Art over Work…

Although I have 700 things to grade and the deadline is positively LOOMING over me (it always does…some times of the year, it just feels like I’m ducking down to avoid responsibilities for weeks at a time), I am blowing it all off today for art. Seriously. It’s the weekend. I’ll deal with it tomorrow. And Monday. And every freakin’ day next week. Whatever doesn’t get done…doesn’t get done. Honestly, nobody’s grade is changing THAT much at this point.

Teachers at the end of the year…sigh. I was done yesterday, and we still have nine more days.

Anyway, I got nothing done last night because of gaming and exhaustion, but I will today. First, I have to deliver Mammogram to the Oceanside Museum of Art…the opening of the California Fibers: Eclectic Fibers show is Saturday, June 25, from 6-8 PM. If you’re planning on coming, let me know and I can put you on a list so you can get in free.

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There will also be some sort of artist talk on July 12 from 6:30-8. It will either be artist meet and greet or an artist panel, but I’m planning on being there either way. The show is open for quite a while, so you have plenty of chances to go see it.

The closing exhibition for Feminism Now is next Saturday from 6-10 PM, which is part of the Barrio Art Crawl. I will need to be there at 10 to pick up my work, but I won’t be there for the whole 4 hours! (Sorry)

I have a post-it attached to my computer with all the upcoming deadlines and ideas for some of them (at least one of them needs a drawing in the next month or so). However many things I have on my phone to remind me of stuff, sometimes I just need to go old school so I can SEE it every day. All the ways you can poke the brain into remembering shit.

The rest of today will be tracing stuff and then the Art around Adams two-mile art and music event this afternoon and evening. Because it’s a weekend and summer and it doesn’t all have to be work all the time. Because that’s what makes us cranky. But first I have to drive to Oceanside. Eh. Oh well. It’s for a good thing. The other stuff today will help with inspiration for the next few pieces (that nightstand thing is currently rolling around in my head, and not necessarily in a good way). Hopefully I can get some drawing in soon too.

But Soon…

Oh wow. Friday tired and it was only a 4-day week. Can’t imagine how next week will feel. Puppy is behind me talking to Kitten. He has this funny growl that sounds like he’s talking and she is just staring at him, like WTF is your deal, dude? He still has a cone on his head, which means he bumps into everything and needs his head scratched on a regular basis.

I had my stitching meeting last night and finished another bird in the Sue Spargo thing I’ve been working on for like three years…there are only four birds left and then I can piece them together. Maybe I’ll get to that this summer. AND finishing the other one, which is pieced, but needs a flower, a stem, and a leaf, and then to be sandwiched and quilted. I really should do that.

I also got confirmation that I will be doing that little owl as a commission, so I’ll get working on tracing that soon. I pulled my Etsy site…nothing was selling and I suspect only my friends were liking stuff. So that was a bust. I’m honestly flailing a little this year on increasing income…I bid on a bunch of copyediting and proofreading jobs, but suspect there is always someone there who will underbid just to get the job. I can’t afford to lose time unless I’m getting paid the going rate, so I spend time preparing a bid and doing sample edits, and sigh. Maybe I just suck at it. Or maybe I don’t work hard enough at trying to get new jobs. Because I’m buried in school work. And tired.

So last night, I figured I had earned tracing time…I graded all day in class while students were watching puberty videos. Today they’ll be working on vocab, so I’m gonna keep grading…because hey! School’s almost out! And I’m going to sleep in a lot! Because I’m so tired! I always give my co-teacher shit for overusing exclamation points and there I used like four in a row. !

Last year, on this day, I was ironing the first bathtub quilt together.

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There are now two bathtub quilts. There are at least three more bathtub drawings, one of which is enlarged but needs some heads (seriously, both people are headless due to my drawing off the paper, which drove my 5th-grade teacher bonkers. She was an artist and kept trying to get me to fit ON the paper. But my vision was always bigger.) and one that will never be a quilt because it’s just too loosey goosey. But the other one, with its crown of thorns, it could be a quilt. HEY! One of the shows I’m looking at entering is about WATER. And bathtubs…they have WATER. Wait. !!!

Yeah. I’m a little punchy.

Puppy and I are equally NOT interested in our boring breakfasts today.

So I traced last night…Still filling up the third sheet. Most of what I’m doing now is tiny, filling in between the ribs.

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Last night, I traced some more grapes and grape leaves, and then a homeless woman with her shopping cart and her sign (which is bloody tiny, I must say), and then I did a butterfly. But I stopped when I got to the cocoons, because it was after midnight, and I really do try to go to sleep at a “reasonable” hour (I know my doc thinks it should be two hours earlier, but then I would get NO ART DONE and that is unacceptable. Plus it’s hard enough for me to fall asleep at midnight.).

See the tiny little pieces interspersed among much bigger pieces? Yeah.

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I’m at piece 714…with another hour in…at this time of year, slow and steady is about all I can handle. Not quite halfway, but maybe…well, tonight maybe not. But soon.

Plod on…

So when the kids are here, I can’t blast music in the morning. Well. I guess I COULD, but…it would be mean. I didn’t realize I’d gotten used to being able to do that whenever I want. To their credit, they tried to organize the kitchen counters yesterday, but there’s piles for me to deal with, and I don’t have time. This makes me laugh. Because that’s why the kitchen looked like that in the first place: Time. Not enough of it. Been the story of my life. Really, no. It’s just that my priorities are different. Probably most people don’t come home and grade for a couple of hours and then trace Wonder Under for another hour or two. Or iron a few thousand pieces of fabric. Or quilt around a uterus. Boychild wanted to know why I had expired coupons. Plus they found one of my reproduction folders (I was looking for that…it has the printouts of circumcision in there…I was trying to explain that the other day). And the girlchild’s senior photos (whoops. I’m pretty sure I should have handed those out to people like last year. I suck.).

Hey, I am not a perfect parent. For one, it’s just me here. For another, there’s no manual for how to fix this and do that. I’m winging it. After spending all day with 7th graders. I can’t be amazing Supermom. I can just be me.

Speaking of uteri, I am full on into teaching human reproduction now, so my days are full of explaining spontaneous erections and semen and periods. It’s tiring, but it’s easy enough, except my voice is not trained this year…we talk less now that everything is online. So it feels like a stretch to talk almost all period. There’s some minor behaviors to deal with this week, certainly, but we should survive it. It’s almost a relief to get to this unit, because I know they will pay attention and I’ve been teaching it so long that it’s second nature. I used to have to look up the answers to a lot of their questions (because I like to be accurate), but now I just wing most of it. I looked up some data on cervical cancer yesterday. None of today’s questions require more than a basic knowledge of how stuff works. Although there were a couple of boys yesterday that wanted to know when their periods would start. Oh my. Parents? Are you telling them anything? Or are you just fucking with them? Because with those two? I’d be OK with that.

So that’s the daily grind. Grades are due in about a week in a half, so I’m trying to stay on top of it, but it’s hard. I’ll get there. The hard way.

Last night, I managed to go to the gym, finish my book for book club…in July (seriously, I think I’m a month ahead? Plus I am totally Gaiman over Pratchett…Pratchett is funny at all and sometimes really good, but not like Gaiman. Sorry if that’s blasphemy to you.), grade a pile of science journals (not all of them though, because the couch was co-opted by college kids and I was forced to work in here), and finally persuaded myself to come out and start tracing stuff. I was really tired, but I always want to get some time in.

Luckily, I was pretty efficient. Got over 100 pieces traced in about 45 minutes…that’s the channel changer on the light table…the girlchild went to bed about 5 minutes after I went in there, so I got control of the TV! This is another thing that I have to get used to…

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I did the section with the giraffe and started the leaves and grapevines above it.

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I didn’t do a lot of the grapes though. Look at the clock. It’s midnight. You’re tired. But you can see a whole pile of giraffe spots on the right…

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I cut those out as one piece of Wonder Under and then iron that down to one fabric…it saves time. Then when I cut out the fabric, I can cut out each piece. I can’t do the same thing with the grapes in the lower left corner, though, because they overlap, so they’ll have to be a variety of colors. If I were really smart, I’d figure out a 1,2,3,4 range for those and mark them now and draw all the 1’s together, then the 2’s, etc., but I don’t usually like thinking that hard at this stage. So I’ll just have a million small grapey pieces of Wonder Under floating around.

There is no shortage of small pieces in this quilt…with the big pieces tucked behind. Most of the lower torso is now done and I’m moving up into the upper ribcage area. I think I’m in the high 500s now…yup. Checked my notes. So a third of the way through…6 hours and 16 minutes. So 19 hours? Not a bad guess. So much easier to meditate with Wonder Under at night than to do work. That damn mockingbird is still torturing me every night. I had one night last week when he wasn’t out there until almost 3 AM…and then he was further away. I could barely hear him. Last night? He’s back at it, loud as hell. I’m tired of sleeping with a pillow over my head. I tried earplugs, but they make me feel all clogged up (doesn’t help that my sinuses are being all stuffy with allergies).

Anyway. I plod on.

Countdown

There aren’t many days of school left. I’m trying to get caught up, but little things get in the way. Yesterday I bid on a proofreading job…which meant a sample edit…plus some other stuff that needed editing…so I got no grading done. I’m behind. I need to focus today during prep, which is often really hard for me. Here…teach hard for about an hour and a half and then STOP. Then focus on grading stuff. Then teach again. My brain doesn’t like that, so it often refuses. Whatever. Plus I have yard duty before and after school for two weeks, which is a giant clusterfuck to my organization and schedule. Plus the kids emailing me about their grades. Please please give me a giant extra credit packet to fix my grade! I wasn’t gonna deal with that. Bloody hell.

School is making me cranky. Said every teacher the last month of school. Plus other crap. Think I’m gonna just crawl into bed and come out in July.

When I’d finished all the tasks at hand (and I’m sure there’s some I forgot), I did trace stuff. The first thing I did was a full trace of the owl that’s in this drawing…

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I think this is Owl 3.0. He was originally under a rib bone and a uterus, so I drew those bits out.

I’ve done two others (one of them multiple times)…here’s 2.0, still available.

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And 1.0 (although I didn’t think of him as that)…which I made three times in three different colorways for three different people…

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Yeah apparently I have an owl obsession. This new one is small…fits on an 8 1/2 x 11″ piece of paper, but has about 100 pieces. That guy up there has about 26.

Anyway, from there, I went on to the real business of tracing…apparently very slowly, because I only got about 60 pieces done in an hour…

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I traced a uterus and some tulips and the background stuff behind the giraffe. And then I looked at the clock. Time flies when you’re staring at a light table apparently. I’m on my third yard of Wonder Under, although I’m still filling in smaller pieces on the other sheets.

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Told you this wouldn’t be a quick one. That’s all three yards laid out on the table. You can see I just started filling in the third one on the right.

When I shut down the tracing, I sat down on the couch for a quick moment…just to relax a bit after standing all day. Midnight was looking for attention (I guess puppy got most of it this evening)…

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So there was some attention given.

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I spend a lot of time petting furry creatures. It makes up for being yelled at and dealing with teenaged crisis. And trying to bid on jobs when I have to BE at my other job. And getting left alone a lot when I really don’t want to be. Rough night. So today I go on to teach puberty (because that’s an easy thing to teach to kids who are going through it)…and tonight there is exercise on the calendar (yay!) and I will trace some more. And pet more furry beasts. And count down one more day until summer break.

Recap

Three-day weekend recap: Sleep? Not enough. Art? Not enough. Grading? Not enough. Exercise? Not enough. Glad I got an extra day off? At this time of the school year, absolutely. I start teaching human reproduction today and I don’t feel ready. It’s time-consuming and challenging, even though at least I have their attention…not a small thing for the last three weeks of school.

So I spent about 6 hours yesterday putting together a post about the Feminism Now exhibit I’m currently in…if you want to see the whole show, you have two choices: go to the FIG blog here, or come to the closing show Saturday, June 11, from 6-10 PM. The owner might open up for appointments…I’m waiting for an answer on that and will update the blogpost on FIG when I have one. So that ate up a lot of time, but I’m glad it’s up there to document the show.

I did manage to get in some tracing time last night, but late…I did trace the owl…you can see him on the right.

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Lots of wing pieces. The bigger pieces you see are mostly the flesh background behind all the tiny plant and animal pieces. I’ve done one whole side under the hand, which is just above the belly button, plus the middle section. Tonight (assuming I get to it) will be the giraffe and whatever else is on that side.

More big pieces from the earth at the bottom and little flower pieces filling in the blanks in between.

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It’s faster now. Smaller pieces. I got just past 400 last night (only 1550 to go, right?). So I’m at 4 1/2 hours…catching up. Sixteen hours to go? And school calls.

Support

About 4 or 5 years ago, I was coming to the realization that my work doesn’t necessarily fit in the quilt world, that there are shows I can get into, but there are also many that I can’t, because the imagery is too challenging or controversial or hell…it has boobs and a vulva and those things aren’t allowed. Because 50% of the population needs to have their parts hidden away? Well it’s not like there’s a bunch of art out there with penises on it, unless it’s the oh-so-acceptable sculptural types from the Renaissance. I was in a few quilt groups that ran on the art side of things, but I was looking for local groups, places where I felt less isolated and out there in the art world. I wasn’t in the San Diego art world at all.

So I started looking, and I found two groups that I’ve been a part of since then, one juried and one not, and between the two of them, I’ve been in about 10 shows in Southern California and beyond (one is traveling to Sweden next year), but more importantly, I’m growing this support group of people who know my work and support me and have no problems with fabric inhabiting the art world. I can have a conversation with almost anyone in either group, and I’m starting to find other opportunities because of belonging…my 2-person show in January absolutely came about because of my membership in one of the groups with the curator. I was just juried into another group and members from both groups voted for me…hence more opportunities to show work.

Being in local shows doesn’t seem like a big deal…I get work into shows all the time and it travels all over the world. But it is a big deal, because the local shows are where I meet people in person who are looking at the work and talking to me…giving me tangible support to keep making. Not that I will stop…not that I know HOW to stop. This drive does not slow down for exhaustion or my job or other obligations. I hear it in the back of my head all the time (Make Make Make). But now I have people I see at shows, people who have my back, people who talk to me about my work, their work, work in general. People who push me to do different work, like the 17-foot woman from last year and the nightstand I’ll be doing this year. This is all good.

We had an artists’ talk for my women’s art group yesterday at our show Feminism Now. Amusingly, someone actually did some mansplaining for us, telling us how the problems we think exist don’t any more. Say what? But it was a good discussion anyway. I got to hear a few artists talk about their work, artists I hadn’t heard from before. As our group grows, I’m finding it hard to make sure I can place name with face (we need to work on that as a group), but I do know the group serves to support female artists in a city that is known for ignoring or even censoring our presence. This discussion of what is a feminist, what is feminism NOW, and especially to us…it’s important and our group isn’t going to let it drop.

Here’s most of the women who were in the show (there’s a chunk of women who weren’t…it’s a big group now).

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Wirework outside the gallery…suspect Spenser Little at work…

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So most of my day was picking up work from being juried and spending time at the gallery for the talk and trying to get better pictures for an official group blogpost of the show…but I did eventually (after grading of course) come back and start tracing again…

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This piece is slow going, but it will be worth it. I’ve got about 3 hours in and I’m only on piece 220. The first 115 pieces were large and kind of convoluted, so they took longer to trace. Now I’m into the tiny pieces mostly, with some background stuff in there.

This is what it looks like from the back when I’m tracing…

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Except the light on the light table is on. But the numbers are all backwards, which takes some getting used to. I did the left thigh last night: a raccoon and some flowers and leaves. I stopped when I got to the owl, because it was 100 pieces (at least) and it was after midnight. I was tired. I stayed up another half hour to let my brain relax…don’t know if it worked, but I zonked out pretty fast. Good sign.

Apparently I have to trace the owl twice…although I think I will redraw him so he has all his parts first…because he’s missing some parts of his tail I think, and part of a wing. I could do that today as well.

I do have two more classes of the last unit to grade today, plus making new seating charts…very exciting stuff. And groceries and laundry. It’s nice to have an extra day for it though. It would have been hard to deal with going back to school today with everything I was trying to get done over the weekend. Trying to keep up with my job and live life and make art…it’s a lot, and I’m totally looking forward to a break in a few weeks with summer vacation (I’ll still be making art…just not trying to juggle the job in the middle of it). I’m looking forward to sitting out on the deck and relaxing with my sketchbook. I’m looking forward to having the time to reconnect with my art brain in a less stressful way. Also eating and peeing when I want…those are pluses. And fewer demands on my patience (only 2 kids instead of 155 and mine are adults, so hopefully that will help).

Listen to the Body

Ah the challenges of the end of the school year, and your college-aged kids coming home, and a puppy in the house, and all the things that need to be done. The puppy now has been neutered…although it was problematic. Poor guy had one undescended testicle…I wonder if that’s why he hadn’t been neutered yet…they were waiting or they realized it was more expensive to do? It’s done now. But he’s not a happy camper…

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He does have plenty of people around to love him and help him maneuver with the cone, although all he really wants to do is lick his butt, and he’ll have to wait 2 weeks for that joy. He mostly slept last night…a very different puppy to the one we normally have.

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We all went out to dinner at the Indian place…oh my golly, I forget how good that place is. I don’t go at all when the kids are gone, unfortunately (I should order takeaway)…and I usually get multiple meals out of one dinner. Yummy.

Then we came home and rallied around puppy for a while, until the kids went off to bed or room and I started tracing Wonder Under on the newest quilt…which currently is called Earth Mother 2016…I’m assuming I’ll come up with a better name eventually.

I didn’t get far in the numbers, because the whole bottom section is a giant half Earth and the pieces are pretty large.

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So I traced the entire Earth part and got partway around the edge of it until I thought it was pretty late…and I knew I had multiple places to be this morning, so I needed to sleep. I didn’t have the mental energy to do a lot else last night, even though I brought home a huge pile of grading for the three-day weekend. One of the things that sucks about being a teacher is that every single three-day weekend is during school and you end up grading through at least one of the days. Sundays are already trashed by lesson planning etc on a regular weekend, so it’s nice to have one extra day, because it means I will try to treat at least one day of the weekend as a real day off…no grading, no errands, no cleaning. Just relaxing and reading and hiking and hanging out. If that works.

But I do hope to get more tracing done on this over the weekend…around the grading and the artist drop-offs and pick-ups and artist talk and all the other stuff. And right this second? I need a nap. Sad but true. Massive headache plus tired. Not a good mix. Might be worth setting the timer for 20 minutes and putting a pillow over my head. Just a quickie. Listen to the body…it’s telling you something.

Big Numbers…

I stayed up late to finish numbering. I know you find that surprising. I really was going to stop at midnight, but I really really (notice the two reallys) wanted to know how many pieces she had. So I numbered…for a total of 2 hours and 33 minutes (not all last night, mind you)…and she has 1954 pieces. Not bad. Less than 2000. I guessed right. So now I can process that in my head…make sense of it. Everything will take longer than the last couple did. And I’m OK with that.

I like having summer quilt projects with big numbers…lots of pieces. It’s like books you really love…you want them to be big, thick tomes so they take up a huge amount of your brain and time to read. I like to have big hefty quilts that will take up a huge chunk of my summer creating time. It’s somehow easier. I used to only make big quilts in the summer, but now I just make year round.

I started numbering at the bottom and went to the top. I try to be logical, but I was tired last night, so when I start tracing and ironing stuff, you can remind me that I probably wasn’t as logical as I’d like to be. You can see how big it is here.

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I number in sections…one leg, the other leg, one arm, the other arm. The head is often last…some cactus there and an octopus.

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I try to make it easier when I can…number all the background pieces and then the stuff that lies on top of them…a bat, the tail of a snake.

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Midnight likes to lie on it while I’m numbering, until I poke her too many times and she gives up and goes somewhere else…stares at me balefully from the couch.

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Here’s one of the crazier sections, although, again, while I was drawing, I tried to make sure I could trace all the petals of those flowers as one piece…and the pine branch above it is a little nuts, but not as crazy as it could be.

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I even marked a couple things as embroidery or beads (the tips of butterfly antenna do not need to be cut out of fabric). Does it have a lot of pieces? Well, yeah, but that hasn’t worried me before. Last year’s big summer quilt had 1850 pieces in it, finished the drawing in mid-July and the whole quilt by the end of September, with that 17-foot woman done in the middle of it. Plus surgery, the start of school, and taking girlchild to college. So I did OK. It was 164 hours total. So tracing on this one will probably take about 22 hours…My goal is to be done with ALL the Wonder Under, tracing and trimming, by the time school gets out in three weeks. I think I can do that.

And yeah, I know a lot of people think I’m crazy for making quilts like this, using all the tiny pieces, but I like the process and how it looks in the end, so I am going to keep doing it this way. I do have more problems with my hands than I did when I was young, so I realize I might not always be able to do quilts with this level of detail in them, but until that happens, I’m going to take advantage of the hand years I have now.

OK. I’m actually a little excited about this quilt now. Next stage. Tracing is meditative. And I do have two more major drawings to do before the summer is out…

Over the Hump

The household is full. All kids have returned home. Boychild is even skinnier again. Says the new jeans from last summer (winter?) are falling off again. He goes to college and loses weight. Bizarre.

They were all in bed before me, though. The girlchild didn’t sleep well the night before and the boy, well it was 2 AM his time.

Me? I was in the mood to deal with the damn drawing. First I filled in the hole with passionflowers…

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They popped into my head because I was searching for vines and I remembered these at a friend’s house. I used to have one bush here but it died. In the drawing, I wrapped all around the last bit of the space. Total drawing time was about 13 hours. It took 33 minutes to fill in that last space, done yesterday afternoon instead of doing any grading. Or cleaning. It was a long day of frog dissections followed by a doctor’s appointment. I was tired. I needed to draw…

Girlchild on the couch, Midnight on my drawing. It’s OK…I’m not drawing where she’s sitting.

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But they are lying where I need to be standing.

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I tried to photograph the whole drawing, but it was dark by then…

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Wow, that’s a crappy picture. Sigh. I’m still not sure about the big empty space on the right, but I’m thinking about it as I number the piece. I may add something before I finish.

Yes, I started numbering. Because I wasn’t tired yet. Well, that’s not true. I was tired. I just wasn’t willing to stop yet…

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I didn’t number the whole thing though. I got to about the middle of the torso and piece 536. My rough guess is between 1500 and 2000 pieces. We’ll see how wrong I am…maybe I will finish tonight.

I’m glad I finally made it over the hump with this one and finished the drawing. It was kinda kicking my butt. I just got stuck and couldn’t get it done. I think it was more about all the other things I was trying to get done and worrying over, and then I’d get to the drawing and I was too tired to suss out how to finish it. I have two more drawings I need to get started on…both for November due dates, so it seems like plenty of time, but not for two. I could easily do this one and one more big one before November, but I’m not sure about a third. We’ll see.

But first, I have to go to that place that gives me a paycheck (give? I work my ass off for that). The last unit finishes today, and then we start human reproduction after the long weekend. That unit is kind of easy, although hard on the voice. At least I have their attention. This is one of the units I get to keep for next year…although it will be harder to teach it without all the body systems and genetics stuff before it that we usually teach. We’ll have to think about that.

Because It Was the Right Thing to Do

Well. May is kicking my ass. My artistic ass, that is. My tired ass. Again. I really thought after yesterday got revised (plans change…) that I could kick the graded assignment out, get it done super quick, and then finish the big drawing and start numbering it. That really was my plan. Except my dinner plans got changed, and I figured that out (hallelujah for the stash of leftovers I usually have), but then realized I hadn’t finished the boychild’s room. You know. The boychild who is coming home today. I mean, it’s not until 9 PM, but I have a chock-full day already and I’m tired…so I gave up and went in there and finished.

Because it was the right thing to do. I read all these stories about famous male artists in the past and how someone handled all their household stuff and they tell women you can’t be a REAL artist if you have children, and I hate that shit because I don’t believe in it. I’ve been a real artist for years AND had kids and they have just internalized the crazy mom sewing in the middle of the night as normal. Like the light table in the living room. We don’t notice it any more. It’s a work space.

I have to admit that some of the “finishing” the boychild’s room included picking up a pile of papers that I’m not really sure where to put and just piling them back in the office. I will need to deal with the mountain to the left of the computer at some point. Just not today. There’s also some fabric I just piled up to be put away later. But he has a place to sleep. And it’s clean…some black cat had shed an entire cat-full of hair on his chair.

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So there. I achieved something. It just wasn’t artistic or part of my day job. The boychild will be happy about it though. So that counts.

I did go to Costco yesterday…I have been avoiding it, but the toilet paper issue was about to become, well, an issue. I don’t buy much at Costco, but TP and cat litter are the two things I will venture in there for, so with my plans shot to hell, I went there after the chiropractor. It’s usually less busy after 5 PM, so it’s quicker than a Saturday run.

But because I was in a mood, I bought these.

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Notice Midnight’s stare. Do I need more storage? Of course I do. I always do. But maybe not. Right now, I have a lot of my handsewing living in the plastic Rubbermaid boxes, but I use those to sort stuff too (you’d be floored by how many of those things I have, both here and at school). Anyway, it’s not particularly efficient for storage. I’m hoping these are better.

Perhaps I will spend the whole week after school gets out cleaning house and organizing shit. I’m notoriously flaky that week. Need to recover and all.

So the drawing itself is obviously not done and I wonder if I should start another smaller one that’s less stressful. I have this one…

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And this one…

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Sigh. No. I should finish the big one. Then one of these can happen in between this big one and the next big one. I finally wrote down all the deadlines I’m considering for the next 8 months on a post-it and put it by the computer so I could be reminded of my goals. Because my tired school brain keeps forgetting. Old-school paper style. There are 6 things on it. One of them is a collaboration and one is a small coloring book page, so not a whole quilt. The others…one is this big piece that I’ve been drawing since early April. Then potentially three more big ones. Insert laughing here. That ain’t happening. Granted the due dates go out to November, but two realistically. Or draw something smaller. Less complicated.

Anyway, in other news, I will be back at Gallery D in Barrio Logan on Sunday from 1-3 for the artists’ talk on the Feminism Now show, so if you’re interested in hearing from all the women who made the work, show up!

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