Notes on Life Drawing

One of my goals for the summer was to go to a local life-drawing class once a week. I miss the focused time with a sketchbook, plus the looseness of pencil and quick poses, just to get your hand and brain talking to each other again in that free and loose and wiggly way. I’m pretty constrained and tight when I draw…not in a bad way, because my brain is fairly loose about it, but the drawing itself is not very freeform. It’s very focused. And that’s on purpose. So life drawing is different, but useful to keeping the drawing progressing or developing or something.

I went over Spring Break and it was good, and I had done one or two Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School events last year (haven’t been able to make it to one since then), so summer seemed like a good time to try to go regularly.

Basically I suck at that. Mostly that’s because although I have a good time (in the dead silence with my pencil sharpener and only that really weird slightly mentally maybe ill or I don’t know what woman talks to me, and she’s not all there) and it relaxes me and I enjoy it, it’s not always what I want to be doing. The summer is so tight with deadlines, because the school year is a bitch when it comes to making art, and those deadlines make me NOT want to leave the house for any reason at all, especially to do something I already know how to do.

Except it’s not about knowing how to do it. It’s about keeping those two, the brain and the hand, in close contact, communicating with each other.

There is a Saturday morning class I could go to all year long if I wanted to, but if I don’t have something like a hike planned for Saturday morning, then dammit, I want to still be asleep for once…especially during the school year, when waking up gets downright painful. So I go to Thursday morning, which because it is a work day for most of the normal world, is full of old men, a few old women, and some college kids. Lots of old men. Did I mention old men? And some are very nice and even smile and say “How are you?” like they might even care, but most of them are crotchety growling old crankballs.

Things that happen at life drawing:

Once the light fell down on one of the artists, bonking him in the head. That caused a lot of frantic chattering for a while.

There’s no air-conditioning, and they have to place the fan so it doesn’t ruffle paper or overly dry watercolors or acrylics or push pastel dust across a drawing. Difficult to do.

Someone talked about playing music while we drew and one of the old guys (there are lots of them) said it would be OK if we were basket weaving or knitting, but not for figure drawing. The guy then said, what about classical music? And the old man went off on types of music and not wanting to hear all that rabble. UM. First of all, music is OK if we’re working with FIBER? I’m fairly sure there was a sexist thing going on in there, and now every time I look at that old guy (because he’s there every time, probably because his wife kicks him out of the house because she’s annoyed by him) I imagine him yarnbombed. Seriously. Just his eyes are showing and we left his hands free so he can paint or draw without any noise whatsoever but the sputterings from his constrained mouth.

There was once a long discussion of the merits of ten 2-minute poses vs five 3-minute poses.

There are lots of old men. I said this already. A few 20-something’s. A couple of old ladies. A gay man with his spiky-red-haired woman friend. I know he’s gay because he keeps pronouncing all these things about gay men and then reminding everyone around him that he IS one. If a straight man did that, he would be called a homophobe, so I guess this guy is a heterophobe? I don’t really believe that. He won’t shut up though. One woman whom I suspect of having a mental disorder. Hearing aids. There are a lot of hearing aids. I think I’m going to try Dr. AntiSketchy again soon…because it was more fun. Although trying to draw all their costuming is a pain in the ass. I’d really just rather deal with the body without all the clothing crap (as I’m sure is obvious by my own art. Fuck the clothes. They’re a pain and I’m all about what the body is doing, inside and out.).

I don’t like sitting at a table in a chair. I’m short and I can’t see over other people, plus you’re looking at the model from underneath because of the staging situation. So I sit on the counter around the edge. This disturbs most people. They feel a need to comment. It doesn’t seem to be against the rules though.

Models are always pretty young girls and one older tattooed guy. I have been doing life drawing since I was in college, that was starting almost 30 years ago, and there is always only one guy and he’s older and significantly muscled and tattooed. Honestly, I wanted to draw his tats. They were more interesting, but I needed to be closer to do that, and then you’re just drawing someone else’s drawing, and that’s just weird.

One of the older women is wearing a University of Mars T-shirt. The old men are cranky or wearing suspenders. Or sometimes both.

So I don’t know if this is something I really need to do every week. I’ve done it twice during summer and I’m running out of days I can continue to do it on Thursday. But did I mention that Dr. Sketchy events are always held in or near a bar (drinking while drawing!) and later in the day so I don’t have to get up early after staying up until the roosters crow AND, here is the most important thing, you crotchety old man: There’s fucking music. So. Unfortunately I can’t go in August or probably September even, but at least I know what my preference is. I will keep doing life drawing on and off (I really miss the class I used to do way back when I was still married…the organizer did an awesome job of getting a variety of models and it was always interesting and not silent and just more fun. That was the class that significantly upset my then-husband. He didn’t like me drawing naked people. They’re NUDE when they’re up on the platform. They’re NAKED when they step down, and they always get dressed before they step down.). I don’t need entertainment, but I do need to feel like if I’m gonna sneeze, people will bless me instead of cursing me.

Head’s in a Weird Space…

I’m sitting here at midnight on a Saturday listening to the rain pour down through the trees outside my office window. It’s been so warm the last week, and although it is still warm (and now abnormally humid for San Diego), the air has that rain feel to it. It’s nice. It feels good to my heart. Deep breaths of that rain air. Makes up for a long silent day of sitting on soccer fields and not feeling connected to anything or anyone. It’s a tournament weekend, obviously.

I really wanted to get a lot of quilting done today, but soccer was not helping with that. I realize I could send my daughter, who drives, off to these games by herself, but this is her last year in high school, the last year she’s home. Plus it always irritated me that my parents blew off most of my sports events once I was old enough to drive. Her dad has his own club team this year, and all the games are conflicting and at totally different fields, so he’s showing up for about half her games. She needs someone there. And she? She really does.

I did quilt today. I wanted to do 4 hours. I did 2.

This quilt is so detailed and complicated to quilt. I’m still down in the water section, although I’ve started one of the things that sits on the water on the left side…I still have to finish the seaweed, fish, and water on the right side. I’m still sticking to my 20-hour estimate though…

I just may not get 20 hours in total by Tuesday PM. At this point, that would mean 5 hours each day, and I just don’t think I can pull that off. We’ll see. I’m a little obsessed with this art stuff.

Still raining. So nice to hear.

I have to admit, it was a hard day today. I wrote sci fi for a while before the first game, only a thousand words or so. I’m stuck in this place where I want the science to be good, but I don’t know enough about it to make sure that it is. I will have to deal with that at some point. I kinda wish there was a plant scientist sitting right next to me sometimes. I write comments to myself (I’m using Google Docs to write), reminding me to check this scientific process or vocabulary later on. Right now, it’s probably more important that I just write.

That is what my document is called by the way: JustWrite.

Girlchild had two games today.

She also broke up a fight in this one. First time I’ve seen the girls almost come to blows, and she yelled out in this deep voice to get them to stop…I recognized that voice. It’s the one I use at school when I see a fight about to happen. Or when the kids are just getting out of hand. Deep. Guttural. They pay attention. It worked. The ref? Sigh. Take control, man.

So one of the things that started today was GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), which is a goofy image/video scavenger hunt with over 150 items. Teams of 15 people work to get the images and videos uploaded over a week’s time, and many of them require some feats of magic, honestly. I’m part of a Geek Girls Meetup group (yeah, laugh at me. I am one.) that had I think 9 members willing to play, and then we were combined with a group of college girls out of Illinois. This is the stuff that Old Kathy loved. I’m not allowed to post pictures of my items until after the event closes, but I’m saving them. I’m trying to do one a day, although there are some we will try to do as a local group maybe? I tend to pick the more artistic ones (shockingly), but there might be a duet between the girlchild and I, if I can figure out how to pull it off. She sings better than I do, but I have heart and soul. Or something.

She totally is willing to assist, but the boychild is adamantly against helping in any way, shape, or form…which is funny, because it’s totally a college-kid kind of event. Anyway. This is who I am. The wacky creative sort that can figure out what condiments mix together to make flesh colors. Not to mention, we have a lot of Legos.

Please try to figure out how many people are in this photo. I count 7 legs in the pile-up. That seems wrong.

We won one and lost one…

It rained for most of the second game. It RAINED. In San Diego in August. So fucking delightful. I put sunscreen on for the first game, because I will fry in overcast skies, but for the second game, that’s the umbrella and my stitching underneath it. Humid and warm, but wet…

I’m not actually getting much done on the birds, because she’s playing a lot of the games…lots of injuries on the team at the moment, so more opportunities to play. They played the team she used to be on in the second game, which was a little weird…

And unfortunately, that’s the game they lost (by one silly goal). If they make it to the finals tomorrow, they will probably play them again.

Because my brain is not working properly again (fuck me. When DOES it ever work properly?), I thought we’d have time to go home in between the two games and we really didn’t, so we found a weird little Starbucks with crappy Wifi nearby and ate lunch and hung out there. I wrote a little, read the worst book ever (I have to write a review later), and filled in the GISHWHES chart we made so that we could each sign up for specific tasks. By the way, if you know a friendly professional barista in the San Diego area who wants to conspire with me on an artistic activity, let me know. I’m not a professional.

After the second game, I was a good girl and went to the gym. And there are games tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow I can handle the Lego task for GISHWHES. And quilt for 5 hours. I haven’t talked to another human being since 4:42 PM. That’s the stuff that drives me bonkers. I think I already spend way too much time in my head for that shit to be healthy. In fact, the girlchild was trying to listen to an audiobook on the way back from soccer, and I was talking, and she got all irritated because she was trying to listen to the book, and I told her, “Hey. I have no one to talk to until tomorrow…19 hours or so from now.” She felt bad and talked to me on the way home. I wasn’t trying to guilt-trip her. It was reality. I really didn’t have anyone else to talk to. I needed to quilt. I also needed some human connection before I went into the cave that is my antisocial silent world. Talking to the cats and the TV doesn’t count.

Tomorrow? More of the same. Head is in a weird space. It may never come out.

Yarnbombing the World and Other Fiber Stories

I spent a lot of time with fiber today…

I went up to Oceanside and Vista to see some quilt-related stuff, and that led to yarn bombing stuff…

Like this yarnbombed payphone that is actually an iPhone…

Pretty well done, actually…Wait. Actually it’s NOT an iPhone. It’s not even a payphone. It’s an empty space where a payphone used to be. Actually.

This is in front of the Oceanside Library, if you want to see it…

And the other cool stuff that was there…like sweaters for hamsters hanging out to dry.

Lots of yarn was used up in this endeavor…

As well as all those bits and pieces that you started knitting and crocheting and don’t know what to do with them?

Now you know.

Plus. If it has eyeballs…

Then odds are I’m going to take a picture of it…

But since this is the entrance to the library, you know the kids are gonna love it too…

Or be totally creeped out by it and refuse to go in.

Cool feet. And eyeball.

I used to knit AND crochet. Regular Renaissance woman, I am. Now I stick to being a modern woman. Except minus the pointy bra and the Mother’s Little Helper in the cupboard for afternoons post-child.

And yet I don’t yarnbomb. I’m kind of a fan of trees. But also of the absurd. I think it would be cool to yarnbomb a single tree about 20 miles from any access point, like way out in the mountains. But someone’s probably already done that.

So we went to the Rancho Buena Vista Adobe for some quilts that were there…

It had been a while since I’d been there, so I probably have a picture of this mosaic from a million years ago…

And no, it’s not like I needed inspiration to persuade myself that lots of pieces is better than not very many.

I really like that sun. And I liked her…

especially her face up close…

A level of peace I find hard to come by. Plus…waterspots. And this sign…

Too many words for drunk people.

From there, we headed to the Oceanside Museum of Art, where one of the traveling portions of Quilt National opened this last week. No photos allowed, but what’s funny is that I don’t remember some of the quilts. I must have gone through that exhibit 17 times over the three days we were there, and I didn’t remember some of them. There are some wonderful pieces up there, though, totally worth the $8. I would pay $8 just to see Susan Lenz’ graveyard rubbings and Paula Kovarik’s round piece again. Oh yeah, and Brooke Atherton’s journal/map piece. Drop dead gorgeous. So that was nice.

And afterwards, we had Thai food…I don’t know that I’ve ever had Thai, because…well, let’s just say it wasn’t a choice I made…to me, Asian food is all very similar, plus this spice or that one, minus this grass or that one. Then again, the only food I really can’t handle is fish…well, and chocolate, but that’s not usually the main dish.

Van Gogh was checking the time…

I love these Van-Gogh-esque trees (so much drawing inspiration…like I need MORE of that).

Even the tulips on the utility box…well, one of them anyway…

The other one was very bad and didn’t deserve tulips.

I didn’t start quilting until late…I know I have to finish this one up quickly, because I’ve got lots more to do before school starts…and this one is a big bad beastie of a quilt…this is the back…

Luckily, the thread isn’t breaking very often and it’s quilting well, but there are just a LOT of pieces and fiddly bits, so it takes time.

I made it through all the dirt parts, I think…Calli was incredibly helpful, of course.

This is where I gave up…I realized how early I have to get up in the morning for the soccer tournament, and my car overheated today, so I was down in the driveway at almost midnight putting coolant in the radiator, and I still don’t trust it to drive to UCSD tomorrow morning, so we’ll take the kids’ car, but it needs gas. Sigh.

I wanted to get like 5 hours of quilting in today (probably somewhat unrealistic). I managed two.

Eighteen (at least) to go. Realistically? I could finish quilting her by Tuesday maybe. I could do sooner, but only if girlchild doesn’t make it to the finals on Sunday. And I’m probably not supposed to hope for that. There’s no time between games tomorrow, but I have most of the afternoon…although I need to go to the gym and I’m blowing off any possibility of a social life to make quilts. Now there’s a decision for you. So I could realistically get maybe 3 or 4 hours in tomorrow. Sunday, maybe the same, depending on the final and grocery shopping. Monday could be the last bit. If I buckled down and worked my butt off. So I’m sticking with my Tuesday estimate. Of course, I’ll probably have to go back to the fabric store for binding again. Maybe that should just be my Tuesday thang. Buying binding fabric. Whether you need it or not.

Then I have all the materials for the house thing I need to do, plus now I need to do some birds for that as well, plus potentially three more birds. And the gender equality drawing needs to get done and numbered and traced. Plus I might need to actually think about and prepare for school. Nope. Fuck that. I will figure that balance thing out if it kills me. I did OK with balance last year in terms of art v. schoolwork. I just need to make sure I take care of myself too, and that was difficult last year. I have permission from my counselor at the moment to cry as needed, to do what I want, and to take care of myself for the next two weeks without dealing with school. It’s not a very realistic thing, that, but it’s nice to keep it in the back of my mind for when I’m feeling a bit crazy about going back and losing the boychild and coping with my existing life. I’m so incredibly busy, but so incredibly alone in that incredible busy-ness. Not good.

Working on this quilt though? Good. It’s powerful. Of course, that means it won’t get in anywhere, but whatever. It will still kick ass.

The Giver

I’m re-reading The Giver for book club. It’s amusing because (a) I used to teach it to my students (homeroom…it could be argued to be a science book, but only with a significant stretch) and (b) when I tried to get a copy of it, the library had 47 holds on 7 copies, so I turned to my teacher friends. Before, though, I realized that I have read it and both my children have read it, but we do not own it (no one really liked it). Almost every teacher friend I knew was sure they had it but couldn’t find it. One found it but didn’t have time to drop it here on the way to Alpine, and I could have driven out to her, but the timing was off, so another friend went and bought a copy for her classroom (because the movie is coming out and she is actually the language arts teacher so it kinda makes sense) and left it on my doorstep for me. Nice friend. I suck as a friend at the moment, I think. Meditation is asking me to look at how I’m being kind to others, and I don’t think the cats count. I’m not being UNkind, but I’m not putting anything out there, I think. Can’t. Can’t handle kindness back.

So Meditation has turned into Weepitation. Latin word for cry, the verb, is fleo. Meditation = Fleotation? That just sucks. I’m sticking with Weepitation. Sobitation. WAIT. Tears is Lacrimae. MUCH better. Lacrimaetation. There we go. Dear Mr. Meditation. I’m doing it wrong. Seriously. We’re in the Happiness module and the whole last 10 days have been about Kindness, and all I’ve done is CRY. That’s not kindness. That’s just plain mean. My kindness for yesterday? Girlchild forgot her gym pass…I had just dropped her off (already nice of me, at the drop of a hat) because of the Nida Car Shortage (which ends in just three short weeks when the boychild wanders off to college), and then I had to drive BACK here to get her pass, because she won’t go in and tell them she forgot it, it’s too embarrassing mom. As I handed it to her (and I didn’t even get angry or stressed or anything), she said, “Sorry. I’m retarded. Love you.” Huh. That made me cry. See? Kindness makes me cry. Please be mean to me. We’ll all be better off. There will certainly be fewer tears. Maybe I could go back to Meditation then.

Many things conspired to make yesterday what it was. Nothing was fixed. Nothing got finished. Things I meant to do didn’t happen. Whatever. Move on. What it meant was that after I ate dinner, after my stomach said, “Yes, you may eat. I will allow that now.” then I needed something really low key and not very demanding, yet artistic to do. So I did something REALLY low-key.

Yup. I taped an enlarged drawing together. And while I was doing that, I updated all the Microsoft shit on girlchild’s computer, which prompted a flurry of disdainful texts from the boychild, who does in fact think I’m an idiot…this from the kid in long pants in Southern California in July (it was still July yesterday) with a Golden Retriever on his lap…

Yup. Not listening. Also lots of texts about how he’s not going to do all the required things for orientation at college (you can raise them, but you can’t make them do mandatory things). Yup. I taped that fucker good. The drawing, not the boychild. Or even the Golden Retriever.

And then I couldn’t deal with anything else. Sad but true. Not measuring it and adding to top and bottom, not even TAPING more paper on for the drawing. Nope. Not doing it. Could not handle it.

The Mammogram quilt is almost fully bound…just have to put the sleeve on it, but I’m busy today, so maybe tonight. I could easily have finished it last night if my brain didn’t get in the way. And I didn’t start quilting the other one at all. LAME. Whatever. The brain’s in charge and she’s a dumbass at the moment. I will welcome her back with open arms when she gets out of the quicksand mud again. Until then? We do not speak.

So I gave up and went to bed.

When life gives you lemons, you get out of bed after tossing and turning for an hour and you make yourself a nice hot cup of tea, because you’ve been British-trained to think that tea fixes everything, and the caffeine doesn’t really have an effect on you any more, in fact, you think tea runs in your veins instead of blood, based on how much you’ve drunk just to make up for the super late nights in the last year, but you did actually go to bed at a reasonable time last night because you knew you’d have to be up early this morning, so that totally fucking backfired says 4 in the morning, so at 5, you get up and make that magical cup of tea and grab the book you were reading for book club last night, because it’s easy and you’ve read it before and you know how it ends, unlike your own life, which is currently a badly written George R. R. Martin slashfest, except no one dies, they just disappear, and you read The Giver (yup, that book) for about an hour until your brain admits that it might like to go to sleep again, even though your neighbor just fired up his dumptruck and drove off to work, but he gets up REALLY early, and you put the bookmark in and when life gives you lemons, you don’t make fucking lemonade, because it’s always too sweet or too sour, it’s never just right, and you don’t even really LIKE lemonade, you only drink it if there’s no water and the only other choice is soda, so you make lemon chicken instead and you sit down at the table and you eat it by yourself.

After you fall asleep again, you dream. And as it often is lately, when you remember your dreams, they are happy and perfect, because everyone got rid of you and you were the problem. You know better than that, but you still feel it in your gut when you wake up and start yet another day where it will end with you trying to sleep and not doing a very good job of it.

I didn’t really make lemon chicken at 5 AM. Everything else happened though. And that damn book? It is really well-written, I have to say, even though it’s so pat and perfect that it kinda drives me nuts. Even the parts that are supposed to NOT be perfect…they are. Of course, I’ve read the damn thing 5 times and taught it to 6th graders, so I’m probably not capable of reading it with a fresh eye any more. I will, however, be able to discuss it at book club now without saying things like, “I don’t really remember anything but the snow.” Although the snow might be the most important part.

Purple’s a Bitch…

I’m fairly sure the guy who runs my meditation app did not expect me to be using the breathing/thinking exercises to deal with purple thread. But that was the most useful thing I used it for yesterday, and you know, it wasn’t REALLY about the purple thread or running out of the purple thread with only 8 square inches of quilting left, or that I also needed binding, and I couldn’t get the binding in the same store as the thread, and that I had just been to JoAnns (hate that place) the day before for OTHER thread and things that I probably didn’t need (is now really a good time to relearn crochet? I think not. Shut up, Susan.) or that the girlchild wasn’t home yet from the beach and she had been on the phone with me (on her friend’s phone, third time in the last week her phone has died and she has called on a friend’s phone…I laugh about this) because she was convinced her soccer shoes were here (they weren’t) and that I had purposely moved them. Because when I come home from the gym at 8 PM, instead of showering, making dinner, and quilting…I move soccer shoes.

I don’t, by the way. So once the hurricane blew out of here (ie, the girlchild…I was still on the phone with her dad, who had located the shoes at HIS house, when she blew into HIS house with the same level of screechy noise, so I got to hear it again), I was able to leave for thread and binding. But by then, all that shit had settled in my gut, my chest, plus people are emailing me and texting me about school, despite my constant requests to Leave It until August 1 (which is tomorrow, yes, I am quite fucking aware), so I started to breathe in and out. I breathed the purple thread IN and breathed the irritating crap OUT. Seriously. Meditation. It’s good for you.

So my goal (ha ha ha!) was to finish quilting the Mammogram quilt in the morning (I did actually START in the morning) and get it bound early and then start quilting the Menopause quilt.

I guess technically I did finish in the morning…it was just the NEXT morning and before I ever went to bed. Cuz that’s how I roll.

You’ll notice a black cat in lots of these pictures, because apparently she wants to help out with the quilting. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. A lot of that was breaking thread.

I finally changed the needle (again) and that didn’t help at all. Sigh. Never really sure what helps. I can go for hours with no problems and then they just start up and I clean and replace everything and it doesn’t seem to matter (wow, kind of a metaphor for life there).

So here’s the deal with purple. It’s a pain to match. Yesterday was about two hours of trying to match purples and either giving up and going to an entirely different color or making an effort and getting the same purple. I actually had three or four dark purples that I thought might work, so I started with one, and then I got this bad feeling (my poor stomach yesterday), so I stopped, pulled the quilt off the machine, and went to find some real light. Out on the deck. In the sun. Yeah. So that was not going to work. It was too blue.

So then I went to the quilt store, which I had been planning to go to anyway for binding. I had enough of the purple to bind it, but it doesn’t really finish the edge if it’s the same color. I like something a shade darker in that case, so I folded the quilt up and headed out there. And then spent about 45 minutes trying to find that dark purple binding fabric.

Purple’s a bitch. She’s either red-tinged or blue-tinged or even brown- or gray-tinged and there’s never enough choices. In fact, if you find a good solid purple, you should just buy it, because it won’t be there again. I tried many purples. They all sucked. So then I laid the thing out on the floor somewhere that people weren’t hanging out, because GIANT BREAST is why, and I realized that either red (to go with the arteries) or blue (to go with the lungs and the bird and the giant eyeball) would be good choices. I had already tried gray and black (FAIL).

So I pulled a red or two…GAACK. Not happening. Then I pulled a turquoise batik and it was…OK. So I went back into the main part of the store and hung out in the blue section, trying to find something close to the blues in the quilt. I was there for a while. I had the quilt on the floor, but folded up so you could just see the face and the bottom of the hips, but nothing else, and I was putting fabrics underneath to see how heinous they were (sigh, really searching for that perfect blue…at least there were more choices), and a nice old lady came over and said, “How lovely! Can I see the rest?” Oh dear. Um. You look very nice and I don’t know whether you can handle the GIANT BREAST. So I said, “It has nudity, if that’s an issue,” and she continued to smile beautifically (I can’t wait to be old enough to have that smile all the time, like you’ve gotten past the nasty shit and you realize you’re old but it’s wonderful to be out and about and in a fabric store and no one is going to scream at you when you get home and if they do, it doesn’t matter because you can take your hearing aids out), so I unfolded it, and she clapped her hands together twice and clasped them to her chest and said, “Oh that’s FABULOUS. It’s WONDERFUL.” Wow. OK. Thanks. Smiled at her? I did. And I said thank you. Because my mom raised me right. And then I went back and got the turquoise batik that didn’t send my heart into paroxysms of wonderment, but would probably work.

Then I came home and decided to use the turquoise fabric I had lying around from when I did the bird quilts. It’s OK. I can use the other turquoise for something. It’s that standard Turq Batik color, but the one at home was darker and slightly…um…stronger. So shopping for binding? Waste of time. It was here. That is ALSO a metaphor for life.

There’s the 8″ square that still needed quilting…I got to it around 10:30 PM.

Because I didn’t get home from JoAnns hell (quilt store didn’t have the right thread, so I had to go out there again) until after 6:30, and then I had to cook dinner and I did all the dishes that had piled up that can’t go in the dishwasher and then I exercised AND meditated AND did physical therapy. So it was late. I did about 3 hours of quilting yesterday, for a total of 8 hours. I was thinking it would be more like 4 or 5, but I think all the outlining is slower than background quilting, and this sucker is mostly image, not background.

At that point, it was almost 11:30 at night and most of my friends and family were asleep in bed. Well, neither of my children were. And I knew what my plans were for the next few days and what I needed to get done and the limited time I would have, so I laid it out on the entryway floor…

And I trimmed it. Yes, that’s a really dark picture. My camera likes to make random decisions about when it needs to flash. It trimmed really easily (nice quilt). And then I cut the binding and started sewing it on.

Yup. It was late. And then I pinned it down so when I’m at my sewing meeting today, I can do the handsewing. This whole sleep thing? Yeah. Fuck it.

But if I finish her today, she’s a July quilt. Otherwise, she’ll be an August quilt. Probably gonna finish tomorrow. I’m still significantly behind my original schedule for this week, but that’s reality for you. Slaps you upside the head. And then I meditate through it. Because none of it really matters. I’m glad to have this one done. A year and a month from drawing to finish (there’s reality again for you). Got tons of stuff in the mix at the moment. It all wants to be made, and since the rest of my life is such a clusterfuck, especially with school LOOMING the fuck around the corner again (funny how that keeps happening), I need the art to be the balance. Last year, I took very little work home on a daily basis. I made art almost every fucking day, even if for only 30 minutes. It saved me. That and Brussels sprouts. And my kids. So that’s still on the table for my sanity.

OK, so it’s time to go out into the world and runneth the errands of the kingdom. Or something.

In the Silence

In the silence, there can be peace. There can be lies. There can be fear of the truth. Silence can be golden. It can be heavy. It can be loaded. It can be beautiful. It can carry memory. It can remember. Silence is painful, awkward, and deadly. Silence is a relief. Silence is torture. Silence is a treatment.

Three nights a week here it is silent, except for the sounds of my cooking, the cats complaining about my presence or lack thereof, not petting their bellies or actually doing so. The TV is on, so people are talking. Sometimes they are something I have on to just fill space while I cook (tonight, it was Real Housewives of somewhere richer than here). Sometimes it’s something I am actually watching (tonight, it was The Lottery…how can they set it just a few years from now? Not realistic. I was eating while I watched, AND reading a book. Too much brain stimulation needed these days.). Sometimes it’s something I like but don’t really need to watch because I’ve seen it enough times (tonight, it was X-Files…again…still). It’s not that I want TV as a companion. It’s that that’s what I have. Sometimes it’s music, if I’m quilting, although tonight, I chose X-Files over music, because music has more emotional triggers for me. I had been listening to music before and it was causing issues, so I chose not to tonight. It’s easier during the day when the kids are around. They are my emotional buffers. Yes, I often think about what it will be like when they are gone.

I quilted for about 3 hours today…

This thing has about 4 hours in it at the moment (quilting, that is). I probably have another hour at most of outlining to do, if that, and then there isn’t actually much background quilting. The image pretty much fills the space. I’m hoping to finish early tomorrow so I can get a binding on it and move on to quilting the next one. That of course presumes that I have an appropriate binding fabric for it (I’m pretty sure I don’t). Road Trip! To the fabric store. Which is a whopping 5 miles away. I’ve been good, though. I haven’t gone for a long time.

Quilting blood vessels. I wonder how many miles of blood vessels I’ve quilted. When I posted a photo on Instagram of where I was in the quilting, girlchild liked it. I wanted to tell her it was past her bedtime (because it was). She’s not here. Hence the silence. Last night, it was all girls giggling and yelling and TV on and squealy girl noises. Tonight? Tonight is so silent. I can hear the fan. The computer keys tapping. The computer humming. Occasionally there’s a cat-related noise: scratching, mewing, hissing.

The first part of quilting involved not stitching through the cat’s tail.

See Midnight behind the machine? I just draped the quilt over her and she would occasionally twitch, but she wouldn’t move. Whatever. Remind me again why sleep is so important?

If these lung bronchioles and alveoli (if you don’t know what those are, you didn’t have me for 7th-grade science) don’t look just like Dr. Seuss’ trees, truffula trees, I don’t know what does.

It’s hot here during the day. The house was 90 degrees when I went to the gym at 5 PM. There’s not a lot of sleep happening in that heat, so I just stay up late anyway. Plus I don’t sleep. Bad brain. So cats and dogs sprawl…

Wherever they think it might be cool. Temperature cool, not attitude cool. Although with Babygirl, you never know.

I’m officially doing physical therapy on the knee for a month. He thinks it’s a sprained LCL…possibly an IT band issue as well. The right knee is definitely weaker than the left, and he’s given me strengthening exercises to help. I’m not allowed to hike for a week, but after that, it should be OK. He thinks it’s a very solvable problem.

I wish I were a solvable problem.

I also got the materials for the weird-ass project I need to do for my local art group, not quilting at all. Well, that’s not true. I think they want a wall quilt too, but I’m just not sure that will happen. It kind of depends on what I get done this week. If I can get both of these quilts quilted and bound, then I’ll think about a wall quilt too, but right now, I’m designing a 3D floating house. It’s been in my head for months. It needs worry dolls. It needs organza. It needs coathangers and wire. Wire tomorrow. Then build this sucker. Worry dolls go on last. They’re getting mailed to me. But I have to finish the rest first. I shopped in the fancy fabric section of the store. It’s been a while since I’ve hung out in there.

I wanted to draw tonight…got drawings pawing at me at the moment to come out…”Please Please Ms. Nida. Let me out. I’ll be good. I promise. Just let me out.” Pleading. There are only so many hours in the day. So I quilted instead. Sometimes I’m not sure if letting more drawings out of my head is a good thing.

It’s so quiet here. I hate it.

Women I Want to Be When I Grow Up

I started writing this post the other day when I read someone’s list of awesome fictional women…actually, I just went and searched around to see if I could figure out where I got the idea, because the blogger LIKES his hits and trackbacks…fellow teacher and sci-fi writer (although I barely qualify) InfiniteFreeTime wrote about that here. The interesting thing about being a GIRL though (actually, I rarely call myself a girl because it’s such a loaded word when you are dealing with an adult female) is that those awesome female fictional characters are also our role models. So from growing up reading and looking at stuff and trying out how to be the most awesomest female in the world, I put together some short lists.

First of all, you have to know that when I was younger, like middle school, I would tell people that I was the reincarnation of Mary Cassatt (in fact, I wrote a whole story about it, which in retrospect, was probably only one page long in a school notebook and was tossed out that summer when we cleaned out our backpacks). The reason I picked Cassatt was because, and this is important, at the time, she was the only female artist I knew about. Sad but true. I’m not sure even now that I have female role models in the art world…there are artists whose work I admire, but whose practices or personal lives leave much to be desired. Then again, they didn’t have any role models either. The crazy-ass balance between mom, provider, and artist is not something to be envied most days.

Anyway, when I grow up, I want to be one of these women…actually, I want to be a composite of all of them…notice the recurring theme of stubborn strength and kicking ass. In some sort of chronological order…

Dana Scully in X Files: Dana is the perfect mix of faith and science, and although I’m not a religious person, I love her cynicism when it comes to Mulder’s belief and her ability to kick ass and still admit when she’s wrong.

Ellen Ripley in the Alien series: Ripley saves the kid AND kills the aliens. She’s tough, but caring, and so nice to her cat. And she recognizes a bitchy alien when she sees one.

Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (the UK version): a troubled character, but excels despite being surrounded by testosterone-addled males. Plus she solves the cases.

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle in the books of her name: I read Mrs. PW when I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I was reading them to my OWN kids (and teaching middle school) that I realized how freakin’ awesome she is. Always cheery and perky, but the punishment fits the crime. I wish I could be her.

Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) in Kill Bill: There’s something to be said for revenge and for being good at something that is not very feminine (whatever the fuck THAT means…but think about all the stereotypes girls have to watch and then toss this character into that mix…she’s badass, but has compassion), and The Bride does it with style.

Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (prefer the original movies) and the rest of the series: Yup. She’s fucked up. But I love how she gets revenge (ah, a theme erupts). Plus she’s damn smart and sneaky.

Kara Thrace aka Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica (the new one): Starbuck is another troubled woman (she drinks, she smokes, and she fucks up regularly), and she is carrying a HUGE chip on her shoulder, but you can see her fight through her feelings in the series. She is an emotional mess at times, but fights through the crazy and stands strong…not just for herself.

There’s a theme here: troubled, emotional, often making mistakes, but strong in conviction and ability, not bound by gender except when others try to force it on them.

There are other female characters that I love, but who then make a really stupid decision, like Anna in Downton Abbey (don’t keep secrets like that!). I’m always disappointed when shit like that happens. I guess it’s a fine line between a Starbuck or a Jane Tennison and Anna, but it’s my line to draw.

There’s a couple other lists I made while I was thinking about this (and I’ve been thinking about it for days, and I could probably wrack my brains for another year and make the list longer, but this is where it’s at right now).

Girls I wish I had been when I was younger

Hermione Granger in Harry Potter: Duh. Who doesn’t want to be her? Smart, beautiful, strong, emotional, kicks ass around the boys. Thanks JK Rowling for giving my daughter someone to look up to.

Arya Stark in Game of Thrones: Another duh. She’s a tomboy, she uses a sword like a boy (or better), she gets out of situations like a magician, and George R.R. Martin hasn’t killed her yet (knock on wood).

Pippi Longstocking in the books of her name: She’s strong, nonviolent, and a creative thinker. Plus everything she does is cool.

Women I don’t want to be?

Gemma Teller Morrow from Sons of Anarchy: Wants to do right by her family, but is a giant-ass mess. Sure, we all want to be in bed with Jimmy Smits, but we don’t kill people to get there. She’s evil. I realize she’s supposed to be and her circumstances made her largely who she is, and even more importantly, I’m supposed to be troubled about liking her…but I just don’t. In fact, I don’t like any of the women in SoA. I used to like Tara (although that is also pointless now) until she became some PTSD survivor crazy person. Much as I love the show, it’s hard on the females. Oh yeah, and Gemma babysits when drugged out. Bad grandma.

Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife: I have never ever liked her. She wimped out, she used her situation, she’s flaky, she’s fucked up but not in a good way. She just irritates the crap out of me. Take a stand, woman. Please. For the sake of other women out there.

Frida Kahlo: OK, so this is hard because I love her art. But she’s kinda like Alicia, in that she let Diego Rivera be the giant ass he was and she put up with it, and from what I read, that fucked her up mentally in a big way. But she stayed with him anyway. Yes, she made amazing art while she was alive, and some of it may have been precipitated by Diego’s dumbassedness, but I just wish she’d had the balls to tell him to fuck off, and walk away and maybe hang out with Georgia O’Keeffe instead. She might have been happier.

All the women in Breaking Bad, Justified, and The Dresden Files, and possibly more that I’m not even remembering right now. Those are just in my head at the moment. Most of the women on the Lifetime channel, and all of the women in the Real Housewives franchise. Holy shit. Just get rid of all of them.

Women my son wants me to be, but I haven’t actually seen yet

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (it’s on my long long list of things to watch): OK, probably he just wants to date Buffy or someone like her (he would disdainfully snarl at that characterization).

I’m sure this is an ever-changing list as I read more and/or remember more (seriously…the brain is not my friend), but it’s interesting to think about what makes you like or dislike a female role model, because there are certainly some very fine lines between fucked-up and vengeful when you look at say The Bride vs. Gemma, but hey, it’s my list. You don’t have to agree.

Looking Back…

So the bird quilts were a success, thanks to friends and family and groupies and the like (there is some overlap between the categories). There are three left for sale, and tomorrow (which is actually today; I just haven’t gone to sleep yet…) I will move them over to the Recent Work page. I’m also doing one more as a commission, once I finish the obligations I do have for this month. Which I was supposed to work on today, but today ended up being errands and house-cleaning, because I currently have a houseful of teenaged girls. OK, there are only 3, but that’s kinda like a houseful when they get going. They aren’t leaving, either. They will be here until some time in the morning…the REAL morning. Not the morning it is NOW. Hopefully not until after I wake up. And have tea. Because I can barely deal with my OWN teenagers in the morning these days.

I need to get my ass in gear on quilting this week. Hours of it. Starting…um…not now. I spent a chunk of today making and sewing on labels on the bird quilts…

Yes, I’m weird. I sew them on. I read about someone who was removing labels and then putting her own labels on the quilts. So I started fusing AND sewing them on. It might be overkill. Some things are just habit. Not necessarily a good thing.

Jul 28 14 001 small

I have two to go, I think.

I’ve been referred to physical therapy for the recurring knee problem, starting tomorrow. It’s probably too much to ask him if I can hike on Thursday, eh? I will ask anyway. Or I will do it anyway. Who knows. I’m not willing to stop hiking because my knee is cranky.

Yesterday, I forgot to eat until 3:30 in the afternoon. I forgot before I went grocery shopping in the morning. I planned to eat when I got back, but the kids came in staging World War III, and by the time the screaming stopped, it was time for me to leave…so when we got there (to the meeting) and I thought, “Why do I feel so shaky?” and then wracked my brains trying to remember what meal I’d actually eaten that day…um. Yeah. So the brain is still out to lunch. With martinis. She’s in a real mood at the moment. Actually, it’s somewhat easier to exist when she’s out to lunch (except for the part where I forget to eat). There’s less drama. More just getting by. Minute by minute.

The last year has been a bitch. You might have noticed. Here are the positive things that happened though:

In the last year, I’ve written 380 posts averaging about a thousand words a post, some quite a bit more than that. That’s about 380,000 words. That’s kind of a lot.

I started writing a book. I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I’m significantly into this thing at the moment. Hopefully I’ll figure out how it’s supposed to end soon…and maybe get around to naming all the characters.

I learned to meditate. I still meditate almost every evening. I think it has helped give me some distance from my sad brain and situations when I am wigging out. I have meditated in hotels, cars, my classroom (with or without my students), and staff meetings. I have told my students I am meditating right now. I have taught them how to meditate as well.

I’m hiking pretty regularly. The physical exercise is obviously good for me, and the type of exercise is a good alternative to my gym time, but I’m also outside and hanging out with a different group of people on a regular basis. In nature. With the bugs and snakes and other crawly things. And I only fall down occasionally.

I’m reading a lot. I guess this could be a negative in some ways, because my hermit self probably doesn’t need more excuses to hang out with its nose in a book, but I’m reading a good variety of stuff and doing book clubs too for the intellectual stimulation (and just plain goofiness at times).

I remodeled (with the help of the boychild and my dad, and sort of the girlchild) the living room, getting rid of tons of crap and hopefully streamlining the space a bit. Next year, we’ll do the other half of the house if it kills me (and it probably will).

I made a bunch of quilts and drawings that will turn into awesome quilts. I do this every year, but it seems important to note that even when I’m dealing with massive depression and breakdowns, I can still do that. Thanks to the artistic brain for pushing the other shit off the cliff on a regular basis. It keeps climbing back up and getting in my face, but that art brain is unstoppable. She rocks.

I outlasted my boss.

I helped one kid get into college with a pretty good financial aid plan, and hopefully he will remember where he lives after he leaves. There was a lot of paperwork and too many deadlines.

I reintroduced myself to the dance, theater, and spoken-word performances that I used to go to all the time, and I rediscovered my love of comics.

I got some of my diabetes numbers back to the normal range. There have been other issues associated with that, but the HbA1c is the same as someone without diabetes. It’s been over 12 years since it’s been there.

Most of all, I survived it. Moving on. Of course, that’s easy to say right NOW. When that silly brain comes back from her extended cocktail hour, I might have to force the issue a bit more. And there’s that part of the brain that is always yelling “but but but!” whenever you say you did something good…it needs to take a hike. In the opposite direction. Tomorrow, I quilt. Seriously.

Bringing the Brain On Line

Not the most effective use of my time yesterday. Mental breakdowns never are. The plus is I seem to recover fairly quickly now from the parts where I shake and can’t focus. Thank meditation for that. And the help of some friends who say the right stuff, remind me that I am OK…remind me that just because one person in the world believes something about me doesn’t mean it’s right.

I tortured my son and ex by dragging them to the Cornell San Diego barbecue, mostly for me, really, but also so the boy might recognize people who live near him. Not that he will use that info (but all my college friends are yelling Road Trip!). He’s disdainful of the process, and actually came up and asked why the other older students made a point of telling the kids to wash whites separate from other colors, because we don’t do that at home (it’s true, we don’t, although I was raised doing that). I reminded him that the colors of his college include RED. Which RUNS. And makes everything white turn PINK. His dad admitted to making that mistake in college. Boychild wears no white, though, so he’s probably OK.

I tried to work on bindings in the car, but the curvy roads were making me sick. I wanted to get two done yesterday, but had to settle for one…Bird No. 7…

Can’t remember what the other name is for this one.

For one thing, I also quilted a bit (not a lot) on Mammogram…

It’s piled up to keep cats off it.

I finally found the purple fabric I needed for the birds…it was hiding under something else, of course.

I knew it was here. I hate that my brain is still pulling this shit where I’m staring right at something and I can’t see it…I lost the teabag squeezer (probably there’s an official name for that) the other day and was going nuts, but it was right where it should have been, except up an inch or so on a pile of stuff. Right in the wide open. I don’t even understand how I couldn’t see it. OK, I know…because my brain was playing games. I can’t find my turquoise hand-sewing thread either. I’m sure it’s somewhere. Oh shit. I know where it is. Fuck. Dumbass. OK, I know I’m not a dumbass…I just need days of processing time now. Hard to know how much of that is age, hormones, or depression. Or a revolting combo of all of them. The big part of my brain is just not available on a regular basis. I send a messenger down there, into the deep hole, and sometimes the messenger comes back and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes the message is so garbled that it’s useless. And sometimes 24 hours later, the location of the turquoise thread pops into my head.

But in order to manage some of my crazy, I called one friend and emailed another, and we ended up going to see Boyhood…

Which was interesting, although I was more interested in the mother character. It was an interesting concept, although the boy was not very engaging in the first few years. He was much more interesting when he aged and had more mature opinions, and certainly, being about to send a boy off to college, there was some relevance there.

I can’t seem to get my brain working on finishing the stupid pile of small tasks that would finish the living room remodel. Which means my bedroom is a disaster. And now apparently a bunch of teenaged girls are coming to spend the night tomorrow. OK. Well. There’s some motivation to move it along. Or just shove it all in my bedroom and close the door. Whichever seems to make more sense. Taking care of myself is often a collection of behaviors that others do not understand. They don’t get that I’m dragging my brain along with me, behind me, and sometimes it’s strangling me by trying to dig its feet in. Recalcitrant asshole.

More car time today…sitting in a meeting too. Four more bindings. Today. Done. Really. Maybe then my brain will come back on line. Ha.

Working Through It

It’s been one of my (many) mantras this year, work through it. Just keep making. At some point, it will feel different again. The plus with making quilts the way I do is that there are tasks that can be divided up and finished in shorter periods of time. If something is long and difficult, this is how you get through it, one chunk at a time. So when I’m sitting there stabbing needles into that one place on my right middle finger that gets a callous when I’m doing a lot of hand-stitching, I know that it is not an endless, Dante’s-Inferno-of-Stabbing-Pain, but a task that will end, and if it is supremely heinous, then there will be a new and different task to follow it.

I finished three more bindings yesterday. It was difficult, but Endeavour Morse helped me survive it. I never watched the Inspector Morse series, but I like the prequels.

This is Bird 4…they have names now too. I have a hard time remembering the numbers.

Also known as Diving Bird. Obv.

In pricing them, I’ve really only looked at the time. Quilters Newsletter Magazine recently had an article on pricing your work, and I do usually use a combination of time and size, looking at both calculations and arriving somewhere in the middle.

This is Bird 5…

aka HeyBird. The article was interesting in that it touched on two points: those who underprice and undervalue their time are hurting the rest of us…and it gave actual pricing info from some quilters, including Luke Haynes and Caryl Bryer Fallert, both more famous in the quilt world than I am, but I was able to compare my prices for my work with what they would charge for something similar…

This is Bird 6…

aka Curvy Bird or maybe Falling Bird. I haven’t decided. And I found that my pricing formulas do actually make sense. You are paying for my 25 years of experience, my drawing ability, my quilting ability, and for the rarity that is a small Kathy piece without boobs in it (as my daughter would say). Because honestly, this opportunity may never arise again. I find these little quilts a pain in the ass to make, and they don’t give me any satisfaction to make…except when I see them in a pile. That’s kind of cool…a pile of birds. Until the cat tries to sit on them, and then I have to hide them again. And my prices are significantly lower than Fallert’s (as they should be).

Updated: I had to add this after a conversation with the boychild. Minimum wage in California is $9/hour at the moment. If I sell these birds in a gallery, I can lose up to 50% of the price to the gallery (understood, by the way…I’m not arguing against that), so I have to consider the pricing with that in mind. The smallest one, right now, is the only one priced under $100, and if it sold in a gallery, I would get just over minimum wage. Sigh. But these weren’t complicated and I didn’t draw NEW birds…these are existing birds from drawings and quilts that are already done. Plus I think most if not all of them will sell outside of a gallery, so I’m OK with the pricing.

Four more to go, but I already set up the sewing machine last night to start quilting Mammogram. I want to get on with it. Next week is really the last WHOLE week I have free from school stuff until December (oh my god, that is so depressing). I need to use it wisely. This is why as the summer goes on, I become more and more hermitlike. In the early days, I leave the house for lots of errands and fun stuff and lunch with friends (not really), but by the time August 1 rolls around, I’m in lockdown mode. School looms towards me, swinging claws towards my free time and my sanity, and Fall is notoriously bad with soccer slamming me as well. Although this year, there will only be one kid around…one kid who has taken on coaching her OWN team (am I required to go watch that? I feel like I should go at least once.).

And I am exercising and meditating every day. Another way to work through it. One chunk at a time.

“Keep mindfulness alive even in the darkest moments, reminding yourself that the awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.” Jon Kabat-Zinn