Forced Smile

I talked to three people yesterday. One of them was the guy who held the door open at the gym for me. I said thank you. The other two were a student and his mom, who met me at school, because he apparently hadn’t turned his journal in and I had missed it (I really thought I had caught everyone, but he’s a sneaky guy). Well, until the girlchild came home from Disneyland at 11 PM, but she was really cranky and didn’t want to talk much, just complain about whether I had the lights on or not (I do need light in order to walk down the hallway without killing myself, especially since she keeps leaving things IN the hallway for me to kill myself on). And I talked to the dog and three cats. Pretty exciting.

I graded my butt off until around noon. Then went to the gym and then to school to pick up the journal from that kid. Finished grades around 5:30 PM and started cleaning out this one section of my office that has been getting worse and worse. Basically, it was a pile of random shit that had fallen over and then been piled on again, and cats had knocked stuff over and spiders were living in there. Yes, I probably should have taken photos, but I decided to just get in there and clean it. That was good. Now I have 17 other sections of the house that need the same level of attention. It took about an hour to deal with this one section, about 2 feet square.

Giant ass sigh.

It’s a move in the right direction. Then, after procrastinating all day (yes, I clean to procrastinate), I finally started quilting again.

Tiny little squiggles. Sigh. Lots of them. My left elbow is bugging me again. I stopped lifting weights because I thought that was the problem, and it may be part of the problem, but it’s certainly not the whole problem. Tendonitis, yes, and I have a doctor’s appointment right before Thanksgiving, so I’ll bug her for more physical therapy appointments, because I used up my allotted amount for the year on my knee. My question is does the number of PT appointments per year go up as you age? Because maybe it should.

I got a couple of hours in. Not as much as I wanted, but then I thought I was further along in the grading and would have more of the day. I do have most of today.

I need to buy more thread though (did that). This is the back. And I need to get the binding fabric. And my car is having an issue that might be nothing and might be an alternator or battery. I’m trying to decide whether to be proactive and take it in or just ignore it until it’s a real issue. Really mature way to deal with life, eh?

Ugh. This week. I’m not allowed to say or think that it will suck until I have experienced it (thank you, counselor), but ugh. One day at a time. Except I can’t do that, because I have to plan. So I’m trying to plan without thinking about how the days will actually go. Difficult to do. Especially when you experience a sinking feeling just by typing out the instructions for your guest teacher. Dammit. I hate being out this much, but I don’t have a choice.

I really was writing my book on the stationary bike and the elliptical yesterday at the gym. I wrote a whopping 2800 words yesterday. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. I’m over 19,000 words at this point, and totally keeping up with the plan to finish on time.

Girlchild petting Babygirl, who was very demanding yesterday.

Oh dear. Am I the only one wondering why the parents don’t just grab their baby in their beak and fly them down from the nest? Don’t panic…there is a happy ending (I got very worried at one point)…

Barnacle goose freefall

Yup. Need to go quilt. Fighting a really down mood. Tell it to shut up. At some point, depression just gets old. Don’t think about the crap that makes you depressed. Look at clean area of floor that was not clean yesterday. Smile. Then quilt. Forced smile. Yeah, sometimes when I smile and don’t really mean it, it scares people.

Somewhere to Land on Occasion

Wondering where I am? Me too. I feel like I fell into some sort of time warp and I’ll never be allowed out. It’s been days and days of grading and very little else (oh yeah, I did go on a hike)…

More about that later.

And then I graded and graded and graded some more…

When I got tired of the grading (and the cats sitting upon the grading), I folded the fabrics from Houston…there they are…

Lots of pinks. Strange that I have so many pinks when I am really the anti-pink.

I did write over the last few days. It was a little light on Thursday and Friday, due to exhaustion, but Saturday and Sunday, I was back to over 2,000 words/day, so I’m over 16,000 words now for NaNoWriMo. Pretty good. There’s some scary action about to occur. I might even know what everybody’s name is at the moment. I finally figured out I needed to update the character list and keep it open so I could check it. As it is, some people have really lame names (Dr. Blank…paging Dr. Blank). This writing thing, it’s such a freakish thing for me. OK, YES, I know, I write all the time, but there’s no logic to this, no plot, I’m not trying to get somewhere or point something out. I don’t have to make any fucking sense, you know…it’s a blog, not the Bible.

Anyway. I’m keeping up. I’m a week in and I’m keeping up. That’s a good thing.

Grading, though. Fuck me.

See that huge pile? That was the Unit 2 journals. Holy crap. Makes me want to crawl in a hole and give up teaching. Plus I’m missing one. Ought to be interesting. Grades are due Tuesday. My goal is to finish inputting everything tomorrow morning and then I can quilt! Freedom! Well, until I have to lesson plan for the day I’m out this week. Seriously, I’m supposed to be at a training on a 3-day school week. Who thought that was a good idea? No one knows.

I have to admit to having been in an absolutely rancid mood for days. The hike helped, but I’m back to feeling like I live a loser life and my job is trying to kill me. Minor issue. I’m sure I’ll get over it. It would help if I finished the quilting tomorrow, of course. Wish me luck.

This is Margaret Fabrizio’s video of me talking the day before the video you saw before, which was the artist’s tour. This is part of the Quilt Alliance interview…

And here’s her Houston recap…

You can see why I want to BE her when I grow up. It’s also interesting to hear about Houston from someone who had never been there. I did have a good Houston experience this year. It was positive. People were nice. I felt supported. When I said something about not being able to get my work into the IQF show, that only SAQA would take me, someone said that I belonged there, that I belonged to SAQA. They would take me in. I don’t need a tribe…but I do need a place to land on occasion…a place for my art to be appreciated.

Maybe that’s true of the rest of it too…I don’t need a tribe; just somewhere to land on occasion.

Craphole

It IS a word. Shut up.

Oh holy craphole of days, in which I plan on xyz and manage to only get through a, which wasn’t even on the list. And xyz languish, unfinished, unfortunate, because I would probably FEEL better if I had managed xyz. I had a two-hour respite last night hanging out with stitching friends…in which we analyzed our children and our failings (or not) in regards to them. Since I’ve been yelled at in person and via text every single day this week, I’m obviously failing big time (or succeeding, depending on how you look at the parenting spectrum). I have to admit that I’m running especially low on parental tolerance, and it feels awful to be sitting on the couch as they scream away from you and you really just need to have someone hug it away, because I only have so many resources within me to deal with the crap that is thrown and I guess I’m on the low end at the moment. And of course, a lot of that is hormones. It’s hormones, I think, that take whatever small emotions I’m feeling about being overwhelmed, too much work, not getting it done, irritations, rejections…the hormones take that messy soup and just charge it with crazy electricity and make my head spin and spill salty water over the world.

Holy crap. I just got an amazing idea for a drawing. Dammit. I have to leave for school in 34 minutes. There’s no way I can draw it in time. And grades. I’m buried. I can’t draw today. FUCK. It’s OK. I wrote it down. I typed it down. Whatever.

So I found out yesterday that I have one day less than I thought to complete grades (competing calendars…I should have know better than to pick the one that benefited my crazy schedule), so basically I just need to grade until it’s done. Then, if I’m lucky, there will still be part of the weekend left to quilt. But previous experience with long weekends is that it gets frittered away, wasted by lame-i-tude and whatever. Mostly OTHER people’s crap, not mine.

I’m confused by people with a constant positive attitude, like they’re never angry or down. I get there eventually. I talk myself out of the crazy downer that tells me I can’t get it done. I yell inside, yes you can and here’s how. I know I will get there, but it’s hard for me. And when people say they want “no drama, positive attitude,” I think, well fuck. You must just have an easy life. Or you’re genetically wired that way. And I’m not. And if I were, would I make the art I make? Fuck no. I don’t know what I’d make. Maybe nothing. I realize my responses to overwhelming shit are part of having a positive attitude, but hell, sometimes people have a rough day or week (or year). Being positive to me means you still got up and took a shower and packed a lunch, and tried to figure out how to manage the day without assuming it would all go to hell in a handbasket, and if it DID go to hell (like all week has), then you get up the next morning and you do it again, trying to figure out what to change to avoid the handbasket part (because doing the same thing again is kinda stupid if you want to avoid what you don’t like.). So fuck you for reminding me that I’m broken in that way too. That there’s something wrong with me for not being perky Pollyanna. Look at my art. Do you like it? Where the fuck do you think it comes from? Then don’t tell me I’m doing it wrong.

So I didn’t quilt last night. No time. Too late. Too tired. Wrote a little bit, not enough (see why I needed the word cushion?). Graded a little bit, not enough. Should have blown off the social stuff, but since that was the only thing all day that felt calm and nice, that would have been stupid. Didn’t read. Didn’t meditate. Didn’t exercise. Didn’t clean. Didn’t fold the fabric in the dryer. Didn’t eat healthy. Didn’t solve the world’s problems or even my own.

I did. I did throw away my trash. I did enjoy that episode of Dr. Who. I did (not) clean off the kitchen counter. I meant to clean off the kitchen counter. I did feed animals. I did take my meds. I did brush my teeth. I did finish the UK Xmas shopping (I should actually jump around a bit on that one, because that’s been hanging over me and I get no help on that front and now it’s done and I need to get someone to help me wrap it and pack it all up. I WONDER who that will be. Yes, the screamer. Fun times.).

I did.

So I got up this morning and I showered and I ate breakfast and I pondered my lunch options and I made a plan for the day, and at no point did I assume it would suck or that I would not get through my plan and I remembered that I did this last night…

And I told the part of my brain that is whinging about the fact that I will never ever finish this to shut the fuck up, because I will EVENTUALLY finish, but maybe the girlchild will be speaking to me normally by then and not assuming everything I say is a criticism of her existence. Because she’ll have kids of her own and she’ll realize how fucking hard it is to do it even with someone else’s help and yeah.

Shit, I’m having a bad time of it. Tell my brain to get all that emotional shit into the laundry basket and shove it in the corner, because I’m not going to make it through the day otherwise.

Because dammit, if I’m going to criticize ANYONE’S existence, it’s going to be my own.

The Pattern of My Days

This? This is the dryer full of fabrics from my trip to Houston.

The trip I haven’t written about yet because I’m so buried in quilting and grading and trying to get through the days that I can’t go through the 7,000 photos I took and try to decide how to make sense of them (there’s really only about 200 photos, and since I take pictures of the signs too so I know who did each piece and why, there’s probably only 100 quilts). I did buy fabric this year. I don’t usually, unless there’s something in particular that I’m looking for, but I was in the mood to buy fabric. I haven’t been buying much at all. I only go to the quilt store when I need a background or binding, which is about every 2-3 months, and then I try to keep it reasonable. I look for stuff I use a lot of and has been an issue lately. I do always look for flesh colors, and when I get these out of the dryer and folded (god knows when that will be), I’ll show you. I didn’t want solids or almost solids…I wanted funky patterns.

I did buy some browns too, because that dirt thing keeps showing up in my quilts and it uses big pieces that are really convoluted in shape, so I need big pieces of brown. I also bought a few reds…while I was picking them out, mom walks up to me and says, “Hearts?” Yup. For hearts mostly. The average heart I draw needs 4-6 fabrics. Or more. Complicated buggers, those hearts.

I managed NaNoWriMo last night again, although I tried to write while on the phone with my SIL, and that was a clusterfuck. Apparently the writing part of my brain can’t multitask THAT well, plus it sounded like she was about to run away from home (not sure I blame her). And then I went to book club, where we all pretty much swore off Orson Scott Card for the rest of our lives, but did pick a 900-page book for February. I’ve already read December’s book and we’re skipping January due to the holidays. Most of my book club friends are much younger than me, and only one of them has children, so the poor pregnant woman who was there, we were talking about all the advice you get, and I said I had none…oh wait, yes I do…”SLEEP NOW. You will never sleep again.” Seriously. I think it’s true. We did talk a lot about how we as a society protect and treasure pregnant women, how it must be hard-wired into our brains to take care of them. And babies…them too. Mostly. Yes. I go to book club for intellectual conversation, because we don’t just talk about Oooh Babies, but we analyze society’s response to babies. And we drink and eat. You can’t go wrong with that combination.

But I was tired and headed home early to get yelled at by the girlchild, apparently, who had left dinner cooling on the counter for over an hour. Not willing to risk vomiting all night, I didn’t touch it. Sigh. Frustrating. Perfect bacteria-growing temperature.

So that’s when I wrote…actually, I started writing (again, because I had started when my SIL called) and then she needed my computer, so I went and graded for a while and then came back. I’m over 10,000 words, averaging over 2000 a day. I was only at 1200 last night and was tired, and thought I was going to quit because I didn’t feel like writing the next bit. Plus I have a bit of a cushion, but I don’t want to use it now…I’d rather be way ahead and plan for having issues later than be way behind now and assume I can catch up (that’s probably the best summary of my personality that exists anywhere…because I know life is gonna bitchslap you with some crap you don’t even know about yet and you won’t HAVE that extra time later on…seriously). Sometimes I feel (shockingly) that I am writing too much detail, but I suspect it’s better to have too much at this point and edit it out later. The whole book is almost at 35,000 words now. Good progress. The story is developing. No, I still have no idea how it will end, but I’m heading into the rising action section, maybe? I think there needs to be a kidnapping or an attack at this point, so I’m letting my brain play with those ideas as I stare out at a small sea of faces at school. Little do they know what their teacher is thinking about…

And then I quilted. Oh, I graded first, but couldn’t keep going on that for long. I had a goal of finishing one assignment last night, and I didn’t even get close. Sigh. It’s gonna bite me in the butt this weekend, but whatever. Quilting was fun…really.

Thread rebelling against me. I’m still only getting in about an hour a night, although I guess that’s better than none. I was just hoping to be oh-so efficient last night, and it didn’t work out that way. I did finish all the outlining though, and I started on the background quilting…

Which, of course, I started way too tiny and crunched up. There isn’t a ton of background on this quilt, but there are these big pieces of sky up in the tree, and they’re not all behaving nicely, so I suspect that section will make me swear and possibly even cry (OK, I don’t cry because of quilting…I get frustrated and walk away.). I didn’t get very far in the background quilting, honestly, because I was bloody tired and probably should have gone to bed an hour earlier, but I did START. And that’s what I wanted to do, so there. Nine hours in. If I can shop for binding on Sunday and put it on that night, I’ll be good (um, Kathryn, you have a soccer tournament to attend on Sunday? Damn. You’re right. Sigh.). Anyway. It’s getting there, which means I need to get my butt in gear and draw the next one. Seriously. If I type Seriously one more time, please slap me.

And there’s Ms. Bitchy, who started a fight with Kitten last night because she deigned to use the food area.

I was so tired I just watched most of it and then tried to intervene so Kitten could get away. This cat is 11 years old and out for blood most days. And then she takes over my chair and complains if I try to sit on it. Cats. Damn cats.

OK. Survive the school day. Hang out with friends. Grade stuff. Quilt. You see the pattern of my days.

The Neverending Quilting

Oh my god, I just want to be done with it…the neverending quilting. That stage when you aren’t far enough along to be close to done, dammit. You can see the end of the dark tunnel, but it’s just a speck of light in the distance, not close enough to start running towards it, because you have to conserve your energy. Sigh. Even trying to get done with the outlining would have been OK, which was interesting, because when I started quilting (late, again) last night, I thought, oh no, you’re not going to finish the outlining tonight…even though the previous night you thought it was just one more night, that part of your brain was obviously delusional and just needed to go to bed. Then I started stitching, and I got about 45 minutes in, and I’m looking at it, and my brain is at war: one part is sure I can finish and the other is telling me to give up and go to bed (that’s really what the responsible, normal adult would have done, but as I have proven over and over again, although I am responsible with many things, making art and going to sleep at a reasonable hour are not my strong points). In the end, I kept going, sure, positive, convinced I could finish.

I was so close…really, maybe another hour. But no. Sigh. Went to bed. Slept the sleep of the crazy dreamer who wanted to be DONE. Which is just stupid, because I would only be done with the OUTLINING. I still have to quilt the fucking background, and it’s proving to be a bitch, bunching up all over the place, trying to make a mess of my quilting, so I’ll be swearing at it and pulling at it and stretching it flat and wondering how all those people who quilt like 1/8″ apart do it without making a monstrous mess (this is why you are NOT one of those quilters. You think they’re ~~crazy~~ amazing for quilting that close together and they think you’re the same for cutting out a million pieces and then trying not to lose them all while ironing them together. Really, you’re all nuts.).

So I’m 8 hours in and I haven’t even finished the outlining, and I suspect I’m about halfway through, but really I don’t have a freakin’ clue. I do know that at only an hour a night, I’m not going to make my deadline. AND finish grades. AND hike on Saturday.

Oh well. And I really want to clean house; my bedroom and the studio are driving me nuts and I’m barely home long enough today to do anything. So. Yeah. Dysfunctional human much?

Don’t you wonder what happens in the artist’s brain to make the expression of some image (or sound or whatever) SO important that everything else seems pointless? I mean, food isn’t pointless, especially being diabetic, but I wish I had a replicator and could just ask it to make more of that avocado tomato salad this morning so I could take it to school. I have all the ingredients, but not the time (or mental energy, apparently). OK, I might find energy for that. Maybe. But I’d really rather finish sewing or do the next drawing or anything really rather than clean house. I wonder how close to hoarder status I’m approaching. That should motivate me to take the bags of clothes out of the entryway to the thrift shop today, except I don’t actually have time to do that.

Anyway. Writing is also taking up my time these days, but it’s OK. It was my November goal, and I realized at the time that it would be a stretch. I’m writing more than 2000 words a day on the novel at the moment, killing off characters with wild abandon and then going back and giving them a video entry or a first name only, because dammit, they had kids and I need their kids for genetic testing. In the book. Not in real life. I don’t have an outline for this book. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know how it gets to the ending. I have a general feel for the shit that might happen and for the core problem of the book, but it’s writing itself. It reveals itself to me while I write…which honestly is the way I draw as well. Although I might have a drawing in my head, it doesn’t come fully apparent until pen hits paper, and I often have no idea where it will go until it’s done. I’m tapping into some part of my brain that just makes. It doesn’t really care what you think about it; hell, it barely cares what I think about it. It does take some direction, when I have some, but mostly I’m just spilling some synaptic goo out on paper or screen and trying to make sense of it afterwards.

Seriously. The book is gonna need a massive edit. But that’s OK. I hear that’s normal. Maybe tonight I’ll finish outlining, and then the light at the end of the tunnel might feel a bit closer. Sigh.

Apparently Crazy Ass

Hello very furry cat tail that is dipping into my tea. Please removeth yourself.

I’m juggling. Grading and dark coming earlier and school stuff and a dead black widow and a tire that won’t behave or maybe it’s the tire pressure monitoring system, who the fuck cares, just make the light on the dashboard with the exclamation mark go off. I served dinner at 9 PM last night (but I served it, and it was healthy and made from scratch. So there. And there are leftovers. So double there.). I only graded two periods of tests instead of all three (at least I got through two). I was determined to quilt, because goddammit, how am I going to finish the quilting by Saturday night if I don’t actually QUILT every night? So let’s ignore the fact that I was still awake at 1 AM and that my body on non-Daylight Savings time believes it should be awake an hour earlier, and honestly, so does Kitten, so there’s no point in trying to sleep longer. In fact, amusingly, my body seems to think it’s being allowed to sleep in, so although it had barely more than 5 hours of sleep, it feels better than normal, because it’s an hour later. Or earlier. Or something. I’m sure it will all even out in a few days, but for now, it’s what’s keeping me moving.

And you know what? Dumbass subs who leave no notes as to what happened at all (apparently he wrote a referral on an entire class?)? Give Up Now. Or stay out of my class. Really, there was less chaos returning to the classroom after two days gone than I thought there would be, but that was mostly because I put it all on them, made sure that all the responsibility lay squarely in their laps. Oh, you didn’t complete the work on Friday? So sad. If you don’t have it done by Tuesday, you will be unable to do the required assignment that you only get one day to do. Oh, your class doesn’t know how to plug in the Chromebooks? Y’all can write it down on PAPER…that archaic substance that frightens you so much. So sad. Other classes will be on Chromebooks today. You are not so lucky. Maybe you will learn from this. Or not.

My team is in Bitch Mode. End of the trimester mentality, but more like where we would be in March, after Trimester 2. Not sure what’s up with that. I just know it feels crappy. Teachers blame themselves when the kids don’t perform, even when they know kids are making choices to do so. It makes you feel like a failure. No one likes that.

So that’s why I need to lose myself in quilting at night. I need a place to rest after grading all those tests, a place for my head to go where I have control over the outcome…or at least more control than I have over 140 12-year-olds.

So I quilted for an hour almost…

I really like those hands. I’m 6 1/2 hours in and almost done with the outlining.

I just have the tree left, and I’ve done some of it. Then I can start quilting the background, and honestly, not very much of the background shows. Then binding and trying to figure out what to do with the bleed spots. Almost there. Still need to draw the NEXT one. No pressure. OK, lots of pressure. Crazy-ass pressure, honestly.

I’m also writing the novel again, burying myself in plant/animal hybrid genetics and escaping from the government and chemical responses and how people might die. Weird stuff. I’m doing NaNoWriMo, where you write 50,000 words in 30 days in November. I wrote on the plane on Saturday morning, I wrote in LAX’s tiny little offshoot terminal where we were stuck for four hours, I wrote on my computer, and I wrote on the iPad while sitting in a meeting (hey, it kept me awake and I was actually listening.). I’m over 6,000 words in three days, so I’m doing OK. I’m trying to stay ahead of the 1667 words/day that will definitely get me there. It’s nice to have the website tell me that at the current rate, I will finish 5 days early (unlikely in real life). It gives me a cushion for the days I can’t get much written. And the story is progressing! I wrote 7 new characters in and promptly killed them off! Good times.

Anyway. I am busy. I might need a break soon. Meanwhile, here’s the video my mom took of me at Houston explaining Awakening the Crone…there’s a Quilt Alliance video too, but they haven’t sent me the link to that yet.

Apparently I invited everyone to take me out to a bar and explain myself. You know, like you do. Yeah. Apparently crazy ass.

Barely Awake

Started this on Thursday morning…days ago…so this is less than 3 hours of sleep. Hmn. Yeah. Don’t like it. Head is all swimmy. Brain thinks it’s still asleep. It told me to go lay back down. Stop this uprightness and just lay the fuck back down. On a bed. With a nice soft pillow. Yum.

I did this last year too…got up at 3:30-ish to get out of here. I just don’t remember it. You know why? I was asleep when it happened, that’s why. Just like I’m asleep now.

Did I go to bed early last night, like a normal person would? Nope. I quilted. Here’s Midnight watching me quilt…

I wasn’t tired. There’s no point in going to bed if you’re not tired.

I realized some things in Houston this year. One is that I’m not particularly stable. I mean, I’m not completely off my rocker, but stable, normal people do not stay up until midnight making art (stitching around a penis, let’s be specific here) the night before they have to get up really early and fly to Texas. They go to bed early. They schedule their time differently. They probably have a clean house. They probably seem a little less frantic than I do. I am not that person. I think of the unstable as the part that gets me to drop all the grading and grab my sketchbook one night. The part that blows off some Have-To for a Want-To. Not all the time…just enough times that I’m not predictable.

I also do a lot. I know that. I always have. It’s not a choice…some people think it’s a choice. I think I’m a little ADD and that doesn’t help, but also, my brain does not like to just sit in a chair by the pool and relax. It does not like peace and quiet. It can do that for a short period of time, but there still better be a purpose, a plan. Maybe there’s a book I want to read or a drawing I want to do, or I just want to enjoy the sunshine, but I’d still be better off DOING something. Not doing feels bad. As I attempt (and I say ‘attempt’ because quite honestly I suck at it) to venture into the dating world (again, shoot me now), it’s all online and there are all these questions and you have spreadsheets and graphs of info on your potential dates, and questions like “how does it feel to do nothing all day” or “normal or weird” put me in the small percentages. I feel like crap when I get nothing done. Workaholic much? Yeah. But a hike counts as something. And a drawing counts as something. And reading a book counts as something. And maybe if there were someone around, hanging out with them and doing nothing would be OK, but I don’t know. And weird. I’m definitely weird. And apparently intense. I guess that’s true. I guess…what’s the opposite of intense? Mild. Mild-mannered. Temperate. OK. Yeah. I’m not any of those. Nor am I calm. Or drama free. Look at my drawings. Seriously.

Houston: one thing that has been great both in Houston and as I post pictures of Awakening the Crone and You Make Me Wanna Die is that I am getting a lot of comments, positive comments about my work, my vision (for lack of a better word), my art sense. I have people coming up to me or messaging me and saying the work is good, reminding me of that, because deep down inside me, I know that. But when I am deep in a hole, it’s hard to see that there is a purpose to my work, that when it is done, it will go out there and cause conversations and thoughts (even negative ones), and people will come back to me and grab my hands and smile at me and make it feel worthwhile. So I guess I needed that. Because sometimes being an artist is such a solitary pursuit (and maybe that is why I write SO MUCH, talking to myself) that you forget that this is an image and you are putting it out there with your name on it and people will see it and then they will associate you with that piece (and no, that’s not always a positive thing), but mostly, the vibe coming back at me is good, keep it up, don’t stop.

So I have that. And that is what I am holding onto right now.

I read this…and Polly, thanks. I feel better now. I’m not one of those girls. I know that. I’m not trying to be what someone thinks I should be. Because she says it’s OK to be messy and have emotions and not be perfect and still to WANT to be part of a relationship but on my own terms. Even when people tell you it’s NOT OK. They’re wrong. Because life isn’t always calm and pretty and positive and perky, and if that’s the woman you want to be with, then maybe she’s just faking it because she’s afraid of rocking the boat. I don’t want to be with fake people. I’m spending a lot of time and energy trying to negotiate some level of balance with my body and my brain, and I’m open and will tell you exactly what I’m thinking and feeling and if you can’t roll a bit with that, if you are going to run away when there’s sad or mad, because all you can handle is happy, then I feel sorry for you…because you can’t really feel the happy, experience the joy, unless you’ve felt those damn awful really lows, those sads that make you want to crawl into bed. They are there for everyone. You need to experience them just like you experience the others. And own them. My sad…it’s mine. I know that. I hold on to it sometimes and it struggles and I just hold on until it stops and subsides and I can move on. Read a book. Have a cup of tea. Draw.

I had a great time at the Halloween party last night. It was funny, amusing, intellectual, and engaging. Am I still lonely and sad on either side of it? Yeah. I am. But I can hold on to that few hours of feeling entertained, amused, as a cushion…not a solution, not a goal, because I don’t believe all of life is like that or SHOULD be like that…but accepting that both sides exist, that the spectrum is normal…that’s what I’m looking for. Someone who thinks THAT is OK…meanwhile, I will keep being who I am, because I can’t really do anything else.

Celebrating Silver: Awakening the Crone

I’m home from Houston and the opening of Celebrating Silver, one of SAQA’s 25th anniversary exhibits, so now I can show the whole quilt…you’ve seen details. I started working on it October 10, 2013, and finished January 18, 2014, not counting drawing time. It took 95 hours. Here’s the bird with eyeball…

The weary mother and babe…

The still perky maiden…

The crone and her crown of thorns…

An aging uterus and a protective bird…

The ground in which she’s rooted…

Awakening the Crone…

Finished in January 2014 ($3600), 40” w x 70 ½” h, opening in IQF Houston, TX, Oct 30-Nov, 2014; then traveling to IQF Chicago, IL, June 2015; Quilt! Knit! Stitch!, Portland, OR, Aug 2015; and the Festival of Quilts, Birmingham, England, August 2016. There is video too of me talking about this, in two places. I’ll post those when I get them.

The Crone Emerges…

After Thanksgiving, I was ironing all the pieces down…here’s the biggest pieces of flesh on the whole quilt. I used up almost all of this fabric (which I really loved)…

Pieces were piling up, and I was cutting them out as quickly as I could…

Here’s all the fabrics that were used in the quilt.

And here’s a pile of leftovers after I finish trimming stuff…

After that, I sorted pieces, around the end of the year. I had about two more weeks of Winter Break left.

I started ironing around New Year’s Eve and was done a few days later.

No, I don’t have a life. Why do you ask?

This bird was the beginnings of an idea in Julie’s mind to have me make the small bird quilts I did last summer…

Ironing went quickly…

I was motivated to get it done before school started up again.

The maiden…

Both of them together…

The upper torso coming together…

And Kitten on the crone’s shoulder. Every crone needs a cat.

And this is where I started questioning my choice of background fabric.

I actually laid the whole thing out on the purple fabric…purple that I loved. And then I rejected it. And went shopping for that blue…that eye-popping blue.

Because that blue is what it needed to be. Here it is ironed down, waiting to be stitched down…

Stitching it down, all in early January…

The great thing about those vacation weeks is that I don’t have to do a whole lot of schoolwork.

So I have more time to make art. She definitely has a marked face…

I started quilting it on January 9. That’s probably about when I went back to school…

Lots of outlining…

I quilted it in 7 days during school. I was a little obsessed (honestly, I was running out of time).

There’s all that detail again…

And then I started quilting the background…

The binding went on around the 17th and I was handstitching the night before I was supposed to take it to the photographer.

The next post? Official pictures…

Starting Silver

On September 23, 2013, I started drawing a quilt that I meant to have drawn in July, early August at the latest…but then my life sort of exploded and I couldn’t focus. I had gotten into the 25th anniversary SAQA exhibit called Celebrating Silver, curated by Yvonne Porcella, on the strength of my description of silver as the color of age and experience, the crone versus the mother and the maiden…so I started by drawing the crone…

This is two days of drawing, about a month after school started, when I am mostly exhausted when I get home from school…

I made a copy of the page and then taped the copy to the next page to continue the drawing…

And then I decided it sucked. I actually liked the start for the mother, but decided it just wasn’t working out…so I cut it off and started again.

Oct 3 13 004 small

Better. Much better. So down to two pages…and I keep drawing. Then I start drawing up the sides…

Oct 9 13 002 small

And I decide it needs to be longer and I add to the bottom…

Oct 8 13 003 small

There is a size limit on this thing, but I cut really close to that limit. Go BIG! or don’t go at all, right?

Then I started numbering. Oh my.

This thing has enough detail to kill me. And it almost did. One thousand two hundred and thirty-seven pieces. None of them very big.

I started tracing it on Wonder Under in October…

I finished right before I left for Houston last year…

Lots of little tiny pieces…

Which then had to be cut up…I didn’t even start until mid-November.

This is the background fabric I originally chose for this quilt…

Stay tuned to see what happened to that decision…right before I sorted all 1200+ of those tiny pieces, at the end of November.

I started ironing them to fabric in late November…

And trimming them as well. There are some things that are portable and some that aren’t…

I can’t drag my whole stash around to iron stuff, but I can drag this shoebox around with a pair of scissors…

The fabrics started piling up in December…I took a few days off ironing. Not sure why? School. Tired. Whatever.

But eventually I got my focus on (realizing that time was getting TIGHT)…

And finished ironing everything down to fabric on December 6.

More tomorrow…hopefully…if I have internet. I will be at the SAQA Meet and Greet Thursday at 5 at Houston, as long as flights fly and nothing bad happens. I will be tired! Yay! But I will be there. Like I told my dad, sometimes you just have to run away from all the crap…I totally grabbed all the stuff I needed to grade and ran away from school. I need to go back out and get meds and food and money for tomorrow, but I’m not going back there until Monday. You can’t make me.