In the Far Away…

Yeah. Um. Day’s over. I survived all the bits and pieces of it. Survived yesterday too. There was lots of salt water wasted over the two-day period, but hey…that’s what I do now. You should invite me to your big event. You wouldn’t even have to pay me to cry there…I just do it anyway. I could have my own reality TV show…I could do Laura Dern…I could follow happy people around malls and try to bring them down.

Anyway, senior awards ceremony last night. Boychild is an honor graduate (no shock), but also got a commendation from the National Merit Whosy-whaty…he didn’t get beyond the top 5% in the nation because we didn’t have him take the SAT in the right month. Why? Because we’re stupid obviously. No, because their rules are confusing and we messed up. Whatever. He looks thrilled. Actually, as his dad says, he looks like the reincarnation of Meatloaf in Bat out of Hell. Except less angry.

He’s thrilled to be there. There was a dress code. Otherwise he would be in his standard uniform of jeans and black Tshirt with random holes in it.

We handled dinner afterwards and the girlchild only gave me a ton of shit, instead of two tons. I’m sure I deserve it. I did give birth to her without drugs, by the way. Back labor. Oblique lie. She owes me. She’ll figure it out. It’s OK. But yeah, she made me cry at the awards ceremony and my ex had to separate us. I was willing to just leave, but apparently that wasn’t an option. I had to come back and sit with the family.

Seriously…being a divorced mom of teens isn’t for the weak at heart…although I suspect if we were still married, I would still be the target. I just wish I could hack it better than I do at the moment. I recognize that she needs to separate from me so she can leave and go to college. I just wish she didn’t have to be so nasty about it.

So after dinner, I came home and cut stuff out, and I made the mistake of watching Parenthood, which consistently makes me cry. Stupid, eh? When I was much younger, it was China Beach and 30-Something…and something else I can’t remember the name of…this is why I try to stick to murder mysteries and sci fi these days. They are much less emotionally draining.

See progress? I do. Tiny progress. Tiny bubbles. Boychild asked me today, “What’s a Don Ho?” I explained. I used YouTube as a support. I’d like to say I’m tech savvy, but me and my computer are currently doing some sort of battle that I think will only end in some sort of Fatal Error, not in my court, but in the home of Shit You Don’t Have Money to Spend on a New Computer Right Now (at least not for yourself…probably for that kid who is going off to college). How am I going to survive next year without the calm words of my boy…”What’s she freaking out about now?” Hell, I don’t know. There’s the kid that cooks and the kid that follows instructions, even when he doesn’t want to. There’s the uber-needy child and the otherly needy child. One talks, the other clings and then screams. My counselor talked me through some of this today, because I’m at the end of my rope. I’m dangling off the edge of an emotional cliff. You know it’s bad when your ex has to talk you back into the chair, off the floor. Seriously bad.

I’m going to be OK. Someday. Not any time soon. Maybe in two years. Or five. Maybe. I’m aiming for age 50. It’s a nice round number. It’s far enough out that I have a good chance of being sort of OK by then. Two years, nine months. Then I can be a crone and life will be oh so easy. Whatever.

Here’s one of my frogs during dissection. If you object, sorry…this is a huge learning experience for my ignorant little kids…

Just seeing the variation and how everything fits together is a good thing for them. It’s going to suck in two years when I don’t have body systems any more…sigh. Science teaching is changing too.

Anyway. I did about 5 hours of grading tonight, and it was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been doing this all year, sacrificing work to some version of my sanity by doing art instead, and I just can’t keep doing that this week. I have to hunker down and just grade. For hours. With loud music blasting. And yeah, I will probably cry for part of it. Damn tear ducts. Do you think frogs cry?

Patti Smith? Yeah. Well. It’s not that I don’t like Prince, it’s that I like Smith better. Dark deep woman.

My plan…to get the grading out of the way so I can draw and make art and try to be a human that doesn’t depress me. Don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s a goal. Goals don’t have to be attainable in the moment…it can be in the far away.

Nothing is so fucked up that it can’t be fixed by a Peter Gabriel song…

I think I believe that…oh yeah. And pie.

Crappy video, great song.

Earth Stories: Making a Small Statement

One of the requirements of the Earth Stories exhibit was that we were to make a small, 12×14″ piece that was sort of a poster of what the big piece was about. So how to summarize the whole issue?

Luckily, I had some part of my drawing brain back sometime in late August. I was nearly finished with the big quilt and school was starting, so I was going to panic soon. I sat down and drew this in one evening. Of course, that was after I stared at the paper with the rectangle perimeter drawn on it for about 6 days. Let’s be truthful here.

I wanted to emphasize that the birth control allowed us to decide how to feed our kids, that it gave us choices about when to have kids and how to space them.

I was still a little psycho about pieces on this tiny thing though. It has 133 pieces. Ayep. Still crazy.

Traced it onto Wonder Under in record time (50 minutes).

Cut them out (24 minutes). I really should do more small pieces)…I’d probably be less frustrated. But also probably less fulfilled. Scary balance there.

Then I started the fabric-picking…I had not put the other fabrics away, because I wanted to be choosing from the same pile of stuff…so the two quilts would speak to each other. They are related, you know. It took just over an hour and a half to choose the fabrics…

Then I trimmed the pieces in just under an hour…

And started ironing them down…

Here’s a pile of pieces ready for a background…

Then I realized I didn’t have very much of the background fabric left…to be specific, this is what I had…

So I used the same sky fabric from the big cloud, then pieced border on top of it…but as you can see, I didn’t necessarily do everything completely straight (this is why I don’t piece quilts)…

I do have a degree in fixing things that are fucked up, though, so I pulled apart and restitched a seam…

Ironing it all together and to the background took a little over 2 hours (mostly because I screwed up). Then I stitched everything down (26 minutes), sandwiched, pinbasted, and started quilting…about an hour for all of that.

Afterwards, I once again forgot that tiny-ass binding is a pain in the ass to stitch down, so I did it anyway (I will never learn)…

Binding it took a couple of hours. I started this on August 24, finished on September 12 (and that’s only because I took a long time on the binding). It took 9 hours and 19 minutes. Holy crap. That was easy. It is difficult for me, though, to get enough meaning and depth into a small piece to make me feel satisfied with it. I think this one is successful, as are the other two small ones I did last summer, but it’s not a size I enjoy. I may work on that this summer. There’s something to be said for finishing something in one day. Maybe I’ll set a goal.

Next post? I finally reveal both pieces and talk about the exhibitions and the catalog.

This Is Where Things Are Right Now.

It’s been a rough few days, physically and emotionally. I’ve been running microscope labs for three days and then went right into frog dissections. These take lots of time, energy, class management, cleanup, and dealing with squealing teens, which I just don’t have the patience for right now. I suspect MOST teachers are running low on patience at the moment. There’s nothing abnormal about that. But Tuesday night at the gym, after spending over an hour with the boychild and his dad, trying to navigate through college and immunization crap, I hadn’t apparently eaten enough and my blood sugar crashed at the gym. Badly. I didn’t have my tester, but I did have glucose tabs with me. Here’s a sign of how your brain doesn’t work when your blood sugar crashes: I kept exercising. I know. Silly. It was OK in the end, though…although I felt like crap for the rest of the evening…that’s also unfortunately normal. So I didn’t have the energy to stand and iron…I cut pieces out instead. Silence abounded. Sadness followed.

It’s OK, the next day, right?

Fuck that.

My cutting view: TV, messy house, pajamas on, single glass of wine. I get my hour in, then I go to sleep. The sleep of the exhausted. That’s what low blood sugar does. Fucks with me.

And I keep getting emails from places that annoy me…like Good Housekeeping, why? I don’t think that a new everyday hairstyle or a pop of color in my bathroom is going to change my mood…although the bathroom is on my list for the summer. And House Beautiful? What the fuck? I’m not into that stuff, reading about it, it’s just depressing and reminds me of how lame I am at the moment. Comedy shows? Not my thing. Delete delete delete. Comedy shows are full of mean people being mean to people. Fuck them. Take me off your fucking list, unsubscribe over and over again. Just leave me the fuck alone. Comedy isn’t funny.

Deep breath. Normally I would take a weekend or a short vacation right after school got out and clear my head. That’s not happening this year. No money. Nowhere to go. No one to go with. One kid will apparently be in Palm Springs (or Palm Sprongs, which is what I’m calling it now), which is fine, or it WOULD have been fine if someone had actually talked to me about it instead of assuming that because I have no life that there doesn’t need to be communication. I feel like I need an artists’ retreat or a self-reflective place with lots of meditation time, but I think that would also be a mistake right now. I don’t have enough emotional support to do that. Maybe what I need is to be in my own space, cleaning and rearranging and painting my own life so I can move on past this mopey shit. Damn mopey shit has tentacles that don’t let go. Release me, you fuckwads. Let me be someone else, someone who is not this sad person. I’m tired of her. She’s not fun to be around and she just makes me feel worse.

Funny that the me is still me. Can’t get away from me. Me me me me…fuck me.

So yesterday, I knew it would be rough…first day of frog dissections, plus I had a 2-hour science meeting right after school and then I had to sit through a 2-hour teenaged driving course (required by the school so the girlchild can drive on campus next year without her brother around, who already sat through this). For those of you who remember Red Asphalt…I just saw Red Asphalt V. Sigh. And three other videos that I show my students every year about driving and drinking and texting and all that crap. So I packed food (I learned from the day before…this is my new existence. Eat or pass out.) and I drew during each meeting, because otherwise I would have fallen asleep…

Post-it note with ballpoint pen: not my favorite materials, but I left the sketchbook in the car.

Then I drew during Red Asphalt…

She’s remarkably calm-looking, considering what I was there to see and listen to. Surprisingly, girlchild got mad at me for reading on my phone during the presentation, said it was rude, but had no issues with my DRAWING during the sheriffs’ talking. Not rude to draw.

So Tuesday night, this is what it looked like after I cut pieces out…

And this is after Wednesday night…

Can you tell the difference? Sigh. It’s no wonder I’m depressed. It’s fucking neverending. I mean, I can look at those two photos and see that I got something done…but it’s taking for-freakin-ever. I’m at 11 hours and 38 minutes. There is no way I’m finishing in a couple of hours or so.

Same with this post. I need to go to school. Who knows when I’ll finish.

From meditation, the title. This is where things are right now. Live in the moment. In the moment, I am tired, frustrated, dejected, sad, depressed, overwhelmed, disheartened, anxious, stressed, barefoot, drinking tea, reminding myself I need to iron the boychild’s clothes for the awards ceremony. Mr. Meditation talks about opening a space where we can envision change, even if change is not happening right now (I imagined a mountain meadow with peaks and trees all around, because he said to open the space). Lifting oneself out of the depressed space. Can’t do that. Fuck you. But now I’m sitting in a meadow with all that other shit towering around me. I don’t know if that’s better. It’s easier to hide in the trees than out in the open.

Frogs are done. I even did the dishes already (science labs=dishes). Tomorrow we start sex ed. I don’t know that it will put me in a better mood. When you read all that futuristic and dystopian fiction, there’s always pills or medical conversion chambers or genetic engineering that makes sure that people don’t feel bad or sad…OR…they kill all of us mutants and don’t let us reproduce and make more deep reflective thinkers like us. Society doesn’t want to deal with the likes of us. Even though we make amazing art, visual, verbal, musical, dance…they don’t want to admit that the brain falls so deep for so long. This is where things are right now. Tomorrow maybe I will have a donut and they will be somewhere else.

Earth Stories: Sewing It Down…or Up…

First you sew it down. Then you sew it up. Once all the pieces are ironed down, I stitch them down with an invisible thread on the top and a small zigzag…here’s what it looks like from the back.

Jul 31 13 021 small

It took me about 9 1/2 hours to stitch the whole thing down, starting on July 31 and finishing August 5…I took a few days off in the middle for a soccer tournament.

It’s kind of mesmerizing (or monotonous, depending on how I’m feeling) to do all that stitching, but if I don’t, the pieces don’t stay put. When I’m not actually sewing, I pile it all up on top of the sewing machine, because otherwise cats want to sit on it.

Sometimes when I’m actually quilting the piece, I’ll find stuff I didn’t stitch down, so I’m not perfect…I try to follow some sort of plan so I don’t miss pieces, but it doesn’t really work that way.

I have a nice view at least (not that I look up…at all). I had a hard time working on this part last year, because normally I listen to music, but music has memories attached to it and emotional tugs, and that was just not a good thing last year at this time. Hell, it probably STILL isn’t, which is sad…but I bullied through. There are a lot of tears in this thing.

Once the whole thing is stitched down, I sandwich it with batting and backing. I had to piece the backing…the quilt finishes at 72″ square, so I even had to move the bench out of the entryway to get it to fit (yes, this is the largest empty floor space in the house…I will never be able to move unless the entryway is at least this big).

Here it is sandwiched…which means no one can come in the front door until it’s pinned. I do have to consider these things (where are the kids and when are they coming back?).

It took almost 3 hours to pin baste it…on my knees…

Then comes the quilting. I start with a dark thread to outline the things I want to see…I had all these spools of the same color of dark blue (it’s one I use a lot). I think I used almost all of them up.

This is outlining, which I do before I stitch any filler stitches.

I outline anything I want to pop out, so most of the imagery in the quilt.

This stage is not easy, because I’m manhandling a large, heavy beast through a normal-sized machine…I wear gloves and try to get up and flex my back and shoulder muscles regularly, but usually, once I start stitching, I find it hard to stop.

I cried a lot during this part too…music again.

Here’s what the back looks like…that’s the heart (upside down).

It took 19 1/2 hours to quilt this whole thing. I started August 7 and finished on the 14th.

There was a lot of little tiny stitching detail going on…

These figures are less than 5″ tall…

The stitching details were what made the difference on these figures…

That section is a whole lot of crazy.

Sometimes the thread has issues…

Here’s that crazy corn section stitched up…

And the International Planned Parenthood Federation logo. I did contact them about this quilt, but they never answered. I should probably do it again with a picture this time.

Cat and baby detail…

Vegetable garden (very fun to draw and make)…

When it was all quilted, I laid it back out on the entryway floor to try to cut it to size. It had to be 72″ square, so that was a pain in the butt…I hate making to an exact size.

Then I put the 18 miles of binding on…

Stitching the binding and sleeves took a little over 8 hours (cat involvement!).

Technically, I finished on August 24 with 168 hours and 39 minutes, started in March. But then I drew on it later…I have absolutely no idea WHEN that was…thought it was January, but I’m not finding any notation of it. Oh well. I know it was after it was photographed. Oh well. I’m OK with that.

Two more posts on this…the exhibit posts and the little quilt…which took a lot less time and energy to make.

Ironing a Mammogram

I had a goal this weekend to start ironing the Mammogram quilt together. It doesn’t have many pieces, less than 400, although it’s not a small quilt. I am still cutting pieces out for the big monster of a quilt I’ll be finishing this summer (which isn’t actually that BIG, it just has a lot of pieces). I like to have a variety of things to work on over the summer, so if I get tired of any one stage of a quilt, I can take a break and work on another one that’s in a different stage, because usually all the deadlines are in the fall, not the summer, so I have some leeway with what I work on. Last summer, I had one ironed together, another one in the fabric-trimming stage, one that needed tracing, and two smaller ones that I started, no wait…three smaller ones that I started and finished over the summer (if you count Labor Day weekend). So it worked out OK. Well, at least THAT part of summer worked out OK.

So right now I have one small top ironed, ready to be stitched down. I have this larger one that is getting ironed down now. I have the big one in pieces, and as soon as I can get my head somewhat cleared (um. cough cough. when might that be?), I can draw the other one that’s due in November and start tracing it. It’s OK. I seem to eventually be able to draw what I need to…when I really need to. I have faith in my brain’s ability to kick butt when it’s required. Someone told me this weekend that I handle high-stress situations well, that I can be counted on in those situations. Huh. Funny. It never FEELS that way. I always feel like I’m falling apart, that I’m barely holding it together. I guess I fake it well.

The problem with that quilt, the one I need to draw, is that I had a clear vision of it back in September when I was first asked to be part of the exhibit, and ironically, that view was more positive in outlook than the view I have now. So I keep trying to get back to that positive view, because that is a view of hope, and I’d rather be there than in the negative place I’m in now about gender equality. But maybe that negative view is more realistic? I have a post-in-progress that I’ve been writing on and off for about a month about feminism and gender equality as they exist (or not) right now…not in the 50s or the 60s or whenever, but right this minute, while I’m trying to raise a son and daughter to be aware (they are, trust me). But like the drawing, the post is not fully gelling, so I’m just giving it space and time to develop. I’ll probably work some of it out in drawings that will never grow up to be big quilts, which is fine. It’s not a waste of time; sometimes they do go on to be quilts, and if not, it was an hour or so that I needed in order to process what was in my head. That’s never a bad thing.

I had a ton of grading to deal with yesterday, plus my eyesight is getting worse again, so I had to get eyes checked…they were lots worse, unfortunately, because the cost of new glasses was not in my summer expense budget (and now it is). So I didn’t get started on ironing the Mammogram quilt together until about 10:45 at night (yes, when you were all going to bed), and then my brother and SIL called about a teacher/tech issue that I hopefully gave them multiple ways to solve…so I was trying to iron AND help them (how to get a large video file to a teacher at 11 PM on the night before it’s due). So I didn’t get very far…

It’s a start. I’m already missing an eyelid. And yes, that figure fades into the belly, but that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want it to bounce out at you. And when I stitch around it, it will be more visible. I only got 49 pieces ironed down. Oh wait, 48, because of the missing eyelid (it will either show up in another bin or I will cut a new one. It’s not crucial).

For those who haven’t been around for a whole year, I’ve had a few mammograms over the years that show this dense area that sometimes makes the radiologists nervous, so I’ve had to have retakes on the scans a few times. Last July, it was a major retake with multiple mammograms and other scans and then he wanted to see me in 6 months, just to be sure…that was back in January, where they did all the panicky stuff again, which makes you feel like you just want to cut the offending appendage off and hand it to them…here, just go at it. Give it back to me when you’re done. Of course, you go along with it, because that cancer word is scary as hell, and I did finally get cleared…again. But now I’m back to my yearly schedule, so I get to do it again. Anyway, last year, when it was a big issue, I drew the issue. Because that’s what I do. I draw what bugs me, what worries me, what makes me sad.

I think the fish are like protective spirits of some sort. They show up a lot. Birds aren’t really protective. Harbingers of doom and all. Anyway. The breast is still here, and so is the funny shadowy area that freaks them out every other year or so (some years, it’s not an issue at all). So maybe I’ll draw one every year and have a mammogram series. Or not.

Hopefully it won’t take all week to finish this (although this week is a bitch, so it could). I thought about trying to finish it for IQF, but I don’t really see it hanging there…amongst the pretty landscapes and technically amazing traditional patterns and the occasional quilt from a nice photo. I will have a piece in the SAQA Celebrating Silver exhibit that is challenging enough for most viewers, so I don’t know that I need to try to enter IQF…besides, I just checked and the entries are due in two days and I haven’t mailed it yet, so there’s the deciding factor right there. I love it when my forgetful brain handles decisions like this by just filing them in the back cupboard, so I don’t have to even consider it. I only remembered the exhibit at all because people were talking about it being the 40th anniversary.

Anyway. Back to entering art shows. Because that’s where my stuff belongs.

Power Struggles

Apparently there’s some sort of power struggle going on in my head between the depressed part of my brain and the part that is just tired of the depressed part. I have to admit that the tired part is not winning. Neither is the depressed part, so I guess that’s a good thing…imagine a big tug-of-war rope with two weaklings pulling on each side, falling down at times, rope burns on the hands, but no one lets go. Oh wait, sometimes the tired side lets go and the depressed part wins for a while, but because she’s depressed, she eventually lets go of the rope and wanders off, only to start tugging again when tired rises up and tries to take control again.

It’s exhausting to watch. Hard to muster any sort of energy on either side of the fight. No one wants depression to win, but sometimes it’s so hard to even consider who you’d have to turn into in order to have the other side win. I don’t know who I am at the moment, but I do know a lot about who I’m not. I guess that helps.

I came into counseling angry today, for decent reasons, and we parsed out why, and delved deep into where it came from, but didn’t find the healthy outlet for it. I spend a lot of time saying “but that’s not who I am” to explain why I don’t take the easy way out. I guess that’s good. I don’t know. I do know I understand better than most why I do things, what I feel, how I’m thinking. Yes, it probably means I spend too much time in my head, but at least I’m not just reacting to life. I don’t want to just make random decisions without thinking clearly about all the parts that go with it. There are so many decisions right now that my head is basically spinning. I think that’s why I’m hiking so much…I can’t possibly decide anything on a hike. All I can do is put one foot in front of another. Over and over again. Until I’m done. You can’t beat that. That’s the decision…walk or stop. Walking is the only thing that makes sense.

I have a plan for the three-day weekend. I probably won’t make it through all the things I’ve planned, but I’ve tried to set myself up for both control and success. I could fail miserably, but hopefully not. I really am hoping for three days of no power struggles (um, yes…I AM aware that I live with teenagers, but I have faith…in something).

I have a quilt that’s been in pieces for a while now, since early April. It’s only got about 365 pieces in it, so it wouldn’t take long to iron…so tonight, I sorted the pieces to that end…

I’m hoping to have some time on Sunday to get them ironed together. Or even Monday. I’m trying to ignore the 160 journals in my classroom that need grading, as well as the two periods’ worth of tests I still haven’t graded. Grrr. Ignore. Yes, this quilt only has FOUR boxes of pieces, instead of TWENTY-ONE. It’s not complicated…on purpose. Apparently I also need to make another smallish quilt with no nudity or violence (um. hmn. ok…)…apparently soonish. Whatever that means. We’ll see how that goes. Summer looms. I’m apparently not teaching summer school (they rejected most of us, so I don’t feel bad)…so maybe I’m going to get a seasonal job at Home Depot. We’ll see.

Then I spent a little time cutting pieces out…

Still forever away from finishing…

Honestly, I have an early hike tomorrow, plus I’m camping, so I had to pack a bunch of stuff for that, and I really should get my butt in bed. Like now. But because I SHOULD, my brain is balking and wanting to stay up late, like the immature little brat it can be. Anyway. I think I can persuade it that sleep is a better choice than trolling the internet…although trying to persuade it that it’s not OK to stay up all night making art is a little bit more difficult. It’s a recalcitrant beast.

Seriously…

I have that weird weather throb in my head again. It’s been there for two days now, as the weather flip flops around from hot to cold. It means monster headaches. It means taking all the Motrin I had in my purse yesterday and gulping it all down and actually calendaring Get More Motrin on my phone so I wouldn’t forget to restock my purse stash before school today, because today we are doing microscopes and heads might roll. Seriously.

Yeah. So I’m having issues balancing blood sugar again and now I know it is at least partially (if not completely) hormonal, which sucks, because I can’t control that. So I’m having to remember to pack extra food that isn’t high in calories but will keep me from passing out at inopportune times, like when I’m teaching or driving. I’m hoping when I get out the other side of menopause that it all calms back down to the semi-normal level of blood-sugar-tending that I had to do before all this, because this is just annoying. I get so paranoid about food. You have to be obsessive about it. I envy people who just eat whenever they like, whatever they like, and don’t have to think about what it will do inside you, or worry that I’m having to go to 2 meetings after school and I need to prepare for that like I’m going camping or something. Like there will be NO Food Available (and certainly there’s the issue of you can bring food but we won’t let you eat it in here, which has been an issue in the past…I just argue medical necessity).

I don’t feel very organized at the moment, either at home or at school. Both places have too much going on and I’m getting overwhelmed. Deep breaths. Make lists. Calendar shit. Pick your battles.

So I should have graded tests last night, and I didn’t. I always have to look at the overwhelmed feelings and try to figure out what’s going to be best for me tonight. Is more grading going to make the difference? Or does it need to be exercise and meditation and artmaking? The latter is winning most nights, at least some combination of those. It’s been difficult lately to find time for all three, especially since I’ve been working really hard on getting more sleep…even an extra half hour or so a night I think will make a difference. It seems like every two or three nights, my brain pitches a fit and doesn’t want to sleep. I don’t even go to bed until my brain has capitulated, decided that the idea of sleep is not a heinous thing. I don’t want to lie awake, letting it wander. That’s when I end up back in the pit.

This morning, I woke up with the alarm, screaming in my head, “Stop it, Fuck off, Go away!” Um. OK. And adrenaline surging. Not a good way to wake up. I have no idea what was going on in my head. I was watching The Americans while I cut out pieces last night. I’m reading The Fall of Hyperion. Neither seemed relevant to the dreaming. I wanted to draw last night…maybe I should have (ran out of hours, minutes, seconds).

I only cut stuff out for 47 minutes. See, when you’re thinking about how much I get done, realize that most nights, I get an hour in. That’s it. I don’t spend a ton of time a day (wish I could). Less than an hour last night…which is why it still looks like this…

There is still a lot to cut out. I’m 9 hours into the cutting. I had estimated 12. I think I’m wrong. Who knows…but certainly I spent a good chunk of that time cutting pieces out that looked like this…

Yup, that’s full on crazy. Those are the outer parts of the octopus suckers. Technical term. Holy crap. I think they really are just called suckers. If you’re in the mood for sorta irreverent sciencey talk about octopus suckers, yet highly educational irreverence, go here. I’m not really sure how I ended up with the science leaning. Coming out of college, I was pure literature and art. There’s some really cool vocabulary in that article though, like ‘infundibulum.’ Yesterday, I taught my students ‘endoplasmic reticulum’ and told them to pull THAT out at dinner time. Earlier this year, I taught them ‘vex’ and ‘irk.’ They’re still using those words. I love that I have taught 160 middle-schoolers to say “You VEX me,” instead of all those other lame words they use.

Which reminds me, someone told me this weekend that my use of the word “DUUUDE” guaranteed my California residency (I was not actually born in California…born in an Alaskan military hospital to two California parents though).

Anyway. Another hour of cutting stuff out and I might have had some mental balance, but I had to consider the sleep component as well.

Midnight was a worthy couch companion…

She misses her mommy at night and harasses me instead.

If I’m at the computer, I get Babygirl (stupidest name EVER)…

who insists on sitting ON the mouse, or IN FRONT of the screen, or trying to drink my tea or eat my oatmeal. And then she gets all pissed off if you don’t pet her at the same time. Try resizing photos when she’s sitting there. It’s impossible.

I wanted to clear out a couple of posts-in-progress last night on hikes and Earth Stories, but girlchild needed my computer to write an essay (the computer she uses is apparently barely functional at the moment, which is unfortunate, because I’m not able to get a NEW one…she can use her brother’s when he gets his graduation laptop, whenever that happens). Then she asked for my advice, which is like asking someone to tell you if your butt is big, when you ask a writing mom with a Comparative Literature degree about your intro paragraph and she actually tries to help you, but you’re an emotional 16-year-old and holy god, why did I even open my mouth, because there were tears and it was not pretty. I should have just told her that her butt looked big. It would have been less traumatic. For both of us.

Remind me never to talk again. Seriously. I’m done with it.

Earth Stories: Sticking It Together

My continuing saga of how the Earth Stories quilts came together…

Once the pieces are trimmed, I iron them all together. I do this by putting the original drawing right-side up on the ironing board and putting an applique press sheet on top. You can see the lines through the sheet, so I pull the paper backing off the pieces one at a time, line them up, overlap them where necessary, and iron them down.

On a quilt this big, I needed multiple sheets going at a time…the quilt is 72″ wide and the sheets aren’t.

I try to iron big sections together, but not necessarily all the pieces. I need room for adjustment later when I go to iron it down to the background.

When I have super-small pieces, like in the skeletons, I often don’t cut those pieces out until I’m ready to iron them. Otherwise, I lose them. I’m not sure WHERE I lose them…it’s like that extra sock you can never find. Sometimes I find them two quilts later, a randomly numbered piece that has no home. So sometimes during this stage I have to redraw and recut a missing piece.

If I can get away with it, I just make a note about the missing piece…they often show up later in a different bin.

This section below has about 250 tiny pieces in it. It was a little crazy.

Oh yeah. This was also crazy. There was a lot of crazy with this quilt. It might have been funny if it weren’t so crazy.

Earth Mother’s face coming together…and her heart. Her heart didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted. I remembered that when I did the next heart.

And here’s the main character in the dream bubble…

I actually divided the sky in half, but ironed both halves on the same fabric…

Did I mention crazy? This is corn. I’m not sure in the end product that it was worth the level of crazy that I drew, but there it is.

You can see the little corn tassels and leaves above ready to be ironed. If you ever see this quilt in person, please appreciate the corn.

Then I pieced the (huge) background and laid it out on my entryway floor…which it filled. My mom’s entryway is bigger, so I have done this at her house too. If I ever move, I will need one big empty floor…

I lay the pieces out on the background and make them fit together. This is sometimes a really long and painful process. The dream world bubble was all one piece at this point…much easier to deal with.

You can see I had the Earth Mother figure divided into three main pieces…top, bottom, and belly.

Here’s most of it in place. I iron it down, best I can on a lumpy tile floor…I just need it all to stick together long enough to get it to the ironing board. Did I mention this is 72″ square? Yeah.

And then I transfer it to my ironing board and spray each section with water (hoping fabrics don’t run) and put the heat on for 30 seconds at least, trying to get all the layers to fuse down.

It took almost 31 hours to iron this sucker together. I worked from July 11-31. I should add that I was going through a significantly traumatic event while this was happening, so I know I wasn’t working very well or efficiently. Technically you’d call my mental state shock. So I guess I should be impressed that I can create anything while in shock, although this task is really just about getting it done, not about being creative. An assistant could probably do this part. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing to distract me from the other crap, but I had a really hard time doing that well. I really didn’t care if it got done or not, except that I had committed to make the quilt for the exhibit, and I’m usually pretty good about commitments like that. I’m not a flaky artist. So I did it. It was, honestly, something to do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months…just making the art, even though it doesn’t feel good…there are other things that feel worse, and this seems to occasionally make me feel at peace…so I keep doing it.

But just looking at that piece lying on the floor brings back how awful I was feeling. I would get out of bed, trudge down the hallway, sigh deeply, and just keep going. Every day. That’s not a life. But it’s the life that birthed this quilt.

Next post, stitching it all together.

What’s That About…

I mentioned that I had some drawings pop up in my head in the last few days. One has actually been popping in and out for about a month. It thinks it wants to be the equality quilt that has to be done by November, but I’ve already told it that it’s not what I want, it’s not appropriate. It’s interesting, because I had picked gender equality, because that’s a big issue for me, always has been, and the image that’s popping up is not a good one…and I really do believe gender equality is possible…eventually. But some shit needs to change. The boychild is an editor on the newspaper at his high school and one of the writers (female) wrote an article about why we need feminism, and there was nothing new or earth-shattering in this article, being as it was written by a teenaged girl who hadn’t really experienced much of anything, but she obviously knew the code words and the issues…but another student (apparently) at the school wrote a comment, a huge long diatribe against feminism and women, claiming she was a 17-year-old female, showing enough knowledge of the school that our guess is that it’s the PARENT of a student, but because of some of the stuff in the comment, they can’t post it online as is (because if they could, me, my SIL, and half my friends would be commenting on her ass, for sure). The assumption is that every women CAN have whatever she wants, that nothing gets in the way of that, but then some stuff about being a proper wife (oh dear, well, I’ve blown that…in fact, I can’t even be a proper girl, or woman, in her terms…and I’m so totally OK with that).

So I need my drawing to be on the good side, the positive side of what gender equality is going to look like, because I have to believe that can exist, despite some of the shit I’ve seen throughout my 47 years (as she wrote about her vast experience of 17 years). So that drawing…it will happen, but the bad version of it might need to happen first. The one where despite what people SAY, they still believe in the lame divisions of who does what, with no understanding of the work involved or the assumptions behind it. If you want me to cook for you dammit, then pick a meal and go buy the supplies, and THEN we can have a discussion…don’t drop all that shit into the lap of someone who cooks all the time and thinks of it as just more work when she is already overwhelmed…do you know how many nights I make TWO dinners, one for tonight and one for the next night? Cooking is not my friend.

On Saturday’s hike, someone (male) slapped my ass. I didn’t say much…not sure what his assumption was, but I refrained from saying something…well…rude, honestly…but it certainly reframed the conversations we’d had over the last two hikes. Women in general will talk about almost anything on hikes…I talked with women about hiking, knee surgery, hysterectomies, teaching, raising children, artmaking, sleep, hormones, allergies, the view, hiking again, shoes (hiking, not the other, plus sandals for post-hiking), diabetes, and food…and that was just today. The men? Always a different conversation. We never know what they do for a living, unless we ask (women tend to drop this info quickly and easily). We don’t know whether they have kids half the time (they rarely talk about their children…we talk about our kids constantly). They appear to have no lives. They probably would say they come on these hikes to get AWAY from their lives, but you know that shit follows you…you might as well let it out.

So if he slaps my ass again, I will probably have to say something, but I’ve learned enough from dealing with middle-school kids that I have two routes: embarrass the crap out of him (burn! as my students say), which is sometimes effective, or grab him on his own and explain that I don’t like it. Either way, I am now that feminist, eh? And I’m OK with that. So my dad and I had a conversation about that and he said there were some women who slapped his ass (which he does NOT mind, the old lech), which I think is just as bad, personally, unless you know the person well and this is part of your interaction with them. I don’t know this guy well. And that’s my ass. So get off of it.

Sigh. There I go being all confrontational again.

So instead of drawing gender equality last night, I drew one version of the bathtub that’s been in and out of my head since I saw Frida Kahlo’s version…

reminded of George Bush’s version (it scares me that I keep remembering art that George made)…

and it’s not done, and I don’t even think it’s right, but it is. She needs a head though.

There’s a lot more that needs to go into the picture. I need at least a half a page above this one. It’s funny…I remember being in 4th or 5th grade, Mrs. Westcott was my teacher, and she was an artist on the side as well…in fact, my parents have a portrait of me that she drew, pastels I think? Anyway, she would get so frustrated with my inability to stay ON the page. My drawings, paintings, etc. always fell off the page. My tree trunks would extend so far up the paper that there was just the bottom part of the leaves showing. I distinctly remember her pointing that out to me, and telling me I needed to look at the page and try to FIT on it. Didn’t happen. I need paper that extends automatically. Anyway. I drew. That’s the real point. It felt good. It’s such a good place to be in my head when I’m drawing. Everything else goes away.

That woman standing in the bathtub…she was a skeleton when I saw her for the first time in the drawing Saturday. Before that, when I saw this drawing, she wasn’t there at all. So I’m not sure what that’s about.

I had another low-blood-sugar event yesterday, the first since I went off the apparently offending medication. It was a strange one, too, and I’m starting to pin these occurrences on hormones instead of anything else…I was feeling nauseous but knew I needed to eat, so I had some fruit with frozen yogurt about 30 minutes before, and then it crashed…which makes no freakin’ sense. Basically I ate pure simple sugars there, and my body flipped out. Sigh. So I logged it and dealt with the ensuing exhaustion that follows, and the blood sugar came back, but it just annoys me that I do everything I’m supposed to and it still doesn’t behave. Story of my life.

So I didn’t get much cutting done, because I drew instead (plus I graded a ton of papers, which I really needed to do)…

But there are the bins…some slightly fuller, one slightly less full. It’s not a short process…it takes for-freakin’-ever, basically. I had hoped to be done cutting out last week, though, and you’d think with having a full day off for fires I could have pulled that off, but my brain and I don’t always agree, so I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to. I do have a goal for this weekend, though, so I should get that set up (means sorting pieces into bins again…that’s a truly boring part of artmaking). But before all that, apparently I have to be a ~~good citizen~~ ~~mommy~~ responsible adult and go to work.

Kinda Stuck

I spent a lot of time in my head yesterday, partially because I was on a LONG kick-your-butt hike where I was hiking by myself for a goodly amount of time (not fast enough to be with the front group and not slow enough to be with the back group), and also because it’s Saturday and I usually spend long swathes of time by myself on Saturdays these days. Some people tell me to fix that, because yes, I do find it depressing to be in my head that much, I should go out with friends to dinner or movies or just to hang out, and I do have those options, but you know what? I’m an introvert. Yes. I teach middle-school kids all day and I’m an introvert. It doesn’t mean I don’t like people…I do OK with them most of the time, although you have to be the right kind of person for me to get really close to you, but I can talk to just about anyone (as evidenced on these hikes). What it means is that too much interaction with people and I need to recharge. I need quiet mental space with a book or music or my art and I need it on a regular basis, like every day, and sometimes for many hours. I can handle my kids and close family, but more than that and I feel like I’m exerting energy I don’t even have any more. It’s exhausting. Because yes, the depression steals some of my ability to cope in social situations. It gets used up faster.

So I actually need those evenings/afternoons/mornings where I’m not expected to be a certain way or put out a certain amount of interaction…but because of how my life is at the moment, most of those moments are now alone moments and my brain reacts to those badly.

I’m a fairly self-reflective person (not with mirrors all over me…that would be funny…oh shit, that’s the THIRD drawing that’s popped into my head in the last 24 hours. That was a plus of all the hiking alone time yesterday. I did a whole drawing in my head…now to get it on paper), so I spend a lot of time (possibly too much) thinking about what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, and how to make it better. Yesterday’s notes to myself: When depressed, don’t watch movies where babies die unexpectedly. Also grocery stores on Saturday night are depressing. Always. Knock it off. Go another day. I don’t care how convenient it is because you have nothing else to do. I don’t care if you feel you HAVE to go Saturday because Sunday is a clusterfuck schedulewise. Find some other chore that needs doing so you’re not perusing the vegetables at 7 PM on Saturday when all you can think of is what you would have been doing then a year ago. A year ago doesn’t exist any more. Move on.

Yeah. Brain and I are not getting along at the moment. I think some of it is because there are still a couple of really high-stress things in my life that need to get handled this week, and they are overwhelming me, so I’m not handling the rest of life well.

Anyway. So I hiked yesterday, a really long hike, and my body is complaining today, but I managed yesterday to NOT have to take a nap (good). And yes, I went to the store (bad). But then I needed to do some cutting out of fabric, because I was too tired Friday night to do that after searching for about an hour for the title on my old car, which needs to be sold. So that now requires a DMV trip, which would be fine if they’d let me make an appointment, but they won’t at the local one, and I can’t get to the nonlocal one in time after school. Bastards.

I have the bins all set up on the couch…

I’m still working on using my new camera well…it’s fussy. There is a black cat in the back of that photo, but you can’t see her at all. The bin on my lap (which you can’t see) has all the trimmed-off trash pieces in it. The bigger bin to the right of me has all the pieces I need to cut out, and then the bin just past it has all the cut-out pieces. Usually there’s a cat somewhere in there too…eventually she moved to the couch behind my head (where she likes to be, because I reach back and pet her occasionally). I use an app (Task Measure) on my phone to record how long I spend each day on each part of making the quilt.

I cut stuff out for a couple of hours, putting me up to 7+ hours on this part of the quilt.

This is the stuff I still haven’t cut out…so the pile is getting smaller, but it’s still pretty big.

I get frustrated with some of the pieces because they’re so tiny (see all the skeleton bones, long skinny pieces?)…some I don’t cut out until later, so I don’t lose them, but these are big enough. These are all the pieces I’ve cut out so far.

So I’m getting there…both with the quilt pieces and with my life, although the latter does seem stalled in place at the moment. There’s some step I need to take but can’t. I know what I want but can’t deal with what I’ll have to do to get there. Don’t have the mental energy, the desire even to go there. So I will be stuck with the quiet Saturday nights for a long while, I think…I can’t really financially afford to be going out and doing stuff anyway, so that doesn’t help. I think sometimes you just have to accept where you’re at and that at some point in the future you might be able to make a change. I don’t like that waiting stuff, though, but until my brain figures out how to come out of the cave/pit/hole/whatever the hell it is that it lives in right now and stay OUT, I’m kinda stuck.