterday I did a long, semi-painful hike (in that I am still feeling it today…it wasn’t hard, just fast), I did a lot of financial aid forms, I wrote three blogposts for groups I’m in (although I’m waiting for info on two of them to be able to finish), and I finally finished cutting out all the fabrics for Ivy’s Memorial quilt…

Wool on the left, which actually needs to be trimmed down, and cotton on the right, which will be appliqued (yes, by hand) down to the wool bits. It took just over 4 hours to pick everything out, longer than normal for me, but I think that was because of limited wool options slowing me down.

I can’t say this piece thrills me…I mean, it’s a memorial to a dead dog that we miss a lot, and maybe in the mood I’m in, memorials to dead things are not a good plan, but it is something I wanted to get to the next stage, so I did. Usually I take a photo of all the fabrics used in the quilt, but this one isn’t really one of my art quilts and I couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out what in this pile (including cat) I had actually used…

So I didn’t (I used a lot of it). And then I took all the wool bits and zipped them into one of those plastic bag things that bedding comes in when you buy it…I love those bags and never use them. I don’t use wool that much in the stuff I do, but I do want to keep it all together. I don’t want to waste a drawer in my office with it, though, and honestly, it was going to be two drawers, and I need those for cottons (which are taking over the space), because I use them so much more…so I think I will store this under my bed with the crazy-ass flesh-colored crazy-quilt fabrics. There is sometimes an issue with storing under the bed, in that you forget they are there, so that’s a problem, but when the kids move out, I am just going to turn this whole house into a scary Hoarders episode of fabric stash, so who cares?

OK. Not really. OR! If I do that, then you know I’ve gone completely off the deep end. Note to kids: good luck cleaning mom’s stuff out when she dies. I’m not making it easy for you.

I finished the second book in the Zita the Spacegirl series, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

These are quick reads for adults, and really are meant for elementary-school-aged kids, maybe middle school. I actually liked this one more than the first one. The story seemed to hold together better.

There’s a robot that pretends to be Zita and the two try to save a planet. There is a third book, but I didn’t get it from the library yet. I probably will, just because now I want to know what happens (and yes, they both end on cliffhangers…if you’re like me, you can’t NOT read the next one).

We do have a 3-day weekend (thank you, Lincoln), so I have an extra day, which is good, because the to-be-graded pile is deadly, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much yet, and I still have a to-do list that is a mile long. It starts this morning with a trip to the gym, which is a good thing…the muscles from yesterday are complaining and the best thing for them is to make them do more. Plus it’s good for the depressed part of the brain…well, people keep saying that exercise helps with depression. Then again, there’s a lot of things that people say about how to fix depression, and sometimes I think it’s just not a fixable thing. It’s there and if you’re lucky, you’ll figure out a way to live with it or persuade it to go away. I can’t take a screwdriver to it or make a list of things that make me happy and have it just disappear.

More drawing tonight I think. Hope. It’s like vacuuming the dust bunnies out of the brain.

Buried in Fiber

It’s OK. I did art stuff tonight. I probably should have gone to bed earlier instead, but…I wonder which will prolong my life more? More sleep or more art? I’m voting for the latter. Trying to balance the two, but really? The art is more calming. Sleep isn’t restful. It’s full of bad dreams and nasty sad. I’d rather be playing with fabric. I started cutting out flower parts…

which is complicated by the fact that there are wool parts of flowers and cotton parts of flowers, so I’m cutting all the wool first, and then I’ll find cotton that works with it, since I have a fairly limited stash of wools and a vast stash of cottons. I made it through almost all the flowers…at least the wool parts…and there’s a squirrel and a bunny in there too.

I need to figure out the banners and all the cotton bits. There’s not a lot left…maybe tomorrow night? Except financial aid is still a mess and school stuff needs to get done too.

I stitched at soccer…

I forgot to take pictures of the girlchild playing. He played her tonight, for real. That’s good. She did well. They won. Another game Thursday. It’s kind of a routine now…two games a week, one Academic League match a week. I keep having to remind myself what day it is…do I bring my stitching to school? Do I bring my Uggs and sweatshirt to school? Will I have time to go home first? Too much thinking. My brain isn’t good at thinking any more. It’s obsessive about the bad stuff, runs over and over it, trying to make sense of it, having conversations with myself. But give it a real task? Yikes. It’s done.

I went to the gym. I meditated. I finished two books…The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon…

who is only 22 years old. This is her debut novel, the first of seven in the series. It’s called a supernatural dystopia, and definitely has sci fi overtones, whatever that means. I liked the idea and most of the book, but kept getting lost in vocabulary and this foreign race, the Rephaim, and some other race, the Emim, which sometimes didn’t make sense. Plus the setup of clairvoyant levels is supremely complicated. But it has promise…I would read another one.

The second book I finished was Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke…

Yes. This is a kids’ graphic novel. A group I’m in has a graphic novel/comics book club, and I have never been to the meetings, but thought I could try to read the books at least, and maybe someday swing one of the meetings. I had a hard time with this book…not because it’s written to a younger audience, but because I got confused by events in the story. Plus I honestly didn’t like Zita much…she’s kind of an annoying squirrel, to use a term I use on some of my students. I don’t know if this book would appeal more to a younger audience, like a late elementary age? Maybe. I do have the second book as well. I did like the giant mouse and the round monster thing, and the spider robots were cool (even though they are evil). It was kind of an eh.

Kind of like my life. Eh. Which means it’s probably time to go to sleep. The later it gets, the sadder I get. I did find another hike for the weekend, I think. I actually found two, signed up for one reluctantly, then found the other one and switched. Seems like with the three-day weekend it would be lame not to go on a long hike…so that’s what I aimed for in my planning.

Ugh. I’m hoping with more regular influxes of art activity the days won’t feel so shitty. We’ll see. I’m tired of the shitty feeling. I keep doing things to improve my mood, trying to think positively about my future. Yeah. Well. The fun thing about depression is that it makes it very hard to think positively about anything, and when past experience is slapping you upside the face, pulling your feet out of the mud long enough to even Stand the Fuck Up and Go Make Art is difficult. I can’t be that depressoid who does nothing but sleep. I can mope and iron fabric at the same time if I have to. There’s some chance of surviving this if I keep my hands buried in fiber.

For Ivy…and Me

My SIL really saved me from myself yesterday and last night. I think she called me about 5 times, not for long, but just to tell me one more ironic or stupid thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know I was trying NOT to sound mopey and shit, but I was, and I don’t even know if she knew that…but just having her sarcastic loving self checking in with me kept me from sinking deep into the low. By the time she stopped calling (No, Really, she said, This is the last call), I was significantly tired so I managed to do a few more things and then went to bed early for me. And got a decent night’s sleep for probably the first time in a month. I know she doesn’t read my blog (she has three kids under the age of 12…I’m not sure she reads anything but text messages), so she’ll never see this. I’ll tell her thanks at some point.

There’s something about the vast expanse of weekend hours that I spend by myself that get me down. One part of me looks forward to quiet and getting to do something I want to do, and the other part of me wants to interact with people, but not total strangers and not in a difficult way. I don’t want to have to work hard at it, because I already do that every day during the work week. I want relaxing and social. Sort of. In small quantities. Maybe. Plus I’m significantly poor, so no cost. Yeah, I know. It’s not very realistic. Even an occasional movie would be nice…maybe when I get past the next Visa bill from hell.

Really, what I did yesterday was fill out financial aid forms. And I did a little fabric stuff. And I meditated.

I have completed 145 meditation sessions. Ironically, I’m having a hard time with the current series, the Creativity series…there’s something about the format of visualizing energy moving through that I can’t hold on to properly. I have no problems with creativity in itself, except for finding time for it and forcing myself to do OTHER stuff that is NOT creative. I am having a hard time relaxing at the moment in meditation…I can’t get my brain to release. It’s been too tied up in financial aid applications to relax…I’m still doing those, by the way. I finished the worst of it Saturday, the CSS Profile, which was way worse than the FAFSA by like 100 degrees. But some of the colleges have their own forms, so I did one of those tonight…and all of them need copies of my tax return, my paystubs, my W-2s, all need to be signed on each page and probably I need to provide a vial of my blood as well. Boychild interrupted my meditation because he had forgotten to turn in an essay online…and then I was talking to him about getting a job. He wanted to know why. Sigh. Ah. Money, dude. Plus hell…you just need to get a job and start being part of society. Feel free to find a job you’d like: politics, bookstore, I don’t know. Something. I will be doing these damn financial aid forms for another two weeks probably…so it seems fair that he should have to work this summer? I don’t know. I might have to work this summer too…who knows. I don’t know how anything is going to work out. Like him, I don’t know what job I could get just for the summer. Delivering pizza?

I also have completed 33 health coach sessions in the last year and a half. They’re stopping my coaching, which has been free so far…apparently losing all the weight means I no longer qualify for the free stuff. I’m OK with that. I think I got the best out of the sessions a while ago. I think there are one or two more. That’s it. I lost 45.5 pounds in that time period. I dropped one med. I upped two other meds and added new ones. Sigh. I’m healthier now despite the extra meds. I can’t help being anemic.

So I went to my local quilt store that carries wool fabrics and got a few more bright fabrics…well, bright-ish. That’s all that was available…

That crazy fabric underneath them is the backing fabric I got for super-cheap a million years ago, and I used every inch of it up on the back of the Sightlines quilts, which have finally returned home.

And then I started going through my wool stash, trying to find all the leftover pieces from other projects I’ve done…because I don’t need huge pieces for the flowers in the background…these are from a Primitive Gatherings’ block-of-the-month that I finished…well, I finished all the blocks. I haven’t put them together…that’s usually my sticking point.

Then I found the pieces from the two Sue Spargo block-of-the-month leftovers…there were some good bright colors in there, including some orange I used for the fish in the water…

I don’t need big pieces. This is not hoarding. Seriously. This is using up my scraps. I don’t have a good wool stash. It’s OK. I don’t NEED a good wool stash. I’m not planning on this being a regular thing. I just really wanted something to show how much I cared about Ivy and how bad I felt about her dying so early. I realize that current readers may not have a clue who Ivy is.

Ivy came home with us in June 2006 as a puppy (yes, that is the boychild at age 10).

She was a Boxer mix…later we figured out that the mix must have been a whippet, because she was long and skinny and ran like the wind.

She was a good dog, like they all are, although she had issues with my parents’ dog at some point, so Missy couldn’t stay with us after Calli (my daughter’s dog) moved in. But she was sweet, and every time the phone rang at night, she would leap off the couch and go running down the hallway, sometimes barking like the world was ending.

She wasn’t very big, but sounded large. She was a good protector and was very loving. She had skin allergies that started up in 2011 and we tried some food and allergy tests…turns out she was allergic to everything under the sun, so we had her on allergy shots for a while, but she even developed an allergy to those. And then her vet died of a sudden heart attack…at age 44 or something. It was crazy. So it took us a while to get another vet in the practice up to speed on the whole allergy issue, and then she got really really sick really really fast. And then well again. And then sick again. And by the time we found out that she had liver cancer, she had stopped eating and drinking, and I had made the horrible decision to stop her pain and suffering. She was 6. It was May 2012. Yes, that long ago.

I don’t know why her death has been so hard on me…I’ve had multiple animals die, but always of old age…or they were old and the diseases finally got too much for them. Ivy was young, in the prime of her life, perfectly fine and hyper and running around excited one day, and vomiting everything up and barely able to stand the next day. It was about a month from the first serious illness to putting her down, and it was just hard for me. My daughter still talks about it; she’s still carrying around resentment over how she didn’t get to hold Ivy when she died. Long story…she was there when it happened, but…I know if she had said something, she could have held her, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue. One that can’t be changed now.

So I spent most of the summer sad about her death. When my first dog, Russia, died of old age, the kids were young, and it took me a couple of years to get another dog, mostly because of finances, and that was Ivy. We have Calli here half the time; she travels back and forth between me and my ex with the kids…so it’s not like I never have a dog here. And I don’t know that I’m home enough to justify a dog just for me…and there’s the cost.

But the real deal was that I felt I needed to memorialize her life. I did some drawings and one became a sort-of banner to Ivy. That’s what this is. And it’s wool mostly, with cotton accents, and I’m planning to embellish it a la Sue Spargo, because I enjoy doing that kind of work, sort of as a hobby, rather than like an art endeavor…and I want what I make for Ivy to have been enjoyable. Because it still makes me feel like crying to think about that month when she was so sick, to remember that day I couldn’t even get her to eat out of my hand, so I decided that was it. That she was suffering more than it was worth, and she wasn’t coming back. We didn’t get the biopsy results for another three or four days, but I was right. It was liver cancer all over the place.

So I’m making this for her. And for me.

I would be ironing on the ironing board, but Babygirl thinks it’s hers now. I had all the wool sort of spread out on the other side of the board.

When I got to the fleshy bits, I had a run of fabrics that I worked really hard to get back in 2012/2013.

And I currently have about half the quilt ironed down to mostly wool, ready to be cut out.

It’s a much different process than I use for most of my quilts…but I’m glad to have it started. Maybe tomorrow night I can get started on the flowers…I have Ivy, me, and the main landscape (hill, river, fish) all cut out. I just need to do about a million flowers and two banners and then there are bunnies and squirrels, because Ivy liked to chase animals. So expect to see more of this in the coming days. For Ivy. Yeah. And me.

Making Up a Journal…

Here’s the post I hope the curator never reads. It’s Monday, January 6 (yes, I started this that long ago…welcome to my life at the moment), and I am supposed to have done a journal for the Earth Stories quilt I finished back in August/September. It’s been a rough 6 months and said journal does not exist.

I started back in early January with trying to use Google Docs, because I figured I could load the photos into a document and then write the words around it while I was sitting at a soccer game. I wanted to use the iPad, but wasn’t sure if the app I wanted to use would be able to save locally without wifi; the phone was my backup plan (and yes, I do often at least start and occasionally write an entire post on my phone). However, Google Docs sucks because it won’t take photos of any size out if the camera…they have to be resized. That’s a lot of work. I did originally resize them for the blog, but I usually delete those when I archive photos into files…so now I’m doing double work…not so smart.

Why didn’t I start a journal when I started the quilt? Because that’s not how I work. I do have a sketchbook (or seven). I don’t journal each quilt’s progress there…I do have a typed private art journal that I write in every Friday (or at least once a week) and there’s obviously my blog, which documents everything except when the dog poops (which it would document if I could find a pattern to it), but I don’t really focus on each quilt in a logical way…it’s more, here’s the quilt I’m making and here’s all the other shit that’s going on, which is why when they said they wanted a journal for the Earth Stories quilt back in like February 2013, I was like…I can do that. I’ll just copy pages from my blog. And then life (shit…tsunami wave of shit) happened. And that’s probably more than EVER needs to go into the journal of making that quilt. Besides, it would be 400 pages long and no one would read it while standing in the exhibit and wondering what made Kathy Nida do what she did, or even how she did it, because I’m not sure anyone cares about why either. Or maybe they do. Who knows.

So I ignored the need for the journal for a goddamned good long time. I emailed the curator and made sure I didn’t have to deal with it right away. And then I let it percolate (ahem…actually, I completely ignored it because I couldn’t handle it).

I bought the journal (a portfolio, relatively cheap from Michael’s) around January 2, and I thought I was finally ready to deal with this. Of course, it meant going through old photos, cleaning out photo files to find what I needed, and that was one of the issues before. I can’t even look at some of my old photo files right now. They’re filed by date and I then go through and cut and paste them into their relevant folder, whether it’s pictures of the animals or the kids’ soccer games, or it’s a particular quilt. It’s nice to have all the quilt pictures in one place, but this quilt spans about February or March of this year until September or so, and I don’t know if I can deal with the documentation.

I HAVE to deal with them. Shit. There’s only photos from November in the quilt file. Fuck. That means they’re all uncategorized, only in by date. That means I have to go through 8-9 months’ worth of photo files, during some of the most painful parts of my life. Wow. So. Should I take a Xanax now or later? Or should I just shoot myself? It might be quicker and less painful.

Probably better to do it in small batches (the photos…not the Xanax). I managed to get them all sorted in a few days. Then I resized all of them into one folder, so if I fucked up and deleted everything, they would be easy to find. Then I started with that damn Google Docs. I fussed with that file for about two days and finally said fuck it and imported it into Word. It wouldn’t move photos the way I wanted them to move, it wouldn’t size things easily. I couldn’t get the text to wrap right.

So you’d think years of Word expertise would make this an easy job. You’d be wrong. Something that happened in the code from Google Docs came in and warped the intelligence of anything I could have done in Word. I would move and reformat a photo just to have it completely disappear when I started typing text. The page below moved all those photos all by itself…the file doesn’t look like this, but when it prints out, this is what it does.

I don’t have a great color printer at the moment. It’s about 20 years old, maybe older, and it just sucks. So I took the file to FedEx to print it out there. It’s possible that there was something hinky that happened in that interface that randomly moved photos and words, but I wasn’t about to try to fix something I couldn’t find without carefully reading code (running out of time here), so I resorted to old-school. Yes. I reprinted the pages on my black and white printer here at home, cut out the color pictures from the other copies, and cut out the words from my printouts…

And started scrapbooking. Whatever. It’s all in these little plastic pages. No one will know…or care.

Example above. It worked fine. I didn’t write a lot because I didn’t think people would want to read a lot. I included a cover page of my inspiration for the piece and my resume in the back. I finally mailed it off earlier this week. You can see below the stupid shit that printer was doing…

“I to see”? Whatever. So it’s done. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at it, let alone read it, but there it is. When the exhibit opens, I’ll do some posts here about the quilt too, so don’t feel bad if you don’t make it to the opening.

The next journaling experience? For Celebrating Silver, they want one or two 12×12″ pages of the process or story or hell, I don’t know what. I don’t own 12×12 pages. I will have to make some paper between now and then apparently. I think I have until mid-April on that one, so obviously I should ignore the need for that to get done until…um…about April 14. I’m sure some people’s journals are really interesting and give great insight into the artistic process. I don’t think that’s the case with mine. I don’t know if I want to spend more time writing about the inspiration before I make a quilt, making the drawing, and then making the piece. I do write about it here, but I think a journal with nothing in it but a big fat QR code is probably not what they want.

Anyway. I suck at journaling the way they want. Here’s my journal. Right here. You’re reading it.

The Getting Up and Pretending

I’m not sure where my head is still…I forgot even more stuff today, left one ingredient out of dinner (the kids noticed, but survived), couldn’t find photos that I had already removed from the relevant email and resized, left my brain in a dusty corner somewhere. I feel so freakin’ inefficient and lame because I can’t seem to focus properly…only half my brain is engaged in life. The other half is somewhere else. Hopefully it’s in Tahiti or the Caribbean, having a grand old time, instead of what I imagine from all the TV shows, where we hope it’s on vacation but it’s really locked up in a damp cell with duct tape (students, that’s d-u-c-t, not quack like a duck) over its mouth, bloody nose from getting hit too hard, double vision.

Yes, the imagination runs in overdrive on a regular basis. I tried to remember stuff. I shipped my journal and bought boxes for the quilt, which needs to get there next week some time. I should have packed it up tonight, but I didn’t have the mental energy…which is too bad, because I think the other four nights this week will be much worse than tonight. Oh well. I need to iron it and dehair it as well. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow night (cough cough, after tutorial, soccer game, and gym). Whatever. The show doesn’t open until May. It will get where it needs to go on time. Ish. I focus so hard on deadlines sometimes that I think it makes me a little insane. Juggling like crazy right now.

I graded papers tonight because I am now way behind. I rarely grade at home these days…it’s just not a priority. I try to do it at school, but sitting in the classroom during prep is depressing. So I avoid it. I have enough depressoid going on…I don’t need to make more. On the other hand, I do need to catch up. So I’m trying to balance those things out.

I exercised and meditated like a good girl…exercise is just an excuse to be able to read really, and that is never bad. And meditation…it centers me, makes me be more conscious of my inner state, which is often not good, but I’m much better at controlling it this year. My students I think are benefiting from my conscious understanding of when I am losing it, and taking control of that. Breathe. Think. Don’t react. Wish I’d known about it sooner…I think it would have made my life different and better years ago.

Then I came in to try to figure out the fabrics for the Ivy Memorial quilt, which has nothing to do with any art show or entry or deadline at all. I didn’t think there were that many pieces in it, but that is because I am a space cadet and forgot all the detailed tiny bits I put into it because I am freakin’ insane. It has 312 pieces in it, which is a lot when you consider its size…which is about 19″ high x 38″ wide…wow, that’s a lot bigger than I thought it was…and that’s without a border.

I laid out the first 100 pieces, which are all freezer paper, cut with a border if they’re meant to be wool, so I can cut out the wool on the line, or cut on the line if they’re meant to be cotton, because I will turn the edges under to applique them. Only a tiny bit confusing…

Most of it is supposed to be wool, with a few cotton accents around, and I planned it to be mostly bright colors. Last year or the year before, I was searching for a run of flesh tones for the main figure, but I never really worked out the rest of it. I have a decent stash of greens and a few browns etc., but none of the brights I was envisaging for the flowers. I have red. That’s about it.

I did manage to iron the hills and river behind the main figure…I had enough greens for that…this is what I’ve used so far for the hillside…

And the river is done. But before I decide about the rest of them, I need to find the stash of leftover pieces from the two Sue Spargo quilts…there were brightly colored pieces in there that were big enough for flowers, which is mostly what I need them for. I think they’re hiding out in the living room in one of the boxes from my last cleanup. I never throw those offcuts away, those funny-shaped pieces left over from cutting out birds or flowers. Yes, I think that makes me a hoarder in some ways, but I think if I just keep watching a Hoarders episode every month or so, I will be motivated enough to keep the packrat tendencies down to a minimum. Besides, in this situation, I think it’s exactly what I need…little pieces of bright colors. I may track those down tomorrow night.

After I pack the box. Yeah, I know. I don’t think I’ll be doing either of those things tomorrow night, but who knows.

I could just do another drawing of a sad woman with a weapon…because that’s not disturbing at all. I try to explain that I get all my supremely sad and angry and disturbing thoughts out in my drawings, so I don’t need to follow through with them. Expressions of anger, sadness, grief, depression, even suicide. I don’t need to DO any of that, don’t want to…but do need to acknowledge the thoughts that ramble through the brain. It would be stupid not to address those thoughts, the ones that inhabit your brain in the early hours of morning and want to color your dreams. Naw. Bugger off. I saw you, I said I saw you, now go away.

It’s funny…I have this tiny little wool stash, only about 20 different colors and some small pieces of some others…so it makes it really hard for me to pick what I want. I like having a huge palette from which to choose. This is the biggest section of stash…crazy quilt fabrics on the left side, browns, yellows, whites, purples, blues, and grays on the right side (actually it’s taking over the left side too…I recently consolidated the CQ stash over as far as it would go). And below the shelves you can see is a drawer of green and one of black.

Then to the left of that are the blues (3 drawers) and greens (3 drawers), with a drawer of grays and one of browns…

There’s other stuff stacked on top, pieces large enough for backings and backgrounds, plus a hefty Kaffe Fassett collection and all the William Morris-type fabrics ever printed…there’s a bizarre combination for you.

Behind me is one drawer of brown, one of orange, and one of red (spilling out all over)…I have another black drawer back there somewhere too.

Then under the sewing machine desk are two drawers of brown, two of pink/flesh, and then a ton of flesh colors that won’t fit in there. The top pink drawer is broken…the plastic is so old and one of the fatter cats kept sleeping on it until she broke it. I keep meaning to try to replace it. I’ve been really good over the last two years about not buying backing fabric, about using up what I have.

Since I will never be able to afford to move out of this house, I’m thinking when the kids move that I will just knock down all the walls and make a huge studio. I’m sure that won’t hurt the resale value.

So yeah. I did some art stuff, not a lot. I worked. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel completely buried by sadness…just heavy with it. Always so heavy. I work so hard at pushing that away, at getting up and out of it. I wish it would just go. But I think I would need to walk out the door and get on a plane to some foreign country and start completely over for that to really work…plus they’d need to wipe my brain (tempting, oh so tempting). But then who would make my art? So I stick with my dorky kids who argue with me like teenagers do, and the goofy dog who lay on my lap while I was grading, and the three cats who vie for my attention. Every day I feel like I’m just going through the motions of a living person, trying to act like a real live human so no one notices that I am actually an alien from another planet, infiltrating their world, trying to fit in. At least there is art and there are animals and snotty teenagers and books and sometimes even decent movies or television (although tonight was not a good night for that). Without those things, I don’t know that it would be worth it…the getting up and pretending. I do miss, horribly, going to the movies regularly. Sigh. Oh well. Life sucks and then you die (I said that in high school with no understanding of what it meant…now that I better understand what it means, I deeply hope it’s not true).

“‘That’s the thing about pain,’ Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. ‘It demands to be felt.'” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Emotional Sine Wave

I have another post I have mostly written, but I don’t feel like finishing it tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning.

Today was a numb day. I went to the gym. I managed grocery shopping (sort of a miracle these days…I forgot my reusable bags…again…the world will die because of all the plastic they gave me today). I went to one of my art group meetings (I forgot the quilt I was supposed to deliver for a new show, so I went back for that…didn’t get too far, luckily, and then I forgot the checkbook to pay my dues). Numb apparently equals forgetful.

It really does. I am so forgetful now…hence all the post-its and the calendar reminders…otherwise I’d forget my brain. Some days I don’t even know what day it is. I don’t know what month it is…I wrote a check earlier and dated it October 2013. What the hell? It’s like I’ve had some sort of stroke. My brain doesn’t like to remember stuff at the moment, so it chooses to tune out of everything. Hello, brain…feel free to join us here any time. I don’t think it’s going to get better without your involvement. Really. I know it sucks and all, but this is what we’ve got.

I finished a book, M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans…

It was a gift from my UK family. It’s her first book, about a lighthouse operator in the early 1900s in Australia. It was good; I enjoyed it, even though it was tinged with sadness.

I worked on the third bird of Month 2…

Thought I had finished it, but turns out I was supposed to sew in the moon as well…so I started that but didn’t finish. I sewed in the car on the way up and during the meeting; it was dark on the way back down. I’ll finish it at Tuesday’s soccer game and then start on Month 3’s embellishments. Very exciting stuff. The stitching itself is relaxing. I manage to stop grinding my teeth when I’m stitching mostly. The rest of the time, grind away. I have to consciously make myself stop holding my jaw like the world is ending around me.

Still too many things on the to-do list. Started my taxes because the W-2 finally showed up and I need that for the financial aid, finished the journal for Earth Stories and got it ready to ship, along with a bunch of other stuff I have to mail. Made a new to-do list. Boychild had one college interview today, so I ironed his clothes for him. He commented that men’s button-down shirts are not made for men with long hair. Never thought of that. He has another interview next weekend. I guess it’s good that he made it past the first pass…or maybe they interview everyone. Who knows. It’s all new for him, having to talk to strangers about himself, trying to sell himself, trying not to get annoyed by stupid questions…or at least not to SHOW irritation. I feel for him, but am excited by his having to deal, to manage, to grow up. He’s a good kid…man.

Came home and girlchild had made dinner, which is always nice. She hurricaned the kitchen (yes, that is a verb now) as well, but I needed to catch up on dishwashing anyway, so it was motivation to do so. All these tasks take away from artmaking time, of course. It was pretty late before I started my lesson planning for this week…well, I did most of it last year. I’m not deviating much…can’t handle that on top of everything else. I signed up for two more hikes. I need more outside time…more physical in nature time. More open space with fresh air and sweat and exertion and letting the toxic shit in my head float away into the sky while I stomp along a dirt path.

Two of my quilts are in a California Fibers exhibit at Soka University in Aliso Viejo through May 8…the opening is this Thursday from 5:30-7:45. The weird time is because there is a performance at the university right after that, so this takes advantage of that. I won’t be able to make it up there, unfortunately, but it apparently is a really nice show (that is only open Monday-Friday). I’m hoping to go up during Spring Break, I think. We’ll see. Earth Mother is there…

As is Untied…

Both normally hang in my house.

Then next week, I have one quilt in another California Fibers show in Ojai, California, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts…Here is hanging there…

ha ha ha. Here is hanging There. That’s funny. OK, not really. It will be there through March 30. There’s word that there may be an artist’s panel with some of us on March 30. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to that, but other artists will be there.

There are three California Fibers’ shows opening in January and February…this was a great group to join to get into shows. All three have been juried, so you still have to have good work that people want, but instead of pulling from 700 people for a show with 40 pieces, they’re pulling from a group of 30. California Fibers is a juried group and the membership call is coming up in April. If you live in Southern California, are willing to commit to 4 meetings a year in Oceanside, and work in anything that qualifies as fibers, you might consider it. Check out the website and contact the membership person.

The other art group I’m a member of is doing a 2-month exhibit in September/October about the border fence. I’m in a subcommittee (I didn’t commit to leading anything…see notes about forgetfulness above) that will be doing some sort of cross-border quilt/fabric construction. This group works completely differently than the other group…but they both are trying to be actively in exhibits and marketing themselves. It’s good, because I feel like my local SAQA group has become less active, even though we had a decent show last month that will be traveling to Georgia in March. We used to meet more down here in San Diego, and now there seem to be very few meetings down here.

If this is my life, if art is my focus, if art is the thing I have right now, then I might as well make it a regular thing. I’ve been looking at life-drawing classes as well, although then I need to balance exercise and hiking and art, because they all seem to want to happen at the same time. But if I can do it once a month, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I miss life drawing. Yes, I miss sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench for hours staring at a naked person and trying to make my drawing look like what’s in front of me. Sounds crazy. It’s a different head space though…not a bad one.

Anyway, I didn’t get to start on even thinking about real artmaking until about 10:30 tonight…and then it was a decision of What Next? I could draw, I could clean off the light table and set it up for tracing the next quilt, I could stitch down the smaller quilt that’s hanging in my office. I decided to finish cutting out all the pieces for the Ivy Memorial Quilt…

They’re freezer paper, not Wonder Under…yes, new and different. The quilt is mostly wool fabrics (or will be, since it currently doesn’t exist) with cotton fabric accents, and then there will be embroidery like you see on the bird blocks I’ve been doing. It’s not something I really expect to exhibit…I just want to hang it in the house, like above a doorway, so it’s wide but not high. Ivy died in May 2012 of liver cancer at the age of 6. For some reason, it was significantly more difficult to deal with her death, probably because of her young age and it happened really quickly. I guess I don’t deal well with unexpected bad stuff. Anyway, now that all the pieces are trimmed, I could start picking wool fabrics and ironing freezer paper to them…maybe tomorrow night.

I wonder if these numb forgetful days are an aftershock to the highly emotional days. I think I’m on some sort of emotional sine wave, up and down on some regular rhythm, somehow controlled by hormones or amount of sleep or exercise or something else I don’t understand (or a combination of all of those). It’s super super low and then I hit numbness…I don’t ever really get to the high point, though. It’s just less painful than some other days. Maybe the numb days are when I get enough of some combination of sleep and exercise and interaction with humans who give a shit. It’s hard to say. I have people say to me all the time, Hey, I read your blog, and then I’m like, well then you know I’m not having any fun with all this. I don’t know what to say to that. Well, then you know I’m a giant pile of depression and awful. Well, then, I guess you know that I was crying yesterday, I’ll be crying today, and tomorrow? On the menu is crying. I guess that’s OK. You won’t have particularly high expectations of me then, will you. You’ll know I can make good art but I can’t remember anything and I’m likely to dissolve into a pile of saltwater if you bring up anything that I find troubling…like really anything. Sigh.

Who the hell is googling my age, by the way? I’m 46, people. I’ll be 47 in a couple of months. I don’t know why it’s relevant. Feel free to just ask.

OK, taking the sine wave to bed…maybe I’m still on the way up…

I Need Better Shoes…

If I’m going to hang out at art openings, I will need better shoes. I may need a personality transplant as well, one that smiles and chats at the appropriate times. I also need to be much less judgmental, both of the art and the art wannabes; the fake is strong here.

That said, I did force myself to be among the living…

and had a reasonably intelligent conversation with, of all people, another middle-school teacher who volunteers for the group that was raising money at this function. The group is 1:1 Movement, which is working on educating kids about sustainability and conservation. One of the things they do is give a plastic recyclable bag to each kid in a classroom and ask them to collect everything they would normally throw away for a whole week, and then they come back and look at what’s in the bag. The woman I talked to started saying all these things my students say about losing stuff, papers they got the day before, the pencil they brought to school…I hear you sister. They will come out to our school and talk to the kids…gonna see whether I can pull this off.

It wasn’t what I expected when I went…but I wasn’t really paying attention properly. They invited local artists to paint the recyclable bags they give the kids…

And then they auctioned them off to the highest bidder…

The money went to buy more bags for kids.

I don’t have any money to spare at the moment. So I bid on nothing. I did start to walk out (way too many people that I didn’t know), and then stopped. I bought a jar of wine (drinks came in jars, which meant I spilt), and then went and sat down in sort of the center of things, OK, not the center, but there were still lots of people around me…

And I did actually talk to about three whole people, one about my shitty camera (he had the same one and the same problem with the stupid lens covering…piece of shit!), one about the project itself (she was obviously an extrovert), and one about tamales. I know. I’m not an expert, but I did know where they were (observant tendencies).

Mostly I just sat and listened to other people do artspeak and anti-artspeak and wow, I’m old here, aren’t I? And I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people. Sigh. So I people-watched and checked out shoes and clothes and who was walking around with whom and what they looked at and didn’t look at. But I stayed for at least 45 minutes. And I’m glad I had the conversation with the other teacher, because I will look into bringing them on my campus. I think it would do my students good to think more about what they waste…it frustrates me no end. Breaking pencils so they can throw lead at other students, picking up 5 pieces of white paper instead of 1 because they think they’re entitled to do so (I buy my own paper about half the year), losing assignments they picked up the day before, never having a pencil or lead.

Anyway. I did it. I went. It was OK.

I went to Road to California in the morning and afternoon with Julie and my mom…I will have to find time to write that post. It’s long and complicated.

The morning looked like this…

Actually, it was much prettier than that, but the camera is not being my friend.

I stitched in the car on the way up and back. I always expect to get so much done, but even with about 3 hours in the car, I only finished two of the blocks and got a bit into the third…and the first of the two I finished was really almost done.

I have done a lot of Pekinese stitch in the last few days. The bottom two are done (I could embellish them a lot more, but would never finish at that rate). The top right one will get finished in the car tomorrow (yet another drive for art-related activities).

And then when I got home, I needed to decide how to spend my evening. I needed to find something that would help my mood, rather than make it worse. I’ve had a bunch of drawings wandering my head for weeks, so I sat down and drew…

It’s not done. Yes, it’s a bit disturbing. It will get more so, once I add another page to the left. Such is my brain.

OK, tired, exhausted. Really. That is the second time I’ve drawn a gun. It is the third time I’ve drawn tsunami waves. It’s not done.

Hitting Me Over the Head…

So when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is holy god how can I just go back to sleep and stay there until everything feels better, not because you’re tired or sick but because you just don’t feel like you can negotiate all the interactions of the day or even the noise level, because it’s quiet now in the classroom and dark, but the gates open in maybe 3 minutes and then you have to deal…when that’s how it feels when you wake up, then there is not a lot of hope for the next 7 hours.

And yet. I dealt. Because I have to. Because when it’s hard, you deal. Or you don’t and people around you have to suffer because you don’t deal.

I’m really NOT in a good place tonight. I tried to be. I crossed off like 6 things off my list (my lime-green post-it note from hell). I resized things and signed things and scanned things and dropboxed things (most of those aren’t really verbs, but I don’t fucking care…language is there for me to manipulate it). I signed the girlchild up for her SAT and the boychild and I assigned her 4 colleges…she is looking at veterinarian/zoology and writing, and now he is looking at law, even federal stuff. Wacky. I don’t even know what to think about their futures, except…hell…they are THEIR futures and I am simply here to sign papers and fill in financial aid forms and Paypal them when they need it.

I just want them to be happy. The one thing their mom failed at so far, I want them to have that. I don’t care what they do. I don’t care what their fucking grades are. I just want them to get to happy.

I’d like to get there too, but I hold out less hope for that. I was able to describe to the counselor what happy looked like; yes, I still remember it. She says I don’t think I can be happy again. It’s definitely hard to imagine, especially after tonight’s meditation, which was a giant pile of cry. I don’t know why. I never know why. He says if you can’t find your overriding emotion, then to look for clues. Seriously? My overriding emotion for the last 6+ months? Sad. Grief. Crying. It’s there every fucking day. Sometimes it’s low level and I’m like barely touched by it, barely touched by anything, numb honestly. Then there are days when I am on the verge of tears all fucking day long (today) and finally I just lose it during meditation and cry for 40 minutes straight. Just crying. That just sucks. It just sucks all your energy out and stuffs your damn nose up and makes your head feel like it’s going to float away on a sea of saltwater shit.

Seriously. I could do without that. He asks, Mr. Meditation, is it heavy or light (the visualization)? It’s fucking sad, you asshole. Is it spacious or restricting? It’s just fucking sad. There’s nothing light or spacious about sad. It’s suffocating. It’s heavy. It drags you down into deep sucky mud and makes it so you can’t breathe or stop crying or see straight. Do I feel stillness or restlessness? I don’t even know. Be clear about how you’re feeling without judging it. I’m clear. This is fucking sad. I don’t judge it. It just fucking is. It may never go away. That’s what it feels like tonight, like suckers attached to your chest and they will never fucking let go.

I’m sure that will be better tomorrow. Or Sunday. Or Monday. In 2021. Whatever. Fuck you.

I was listening to NPR before counseling and they were talking to an author, Jennifer Senior, who wrote a book about parenting and children called All Joy and No Fun. The author talked about how women (in general) have a running ticker tape of concerns going through their heads. Men compartmentalize and can put concerns away at work. I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t been with the parent of my children for long enough that it seems irrelevant to analyze how we deal with the kids…because we aren’t really a team. When the boychild and I were trying to decide if I was a single mom, like the legal definition, well, no I’m not. I have an ex who has joint custody and pays money, but I do almost everything that is kid-related with virtually no support. I can’t imagine having support, having a team supporting the kids. I wanted that, but fuck all, when do I get what I want? I don’t know. I’ll let you know. I do all the SATs and ACTs and college apps and FAFSA and interviews and all this shit. I get very little help. I would have liked to have help. I would have liked to have had a team to deal with all this. I would have liked support, empathy, help.

I must have done something very very wrong to be in this space right now.

Or I just feel that way.

Yes, it’s a bad place. It’s OK. I’m sure it will be better tomorrow. Or the next day. You really just get to this point where you push yourself into bed and sleep and hope when you wake up that it doesn’t feel the way it did yesterday.

And if it does, you do it again. And pick up a pen or a needle or some fabric, and hope to god that it doesn’t ever feel like that again.

I dehaired and packed yet another quilt for a show that’s opening in two weeks in Ojai…

I’m delivering it Sunday. Busy weekend.

The new Sue Spargo BOM? We’re not allowed to post finished or in-process blocks on blogs, because people were copying them instead of buying her patterns, so I guess for the next year-plus all you will see is supreme details and materials…here’s the materials for Month 1.

I am so not ready to even start Month 1. First I have to get the embellishment done on last-year’s quilt Months 2-12. Minor issue. Packed up a bunch of stuff for tomorrow’s drive. Maybe I will get through Month 2…or even start Month 3. Who the fuck cares. It just occupies the part of my brain that likes to move thread around with needles. It’s not the savior to my sanity.

The sleepover got canceled, by the way…thank god, because I was in no sane frame of mind. I decided to keep cutting out the freezer paper pieces for the Ivy Memorial quilt, started last year and abandoned.

This is an interesting quilt in that it is mostly wool with cotton bits and pieces, with plans for lots of thread embellishment, so sort of a clash (clash?) between the Sue Spargo wool world and Kathy’s art world. I have no idea what will actually come of it…but I just wanted something to acknowledge Ivy’s existence on the planet. It’s never easy when things/organisms/people die too early. It just feels wrong and makes you obsess and drags you down.

So maybe this quilt will help me move on to a new dog. Who knows. I can’t afford a new dog.

I listened to this in the morning…

it helped. Maybe. Briefly. Hitting me over the head with a sledgehammer also might help.

Past the Deadlines…(sort of)

I practiced meditation at school again today. In class. While teaching. Well, supervising independent work today. We do that. I also practiced a feminist rant…OK, I didn’t practice it…I just did it. Sometimes I think the kids need to see that…plus the kid saying that men were better at everything than women were kinda got my goat. It’s OK…I kinda did it as a gospel moment; I think I even hallelujahed. The girls appreciated it and some of the boys did too (although most were probably frightened). I don’t just teach science, people…

I taught. I breathed deep (actually not so deep…it’s either the allergies I technically don’t have or something pretending to be sick). I went to the emergency union meeting and took notes. I went to the girlchild’s soccer game where the asshole coach (oops, did I say that out loud) wouldn’t play her (long story…it’s finals week and she chose academics over soccer). I went to the gym and read an entire book (it was a graphic novel…they are a quick read). I prepped tomorrow night’s dinner, which now has to stretch to feed 7 instead of 3 (one of which is a hungry teenaged boy). I cleaned a bit, because apparently now there is a sleepover at my house tomorrow night (I wonder if they will mind my tracing Wonder Under on the giant-ass light table while they watch bad TV and gossip late into the night…yeah, I know. I will probably have to give up my Friday night plans).

I ate dinner super late. I picked TV that I should not be watching in the mood I’m in. As always, I don’t know what governs the moods. Is it being tired? Is it work frustration? Is it a chemical imbalance in my brain? Who the fuck knows.

At the soccer game, I almost finished this guy…

It was dark, though, and I was trying to do Pekinese stitch on top of the blue things and largely failing (I got one done), so I stopped. Some schools have crappy stadium lights.

I am definitely beyond trying to predict how many games it takes to finish any of these. I will have time in cars on Saturday and Sunday, though. I could potentially finish quite a lot. Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. They just are fun to do…the embroidery stitches are interesting. Sometimes even relaxing (minorly).

The book I finished is the graphic-novel adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children…

(real book on the left, graphic adaptation on the right)

I read the book last year and really liked it. The graphic novel was eh. The art didn’t move me. I felt like the story was chopped up by the pictures. I had a better imagination while just reading the words (there are a few photographs in the original book).

Like I said in my review on GoodReads, I need a graphic adaptation (or a movie, for that point) to ADD to the fiction, and they rarely do. Mostly they just mess with the images I had in my head.

I do have a plan for tomorrow night’s artmaking. Actually, I will need to do some more of the crossing-off the post-it-note crap. I crossed off two things today (woo hoo!). I know. It’s amazing. So maybe I can cross a few more off tomorrow. And I do have another quilt top in here that I could work on. In fact, I think there’s another QUILT in here that has been pinbasted for like 3 years. I obviously care a lot about it. So there’s no shortage of stuff to be done. It just feels better to start something new sometimes…to have that sense of excitement (pretty toned down in the current Kathy state) about new. Different. Moving on.

So I numbered the big quilt…

It’s about 350 pieces. That’s tiny. I mean, the quilt itself is good-sized…it just doesn’t have a lot of pieces.

By the way, I got my evaluation back from Road to California…shockingly, the uterus quilt did NOT win an award (I am so shocked…I’m still minorly amazed that it even got in), but the comments were interesting…they said it could use more quilting (I know KPM did not say that…), which is par for the course when you put an art quilt in a semi-traditional show (Road embraces art quilts…but there are still traditional judges), but they did say the imagery was interesting and the storytelling was effective. Nice to know. I guess. It’s been so long since a quilt of mine has been judged like that…they always say not enough quilting. Whatever.

Anyway. I’ll be up there on Saturday to see the ones that DID win awards and have enough quilting. People, if I wanted to quilt the body parts, I would, but then they wouldn’t pop out so much.

Then I thought I should probably pick one of the smaller ones too, and I had a real hard time with that, because nothing was really reaching out and grabbing me, so I just picked the smallest one, which is also breast-related (I’m on a roll), but is only about 10″ square…

It has 150 pieces or so in it. I don’t know when I’ll get back to working on these…it kind of depends on what I end up doing tomorrow night…what I feel like doing. I kinda feel like going with my mood, with whatever makes me feel better, more at peace, is totally the way to go with my art at the moment. I’ve spent the last 6 months really getting through some have-to’s as far as my art is concerned. I had what I originally thought was four pieces that had to be done by deadlines (actually 6, if I count the two small ones), and so it’s been All Deadlines, All the Time for an awfully long time… maybe I should give myself a break for a while. I’m thinking I can work on whatever I want until Spring Break (which is late this year, mid-April), and by then, I should have a drawing for the next invitational quilt that has to be done in November and another big piece for the summer…not as crazy as the Earth Stories one, but one that is impactful and strong and meaningful and will celebrate me, the artist, next summer. I feel like I’m going to need some of that Me Celebration by then. Maybe. Who knows. It will probably still be painful and emotional and full of sturm und drang, but it will be mine.

Wow. That sounded almost hopeful and maybe even a bit I am woman, hear me roar. So much better than the godawful mood I was in earlier. It’s silly that something as mundane as numbering two drawings can be mood-altering…at least minorly. I really should just quit my job and make art full time. (ha. like that’s an option) I should probably finish crossing things off the post-it note list before I abandon all deadlines, though. Yeah. Gotta be a little bit responsible.