Ironing Like a Beast…

Sometimes stuff pisses me off.

I know you’re shocked by that.

But when it does, I do what my counselor always tells me: take care of yourself. Do something nice for yourself. Now with a normal female, that might mean a pedicure or shopping for a new skirt or chocolate. Eh. I make art. So when life conspired to punch me in the face yesterday, and I was sitting there, grading shit, still grading shit, always grading shit, hands shaking, so angry and upset and frustrated that I was about to cry, I took a deep breath, set a line for the end of the feeling and grading of shit, and decided to make art for most of last night.

Well, except, I also needed to sleep. So I did that too.

I kicked some ironing ass last night. But before I did, I started sorting all the recycled pieces from Mariah’s quilts for the second piece in Diverted Destruction 8, which opens June 27 in Los Angeles, by the way. I figure I’m going to need them grouped together instead of piled on the floor in the living room if I ever want to make a quilt out of them. Here’s pink sorted and purple piled…

And here I am working on the green.

Blue is mostly done. I did it while I had pneumonia. Sitting on the floor was doable then. So I have a few more colors to sort, and then I’m done with that. It’s overwhelming to sort these, so it’s better if I just do a little each day. I don’t have very much of most colors, so that makes it more difficult…lots of squares and triangles and strips…but that’s what this show is about. How do we take stuff that normally would get tossed out or put aside, and then turn it into art.

THEN I started ironing like a beast…this is all the flesh in the Ventura quilt…

There isn’t much, because remember? No nudity, no politics, no violence. So she’s mostly covered. Her face and hands show, and her shoulders. And there’s bits of flesh showing behind things. But that’s it. So to iron the flesh colors, I had to pull pieces from the 300s, which is where I’m at, all the way through the 700s. So now I don’t know how far I am, except that I have 7 hours in. When did that happen?

And then I pulled fabrics for the great blue heron that makes up her left arm…

Grays and blues, but the blue in the wings had to show up on the background, so that was a challenge. So now it has some purple in it. I’m OK with that. The idea of the heron will be there. And I picked some really interesting wing-feather fabric. Had to fussy cut the bits I wanted, because it goes all over the place into pink and I didn’t want that. Much. There’s some turquoise in there too. I left a little of that.

Anyway, so that got me to the end of the 300s, but half that wing was in the 400s (all the pieces from 435-485, basically…who numbered this thing?), so again, no idea how far along I am, but maybe have something over 500 pieces ironed? Maybe halfway? It doesn’t look like halfway, but what do I know? It must be halfway. I spent 2 1/2 hours ironing last night and then had a very hard time stopping. Made myself stop. Still tired this morning though…here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far…

You can see the fleshy run and the heron is all on the left. Next up is sunflowers I think…and then a cat? Or the heart. Not sure. Yes, she’s covered in plants and flowers, but there’s still a giant anatomical heart. This is all for a show where I have to jury in, by the way. So I might not get in. And I will only have one entry, because every single other piece I have has nudity, politics, or violence (or all three) in it. Sigh.

Here’s pieces ready to be cut out…filling up the box.

Two weeks until Spring Break…and I’m still on schedule. Miraculous.

Here’s a chair that Kitten has destroyed…

And now inhabits. I’m not fixing it until she’s gone. There’s no point, unless I use bulletproof fabric…and I’m not even sure that would stand up to Kitten claws.

Luckily, she leaves my fabric stash alone.

Not Thinking Too Hard…

I brought home 119 science packets last night, the last unit we completed. I had already graded 21 of them at school, one small class’ worth, but I really need to finish the rest over the weekend. Funny, this is the smallest number of students I have ever had (maxed out at 190 one year), but I still can’t balance the grading. You take a weekend off or you schedule it so everything is due at once, and all of a sudden, there’s an avalanche. I just started my 14th year of teaching, and I still can’t find a best practice on that part of the job.

So I sat there for about three hours…and I got through 68 of them. The pile on the right is done…

The pile on the left is still staring at me…balefully. I watched a bunch of TV to drag me through it, and I got faster and faster (which is why sometimes it’s better to just bully through and do ALL of it at once, because once you’re on a roll, you DO get faster and faster). I stopped and made dinner in the middle (girlchild blew me off for yet another Friday night…whatever), and at around 10 PM, I quit. I have my smallest class and my largest class left. It’s easier to grade the good students, because everything is there, complete, and in order. The ones that kill me are the kids who don’t put anything in order and put random stuff in there (one kid stapled a field trip permission slip in there…guess it made it look more full). Sigh. Worst part of my job…well, besides navigating politics and administrators.

Anyway. I was exhausted by then, but in true Kathy fashion, I don’t ever let that stop me from making art. OK. Sometimes I do. But not last night. Just grading all night and not doing something for me makes me cranky. So I dragged myself into the office and looked at what was next to be ironed. And remembered I needed to do a label for the quilt that sold, so I did that first. By the way, the second Catching Cancer is available, if anyone’s interested…

It’s 10 1/2″ w x 12 3/4″ h, $140. Let me know.

And then I started looking at elephant pieces. Teensy weensy wrinkles and eyeballs and lots of gray gray gray, which can be blue-ish or yellow-ish or brown-ish. Grays annoy me. I use them all the time. I love gray. But it drives me nuts. If I were really anal-retentive obsessive compulsive, all my grays would be sorted by their base color and I wouldn’t have to search all through a million bins trying to find the RIGHT gray (I never have the RIGHT gray. I am always buying more gray). So I needed a run of 7 fabrics for the elephants, because they are standing in front of each other, so you have to think about that.

Well, YOU don’t. I do.

There’s only three elephants, but they take up about 100 pieces of Wonder Under…

And I had to add fabrics for eyes and tusks. Here they are all laid out. The old Wonder Under is releasing like crazy. The new stuff is fucking awesome. It doesn’t release and the paper comes off like a dream. The only issue I’m having is that my iron is getting stuff stuck to it from the old Wonder Under, and I can’t get it clean enough, and that is having an issue with the paper of the new Wonder Under, which is really plasticky. I didn’t read the instructions (ha! never do…), so maybe I need to reduce the heat. Or clean my iron better.

It took about an hour to iron all the elephant pieces down…

The next thing on the ironing list is an apple tree with the tiniest pieces ever…because some crazy woman thought that was a good idea. Then I move onto HUGE pieces of body parts and bird wings. I might need to go gray/white shopping. Seriously. There’s a huge heron wing in there, so I have to figure out what color that is. Blue gray? Maybe?

Underneath my feet while I iron…

She was very tired. So was I at the end of it…girlchild came home way too late (apparently clocks are so passé). By then, I was sitting again (so tired yesterday…couldn’t stand to stand and iron for long), working on the binding, which has to get done today, so I can get it photographed tomorrow. Boom! Then I need to start the other recycled piece.

It’s good to be finishing these and moving on. I’m not enjoying the Have-To’s on the quilt front as much as I enjoy the Want-To’s, but those Have-To’s get into shows, and right now, with my rejection rate on the stuff I LIKE to make, if I’m going to be in shows, I have to cater a bit to whatever the hell it is they think they want. I can’t try to figure out why the stuff I really want to make, the stuff I enjoy, why it’s not getting into shows…unless it’s an invitational, so they don’t see it beforehand. I just have to move on and try to balance the stuff I really like with the stuff I need to make for whatever reason…paying the bills, participating in a group show. It is what it is. And I do actually think this Ventura quilt will be cool in the end…even though I really had to fight my own inclinations to get it drawn.

All right…I’m sewing that damn binding on now. Obviously I am Thinking Too Hard.

Catching Cancer

My students sometimes think all diseases are contagious, even cancer, and you have to explain that some things are genetic, or inherited, and some things are mutations, like cancer, which can be caused by things like smoking or UV radiation, but can also be somewhat random, and then there are the things that are contagious. But for a while, I always have a group of some kids who must have cotton balls in their ears who think not only that rocks are alive, but that you can catch cancer from the kid sitting next to you. They also think Mountain Dew can keep your sperm from getting a girl pregnant, so keep that in mind.

I drew these hands because…this is convoluted, but this is how my brain works too, so hang with me…I was doing the FFAC donation quilt, which benefits cancer research, and I was flailing for ideas, so I took my sketchbook to my monthly stitching meeting with two creative minds, so I could try to get something down. They talked a lot about ideas and I did some weird sketches, and I don’t think I did the final FFAC drawing until later, but they did try to help. Because of that, one of them, who is a breast-cancer survivor, sent me a link the following day to some breast-cancer cells, which honestly, I had never closely looked at, and they are freaking spiky scary-looking beasts.

So I was sitting in a bar later that week (like you do), waiting for a friend to show up, and I started drawing these things…in a hand. And I couldn’t tell if the hand was catching it or letting it go or just being spiked all to hell by it…

And later I did another drawing…

And then two people showed interest in those. So I made them into quilts…this is Catching Cancer 1…

(10″w x 11″ h) And I should admit that I screwed up when I traced the Wonder Under on this one, which is why it’s reversed.

And here is Catching Cancer 2…

(10 1/2″ w x 12 3/4″ h) Which I finished Wednesday night? Yes. After the banquet. When my brain wandered off into depresso world.

It only took that long because I was sick for most of February. And the first one is already sold. The second one? Maybe. There was interest, so I am waiting to hear.

I’m lucky in that my DNA has not mutated into these spiky fuckers (they really are terrorful things), although y’all know I’ve had more mammograms than your average 40-some-year-old due to some weird shadow beast who lurks in my left breast. I was glad to make these, glad they will find good homes.

Now I just need to finish all THIS stuff…

So I can get onto the OTHER stuff I need to get done. Tonight? After gym and grading, maybe I will be able to function well. Not the last two nights, although last night, I had to create an assignment and a webpage for school today. Someone needs to tell Google that teachers don’t want to make assignments at the last minute. Give us a scheduling button, you dumbasses. All I can think is that they don’t know how to schedule themselves. So yeah, I was working at 11:30 PM last night. Do you hear that politicians? Huh?

Yeah. Moving on. Survive school. Make art. Maybe sometimes sleep.

Fighting a Mood

I think I started yesterday’s post with Oh Holy Hell. Or did I? I was sick yesterday apparently. No really. I was. Ran a fever and everything. It was strange. Woke up nauseous as hell, ran a fever, fine today. I do not understand. I feel like I have completely lost touch with my immune system. Or for that matter, my reproductive system. Possibly my nervous system as well. Digestive? Fuck. HELLO BODY. Please come in. There is no connection. We need to re-establish communication here.

So seriously, need to get back to exercising and hiking and the gym. She says, as she looks at this week’s calendar and snorts Cheerios out her nose. Huh. Good intentions.

So after I lolled around on the couch yesterday afternoon, feeling like crap, tired as hell, supporting a cat’s claws with my fleshy bits, I eventually dragged myself up and did the stupid independent study contract I needed to do for the kid who will be gone for two weeks before Spring Break but who already does no work, so I spent an hour making this thing for him and he probably won’t do more than half of it, if that, based on his current grade. Dear Politicians: I didn’t get paid for that time, but I did it anyway.

Then I finally got my act together and started picking out fabrics…well, I started with laying Wonder Under out…

Which requires almost zero brain power, and yet I fucked it up. I love it when I recut a complicated piece and then find it later in the wrong pile. Did I tell you I was running a fever? I was. Piece 29 was down in the 70s. No idea why. I didn’t actually get very far…

Fewer than 100 pieces ironed…the flames kind of discombobulated me. I couldn’t figure my own drawing out. (FEVER!) Here’s what I’ve used so far…

There were a lot of clouds and snow. It was good to get started though. It will be easier to keep going now…momentum you know. It keeps you moving. Science!

At some point, though, I was too tired to stand. Or sick. Hard to know. So I sat and sewed bindings for a while…

Yes, I used kiddie fabric on the back of the cancer hands. It was happy fabric. I used it to make baby quilts. I think we should totally fight breast cancer with baby quilts. (No, I’m not fucking delirious. Why do you ask? The fever is completely gone this morning.)

I finished the smaller one.

Then I started the larger one and went to bed. Perchance to sleep. Until 5:30 AM, when the girlchild came in and told me she was sick. (no fever) And then I couldn’t go BACK to sleep. Sleep is such a THANG for me at the moment. I never get enough, even when I try to get enough.

So I have some other random stuff here, like this video from IQF Houston last November…this was the official video they took…

It’s pretty much the same as what Margaret Fabrizio posted (because she was standing there recording me while I did this one!). But you should go check out their other videos. I will…when I have time…I swear! They will just keep playing in a row, so if you’re standing there ironing fabrics, like I might be some time this week (looks at schedule again and chokes up with laughter), you could just watch all of them one after another. Though that might be more quiltspeak than you can handle.

And then there was this…the cats who hate each other…

I was sitting between them, but they stayed when I extracted myself and did not hiss at each other.

Cat in a box. All the cats have been in this box. It’s in the window in my studio, right behind the sewing machine. Apparently it is the best cat place ever.

I do not know why this cat tolerates this…

I delivered a quilt yesterday, so I had to put a label on it, dehair it, and provide sticks of hanging.

It’s a good thing I had that yesterday, because I got rejected from two shows in three days. I’m on a fucking roll! Whatever. While I was dropping it off, I was checking out the gallery space where me and one other artist will be hanging our dual show in January. So big fat whatever, right? Sigh. I don’t know what to think about all the rejections. Oh well. Move on. It’s not like I’m going to stop making art all of a sudden. I’m way too stubborn for that.

Yeah. I’m fighting a mood. I’m sure I’ll come out of it soon.

That Was Easy

Well, if you have a shitty day at work, then it’s easy to come home (after watching a soccer game) and say to yourself that you are done with your job for the day. There was a brief moment of guilt when I considered that I really should grade tests or extra credit or something, but then my art brain took over and explained how I had already used up THIS much energy on work today, and I wasn’t required to use up any more…so move on, little doggie, and make you some art.

Then there was the question of which project to work on, but I’ve got the Ventura quilt on my mind, kicking me in the frontal lobe, Hey! Get me done! Put me on the priority list! You don’t need to clean the house! I’m more important! So I cut out little pieces of Wonder Under while sitting on the couch with the girlchild, watching the same episodes of House that I’ve seen three or four times…until I finished. Wait. I finished. That was easy. I wasn’t expecting to finish cutting them out last night. But I said about 2 1/2 hours and it was just under two. Six hours and 17 minutes total…so not that far off the other one.

And it wasn’t super late…so I set up for sorting…

One bin for each 100 pieces…you know, it’s funny. I have this procedure now that I use with every quilt, and I don’t remember when or how I came up with it…I mean, at some point, I must have been sitting there with a few hundred pieces of Wonder Under (back in the day when I didn’t make quilts with over 2000 pieces?) and thought, how can I better organize this? It’s been so long, I don’t remember starting to do that. But now I have bins that are numbered, so I just go hunt down (in this case) bins 0-8 and lay them out and start…

Believe it or not, this quilt isn’t that complicated, so it was less than an hour. It’s funny that a 900-piece quilt is one I consider pretty easy to do at this stage in my art career. It’s big, but not huge. The one I’m planning for over the summer…I think I will be saved by the size restriction on it. Otherwise, it would have a million pieces in it.

Anyway, I’m ready for the next stage…fabric choice! Except I don’t have a background picked out yet, and that’s what I don’t usually have in my stash. I don’t know if I have time today to get a background…probably not, because she’s only open to 5 PM and I have dance practice (don’t laugh. It’s a long story, mostly unbelievable if you know me well enough) until 4:30 or so. Huh. So tomorrow probably, after school. I could do that. I should probably measure the drawing, though, so I know how much to get.

Exciting! I like the fabric part. The studio/office is a bit of a mess though, so I’ll have to deal with that too.

And complicating my schedule, as always, is soccer. Girlchild’s high school team was in the CIF (state) semifinals last night…

They started with this lineup that included the 9- and 10-year-old club players who hopefully will be future high-school players, which was cute. Apparently we were on TV too (local TV station).

It was a tense game against a team we had tied against before…

A very physical game…

Like check out the legs…

By the end of the second half, it was tied 1-1, and it stayed that way until the last 20 minutes of the game, when we got our second goal…

And under the light of the full moon, managed to keep the lead. There was a lot of screaming. This is the first time they’ve made it this far, and the finals are Saturday night. Not my favorite way to spend Saturday night, and I will have to stitch right through it to reduce the stress. Seriously…these games can shorten your lifespan if you don’t do something else while the girls play.

Anyway. It’s the last game of the high-school season…not to take a deep breath or anything, because the first tournament of the second half of the club season is two weekends later. Oh well. My trimester grades will be done by Saturday night…and worst-case? Her team comes in 2nd. Not a bad finish. And hopefully I’ll get some fabric ironed this weekend too (don’t think about having to grade tests and unit packets).

Poking at Me…

So apparently after mostly recovering from pneumonia (I’m still coughing on and off), exercise can kick your ass. I finally got back into it last night, and I needed a nap afterwards. This is proof of old age right there! It’s OK. It was a really long day already, and an occasional nap is not a bad thing. I can either nap in the late afternoon (OK, it was early evening), or I can stay up really late, or I can do both! Like last night.

It did mean I started dinner late and then I was working on grades, which went even later. I have five things that still need to go in the gradebook, but I’m not collecting two of them until tomorrow, and the other three will get handled on Friday. Luckily, they are not grading things…they are just calculations of stuff the kids are supposed to do all trimester, so it won’t take much time. I want to be done on Friday night. Seriously done. And I will be. I still need to grade makeup tests, which I hate doing, but whatever. And then on Wednesday, kids are handing in the last unit and taking a test, but those will go to the next trimester, because there’s no way I can grade them in time. I’m really trying to be organized!

I’m trying to be organized because the art…she calls me. I was reading entry forms on Saturday (trying to be organized again) and one blurb made an entire drawing just pop right into my head. That’s two that are residing up there. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to get them on paper. I keep thinking about it, but it takes mental energy and space to do that, and I haven’t found that yet. Last night, after dinner and grades, I had choices about what to do next: trim the two cancer hands and put bindings on them? Ugh. Sounds like decision-making. Finish quilting the upholstery nude? Ugh. Sounds tiring. OK, then there’s only one thing left (besides drawing, which I had already dumped off the table, due to a lack of available brain power): cutting out Wonder Under for the Ventura piece…

So that’s what I did. It was sufficiently brainless enough that I could handle it. Obviously, I had way more available brain power over the weekend (because I gave up on the grading?).

I also traced some stuff on freezer paper…

This is the piece I’m not allowed to show. In fact, I don’t know when I’m allowed to show it…it’s not my pattern anyway. This is what I work on at soccer games at the moment. I really should be finishing all those birds I’ve been working on for the last two years, but I haven’t been in the mood. The more tense the game is, the less I can do complicated embroidery. Just stitching bits of wool together seems to be all I can handle.

In other news, the girlchild should start hearing back from colleges in the next 2-4 weeks. No stress here! Seriously, I’m not looking forward to it…we know she’ll get in to a few of them at least, but then how does she choose? Hard to know…wait on the financial aid stuff, I think. The boychild really only had two choices…so it made it much easier.

Meanwhile, those two drawings in my head are poking at me like small children…hungry to be released. Maybe I should find a way to get one of them started today…or tomorrow…she says, looking at her calendar and all the shit that is piled upon it (metaphorical, vague shit…not actual shit). It’s possible I am overextended. As usual.

A Relatively Healthy Balance

I think I did an OK job this weekend of getting schoolwork done, but also feeding the art brain. There are only so many hours in the day, and stupid things like grocery shopping and laundry have to get done, but the remaining hours, they don’t all have to be about your job. I negotiated in my head…if I grade for the length of this TV show, then I will be able to work on art afterwards. That was Sunday. Saturday? Saturday I tried to grade, but got pissed off by some kid trying to cheat his way into a passing grade (because I’m an idiot and won’t catch him?), so I just stopped. I piled all the school stuff up, dumped my grading pens on top of it, and walked the fuck away from it. Because when you get to the point that you’re angry about it, it doesn’t help anyone to be grading kids’ papers. And yeah, I’ll get a bunch of kids FREAKING out this morning because I didn’t update their grade (because they handed everything in late?), but I will just fix my laser glare upon them and they will instantly stop their whining.

Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?

So I made art. And it looks like I did a lot, but really, it was only about 4 1/2 hours over the whole weekend (that’s not really a lot for me).

I pinbasted the upholstered woman (wait, that’s a better title than what I’ve been using so far)…

And then I panicked about actually quilting it. I bought some heavier thread for it, because I thought my regular quilting thread would sink into the upholstery too much, but I was worried about how my machine would handle it…so logically, I turned to something I knew I could do…the cancer hands. I outlined them first…

Which was a piece of cake and took very little time, despite those psychotic, spiky little breast cancer cells…

And then I was lucky to have a thread that worked with the background…seriously, I don’t have much of a thread stash…so I started doing the backgrounds as well.

And before I knew it, they were both done and it was time to head off for my daughter’s CIF soccer game…

They were first in their division, so they didn’t have to play earlier this week. Saturday they played in the quarterfinals…it was a tense game. I stitched a lot. I can’t show you any of it though because we’re not allowed to, which I find kind of irritating, but whatever. I do want designers to make money off their work, but we live in America, Land of We Think Everything Is Free for the Taking, so designers have to protect themselves. And then we’re back to the kid who was cheating in my class, the kid I have to deal with today, the kid who is going to deny it all.

ANYWAY. I stitched. They tied at the end, and you can’t tie, so they went into 15 minutes of overtime…all the while, it was supposed to rain on us, but it held off…

And with 3 minutes and 20 seconds to go, we scored the winning goal. Pro: we’re going to the semifinals! Con: we’re going to the semifinals! More soccer. More cold bleachers. More tense game-watching (more stitching?). It started raining as soon as I got in the car (thank you for that reprieve).

Sunday, I finally took a deep breath (after grading for a proscribed amount of time) and threaded my machine with the heavy thread and went for it…and at first thought it was going to be a giant clusterfuck…

The thread required many prayers to the Goddess of Unbroken Thread, although there are some interesting nests on the back of this quilt. I cleaned them up the best I could…I managed to get all the way around this beast before going to the parentals to cook dinner (girlchild was sick). Then I came back and miraculously had the right color of thread for the background…

which was way easier to quilt, a relief honestly. No super-slow stitching to persuade the machine to go through many layers of upholstery, no swearing as the thread shredded in the needle. Here’s the back…

I didn’t finish all the background quilting, because I remembered that going to sleep on a Sunday night at a reasonable hour makes the rest of the week easier to get through. I usually forget this by Wednesday or Thursday night, unfortunately.

So I’m hoping to trim and bind the two hands, plus finish quilting this one as well this week. I’ve also got a pile of Wonder Under to cut out (and grades for Trimester 2 to finish, but I almost have that under control). Perhaps I should thank that cheating kid for throwing my brain under the bus and forcing me to make art instead of finishing the grading. It all turned out OK, right? As long as I can stay on top of the rest of the grades this week…thanks to my teacher’s aide and my refusal to take any more makeup work, I should be fine.

My constant goal of a healthy balance between all the parts of my life…the art brain always wants more than it gets. I don’t blame it…it certainly is the first to suffer when there’s an issue like illness. But I feel pretty good about what I got done this weekend, so I think I’ll just hold on to that feeling for a while…until I need to motivate myself past the next big step.

Wonder Under Dreaming

Wonder Under dreaming…ten hours and 37 minutes of tracing Wonder Under, around 900 pieces (I didn’t number all of them, shockingly). I did the whole thing under the influence of pneumonia and rib-rattling coughing…starting February 17 and ending last night. I was obviously well and truly ill from the 19th through the 22nd, because nothing happened.

Here’s all but one yard, which I had already cut out…

So about 5 yards…most of it is the old stuff. One and a half yards is the new stuff, so I will apparently be performing a scientific experiment comparing the old to new on this quilt. I love that. (not really.)

I only have a little over 2 hours into the trimming of the Wonder Under though. I guess that’s this week.

It’s progress. I realized last night though that I needed one of the recycled pieces done (DONE) by April 1. Huh. That’s a month away. I can do that. I have one top ready to be sandwiched; I could do that today. And I bought some heavier black thread for the upholstery fabrics to quilt the outlining. Yes, I went to JoAnns. Hate that place. But I had a coupon. And otherwise, I have to buy Wonder Under online and ship it here. That’s expensivo. So I do the deed. I pull my numbered ticket and I stand there for-fucking-ever, waiting to tell them I want the whole bolt anyway, so they don’t have to cut anything, but I still have to wait in the fucking line. And then I go wait in the other long nasty line where they put all that crap on both sides of you, candy and shitty packages of socks and beads for Mardi Gras, just like at Michaels, and I think to myself, I hate this place, but I still go there, because it is what it is. Sales are more important than how shitty the store feels, I guess.

Then there’s this drawing that is fully realized in my head. My brain drew the whole damn fucking thing yesterday as I was driving to school. And I want to find the time and space (because you need mental space to draw) to get it out of my head, vomit it out onto the paper, but I have grading to do and I’m tired and still sick and kinda irritated today, which isn’t anyone’s fault, well except maybe the financial aid departments of all the colleges to which the girlchild applied, because why do you y’all have to be such giant pains in the ass? I mean really. This stuff makes my head hurt.

I entered another art exhibit last night. I didn’t think I’d have anything that would work for this show, even though the title and description are right up my alley…the size restrictions were part of the problem, and the rest of it is that so much of the recent stuff is already out traveling. But I found three that would work and went for it. Because why not? And then looked further out, the next 6+ months of big shows, and realized I needed to quit my stupid daytime job so I could make all the art I wanted to make.

Yeah. That’s not happening. I did ream my students yesterday for asking for MORE time to turn in late work. I said I wanted to have time with my daughter where I wasn’t grading papers. That I wanted to be able to sleep at night. That I wanted to go to her game this Saturday. That I was spending hours every night grading all their makeup work. That I was working way harder than they were. I’m done. Seriously. No more. This happens every year. There’s four weeks until Spring Break and the kids are mentally on vacation and I’m about to start the hardest unit of the year and I’m done. Another parent blows me off when their kid is doing nothing? Man. I just want to bring that kid home and feed him some real food and talk science to him, because he gets it, and then maybe after a year or so of my holding him accountable, maybe he’ll be the student he could be if he had someone around who gave a shit. And that’s what I told him yesterday when he said mom didn’t care: “You have 4 teachers right now who care, but we need you to care too. If you don’t care, we’re not going to waste our time. So you decide. Let me know.” And that’s the truth. He has that right now and it makes him alternately angry and full of hope, and he doesn’t know what to do with any of that. Neither do I, honestly. Neither do I.

That’s the reality of being a teacher. Dear politicians, y’all don’t know shit.

Calli. Such a doofus.

Yeah, so maybe I should make some art today and fuck the school crap. Because it’s messing with my head right now. I’m so frustrated with excuses and the reality of what I can get kids to do and the parents. I just can’t face it. I tried last night. I tried this morning. Better off losing myself in that Wonder Under dream…that place where I don’t have to think about what happens tomorrow or in April or this summer. Just cutting little pieces of fusible web out to make another scary Nida picture.

Or the other bathtub drawing. Yeah. Odalisque in Bloody Bathtub. Awesome name. Won’t ever get into a show. Whatever.

I Made Art…

Hey. I made art. I know. It’s exciting. No really, it is. Being sick sucks. Being sick and being an artist really sucks, because you still have to do laundry and cook and go to work…it’s the art that suffers. And it’s the stuff that keeps you sane, so then you get less sane. And you’re already sick, so that’s already a less-sane zone. Not good.

So last night was an artmaking clusterfuck, but I did better today. I sat at school a lot instead of my typical nine miles of wandering the classroom. I didn’t do another 12-hour workday. I actually remembered to eat breakfast, even though I still am not getting hungry like a normal person.

All I’m doing is tracing Wonder Under though…most boring pictures in the world…

But here’s the deal…I’m about 550 pieces in, so more than halfway. Only 350 to go. And I’ve been tracing for close to 7 hours, so I figure I’ve got another 4 at the most to go. So maybe by Friday night? It’s possible. I might be able to do it.

I did realize that this thing has about a million feathers…seriously, I’ve traced hundreds of feather pieces so far. There’s at least three birds, maybe more…the wings are good for filling in weird spaces. Plus birds are cool. Next, I’m tracing a cat. Can’t have a quilt without a cat in it. It doesn’t have feathers though.

See, I’m looking at Spring Break, which is now less than 5 weeks away, and my plan was to have this one ironed onto fabric and trimmed by Spring Break. PLUS, have the other recycled one at that stage too, if not further along. No, I’m not crazy…why do you ask? If you don’t make goals, you’ll never get anywhere. I don’t mind having goals that I don’t quite meet…I’ll be close (unless I get pneumonia again…remind me to get the damn shot next year).

To that end, I sat on the floor on Sunday (in my delirium yesterday, I totally forgot I had done this) and sorted blue fabrics.

Blue was the biggest pile. I sorted them by fabric pattern…Mariah had all these long strips and weird triangles and squares of all sizes (she pieces quilts), so sometimes all I have is a bunch of 2″ squares…but I could piece those and use them as one piece, like I did with the other one. I still have a bunch of other color piles in there, but for some reason, the blue was the scariest. (It was the biggest, by far.) So I started with it. Only 10 more piles to go. Ha! Once I’ve cut out the other quilt, these will go into my regular stash to be used for a million more quilts…so that’s cool. She has some fabrics I have but in different colorways, and lots of fabrics I just wouldn’t buy, because I’m not making the same types of quilts that she is, but that’s a good thing. It stretches me…stretches my palette. I should let other people buy me fabric to make me work harder sometimes.

It’s good to do this. It gives me a place to bury my work frustration. As we near the end of the trimester, kids are panicking and trying to beg for grades. But if you blow off the entire trimester until three days before I close the gradebook? Um? There’s nothing you can do. I’m irritated by the whole process, and they know it.

And here’s how I know I’m really getting better…I had ideas for drawings today…lots of them. None of them are pretty, of course. Lots of stuff about being an old woman (I know, I’m not really old, but my body is being a brat and I wish it would lay off)…I need to find time to spend with my sketchbook and a nice black pen. It’s calling to me…the skritch scratch of the pen on the paper surface. The smear when it’s not quite dry. The look of the line, not quite not wobbly. I do love being an artist. I mean, it’s hard to be one and be everything else you have to be, but the fulfillment and satisfaction I get from making a piece, even from just completing a drawing…it’s amazing. It brings me peace. It calms the anger inside me. It curls up around me when I fall asleep. It soothes me when I’m sad. It makes me feel more…or maybe because I feel more, I am an artist…hard to say. Anyway. It’s a good thing.

Ramble Much?

I started this Sunday and then completely forgot about it.

I think the hardest thing for someone like me to do is to just stop and rest. I suck at it. I tried a little Saturday and Sunday, but I have so much stuff to do that I can’t do it for long…although I’d really like to take a nap right now. I’m writing right now in order to procrastinate going to the grocery store…because I don’t really feel up to that…and it doesn’t really matter, because I have to do it. If I were just taking care of me, I’d probably blow it off and go take that nap, but it’s never really just me, is it? So no, I didn’t take time off work, which might be why I kept getting sicker, but as a teacher, it’s really difficult to take time off work, especially if you have to come up with a lesson plan that furthers the content you’re already teaching, but that a non-science sub can actually handle, and that’s just not easy to do. So it’s a wasted day (or two or three), and then you’re behind, and I’m already behind because grades are due in about a week and a half, and I’ve spent two weeks falling asleep at inopportune moments (like right after work), which obviously I needed to do, but there’s no backup on the teacher’s job…there’s no one who’s trained to do your thing and handle your kids and take over until you get well again. You just bully through. So I’m taking my meds and coughing like a fiend and trying to boost my energy and immune system and take care of myself and feed the family and get grades done and not collapse.

Really, I should take that nap. Sigh. Or go to the grocery store and get it done and in the fridge and THEN take the nap. I don’t know. Ask for more help probably. Text the girlchild and ask her if she’ll help with the shopping. Maybe.

It’s now Tuesday. You might be wondering what happened? Well, I did nap…after the grocery store. And then I worked some more and fell asleep on the couch. Eventually made it into bed. Yesterday, Monday, I actually felt pretty good. I worked all day, went to another store for stuff they don’t have at my grocery store, then came home and worked (for hours) to get caught up. Then the toner cartridge died, and unfortunately, it was something I really needed, so I drove to the store, because my app said they had two in stock, and then they couldn’t find them. And once they found one (where some asshole had hidden it behind another one), they wanted to charge me $21 more than the website. Anyway. By the time I got home and got through all the crap that had to be done yesterday, because we have one student who is going to be gone for three weeks, so I had to plan out until Spring Break and then revise a bunch of stuff because she won’t actually be IN the classroom (oh my god), it was after 8 PM. Twelve-hour day. It’s OK. I came out of the dark dismal den that is my office (OK, it has fluorescent lights, so it’s not really dark, but it also has a very demanding cat who wants to stand in front of the computer screen and sit on the mouse, so I was beyond frustrated at that point), and I sat with the girlchild, who unfortunately has prom on her mind. I offered her my prom dress (which was my aunt’s prom dress, so circa 1956?), and she cried. OK, she didn’t. She might have if I had forced the issue. It’s a very nice dress. I can see why she doesn’t want to wear it, though, because if you look at current prom dresses, they are made for girls who are obviously going to swanky cocktail parties with the rich and famous (WTF?). I suggested more of her body might be covered than the one I saw her friend buying, which looked like a bra with suspenders holding up a long skirt. Yeah. I am so out of it.

Then I finally thought I could trace some Wonder Under.

I made 23 minutes. Pure exhaustion. OK. I’m listening. I made it to bed eventually after tracing a whopping 40 pieces (well, it’s 40 pieces I didn’t have the day before), and realized that normally I wouldn’t have put in that many work hours before…well…sometimes I do, it’s true…but it’s getting better.

Unfortunately, about 10 minutes into my trying to actually fall asleep before the dead of night (see, my body is exhausted, but my brain won’t play along), girlchild comes in to tell me about the bomb scare at their school (it’s becoming a regular occurrence in their district…no real bombs…just dumbass kids who don’t want to go to school) and how one of the coaches (who is probably now fired) sent out a text to all his players telling them about it. When she left for school this morning…yes, I am the MEAN mom who makes their child go to school with bombs…she grabbed a bunch of snacks in case they went on lockdown (she wasn’t a Girl Scout for long, but damn, I did train her well), and I told her I loved her and not to let the terrorists win. Sigh. She’s texting me from school (it hasn’t started yet), and nobody is there. Great, she can get some one-on-one instruction! Yes, I’m a little crazy. I do think we Americans panic easily though. I don’t know how on Earth our ancestors made it here and survived (well, I guess the first few batches didn’t) all the hardships here without panicking and running back to from whence we came. It seems like all the kick-ass survival instincts were bred out over the years.

So this is obviously a philosophical post. I could show another picture of the 40 pieces of Wonder Under I traced. Or not. I do have pictures from Senior Night for girlchild’s soccer…but apparently WordPress is being bitchy and won’t let me load anything…oh wait…NOW you’ll let me do it. Technology. Lame. So obviously in this picture, my ex has something derogatory to say about the coach, who is standing maybe 10 feet away…

All the other parents and kids were weeping, but no, we were making jokes while the girlchild threatened to kill us and we set voodoo curses on the coach so he would get boils all over his ass (no, I’m not vengeful at all…why do you ask?). I have promised the girlchild that we will do nothing to burn her soccer bridges, but that doesn’t mean we don’t talk about all the things we COULD do.

They’re in CIF now, so winding down to the end…three games more maximum. And then we go back to the relief of club soccer and a good coach and parents that only drive me half nuts instead of completely nuts. No more freezing games on bleachers…just freezing games on chairs instead (somehow it is more bearable on a chair…although I don’t have a chair…mine broke after 10 years and now I have to buy a new one for the last 4 months of soccer? Kinda lame, but I’m sure I will use it somewhere…at the beach? Huh. I’m not really a beach person. Maybe I should become one. I mean, I’m sending the last kid off to college. I can become a completely different person now. Once I’m done recovering from pneumonia. And I pick a job that doesn’t suck up all my waking…and nonwaking hours.).

AND…my doctor’s office just called to check up on my cough and make sure I’m not dead. That’s nice. “Are you taking your meds?” “No, I LIKE having pneumonia.” Yes, I’m taking my fucking meds. Duh. No, it’s nice to have them call.

My last commentary? Obviously my brain is functioning…it’s just my body that’s having issues…bows on bras? Why? I always cut them off. But what is the purpose? I do not understand. Yes, I am not a normal girl. I also don’t like pink. Except my pink fabric stash is huge…not as huge as my black and white stash, but huge nonetheless, because I do a lot of human figures, so the flesh tones run into the pinks, and they fill up a ton of drawers here. But there’s a good reason for that.

Ramble much? Yeah. Whatever.