Gender Equality

Saturday is the opening of the Expressions in Equality exhibit at Visions Art Museum. Sheila Frampton-Cooper is the curator. This is a short version of her curatorial statement…

What drives people to undermine whole populations that they deem different and therefore unacceptable? From racial, gender and sexual inequality to ageism and classism, progress has been made, yet discrimination still abounds. This show begs the questions: What are the issues we’re challenged with, and what would a perfect society look like that’s sustained by pure, unconditional love?

Sheila came to me in Fall of 2013 and asked if I could participate in this exhibit. We talked about how my obvious take would be gender equality, though with teaching a variety of students and life in general, I could certainly do a host of other equality issues. It was gender equality that spoke to me, though. There’s that whole Nature v Nuture thing about male and female that both intrigues and irritates the crap out of me. Don’t assume because I’m female that I can’t do things. Don’t assume that I’m supposed to do things. Obviously, there are things that only a woman can do, like give birth. Imagine being a woman raised knowing that and then not being able to actually have a child.

But what the hell does gender equality mean? There are things that it is physically impossible for a man to do, such as give birth, so that falls squarely in the female arena. Certainly we haven’t figured out how a man can nurse a baby either, although if you’re pro-bottle (my kids never were), there are options to involve both genders in that process. Biologically, men do tend to be larger and stronger, but that is not always the case. We can certainly go back to the caveman stereotype (because stereotypes are so useful) and say Man Hunter, Woman Gatherer, but I have some female friends who would kick ass on the Hunter part and some male friends who would fall woefully short. And all that is OK. Society does throw a wide variety of gender roles and expectations at us that don’t seem at all related to DNA. I know when I was first married, although my husband had gladly cooked for me prior to marriage (sort of a way of attracting the female, right?), after the actual wedding, he made an assumption that the cooking portion of our relationship was my problem. I fought that and won (well, and I’m divorced now, so take that as you will, but he cooks now). I probably continue some of those stereotypes by being a teacher (but I teach science) and a quilter (but my quilts are art). And do I nurture more as a mom because I’m female? Because society expects it of me? Because my DNA tells me to? Or because that’s just the person I am? Hard to say.

When you toss in issues of homosexuality and transgender existences, the whole story turns into a muddle. It’s hard for me to look at how society works now and think that we will ever be capable of gender equality…and it’s not that everything needs to be equal, because it can’t. But certainly in a specific relationship, there should be this idea of people choosing activities and responsibilities based on their inherent passions and abilities, whether they carry a uterus or a penis.

So all those things were in my head all year as the piece grew in my head. Here’s a detail.

I tagged certain parts of the bodies with male and female symbols. I can’t post the whole thing until after the opening Saturday night, but here is my artist’s statement for the piece:

This concept of gender equality, there are some days when it seems like a dream, like something I woke up with in my head, foggy-edged, but possible. Then I go out into the real world and the expectations others have of me because I am female, daughter, mother, sister, wife, girlfriend…it clashes so incredibly with that dream I see in my head, where there are no assumptions of who or what I will be, or what my son or daughter will be…that there isn’t anything I HAVE to do because I was born with two X chromosomes and you were born with one. There is no government entity or group who is limiting me because of the uterus I have inside me and my ability to give birth, which somehow makes me less of a person to some. Even when people say they don’t believe in those divisions, there ARE some things that only one gender can do (give birth), at least for now, and when your child is small and the comfort they get is from the one who provides food, you wonder how many of these gender differences are nature and how many are nurture. Whatever the answer, and I don’t think we have it now, I would hope that a new relationship would start from a place of relative equality and then move from there. I call it a work in progress because I don’t believe we are doing it particularly well now, even myself, and it can only get better. If I keep the dream in the front of my mind and refer to it as I interact, as I do, as I live, as I love, then perhaps I will get closer to what feels like equality…teamwork…standing together to get where we need to go.

So yeah. The piece is called Work in Progress. When Sheila first asked me to participate, I had a hard time coming up with any hope that this was possible, that gender equality would ever be attainable. Society seems to flip flop on women’s rights and equality, and the current mood is certainly not pro-equality. When 20-year-old women tell me they’re not feminists, because they don’t know why they SHOULD be, I wonder how we will ever enact significant change. When 40-year-old men tell me I’m imagining the conspiracy against my uterine rights, I wonder how we can make it more equal when we can’t even acknowledge there’s an issue.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe we don’t do it as a whole society. Maybe we do it one relationship at a time. Hope to see you Saturday night at the opening, 5-7.

Binding Late

I have a significant callus on my middle right finger from a teeny tiny needle poking the crap out of the same spot. I don’t thimble, because I just move to a different finger if there’s a thimble there. Can’t figure the logic of that out, but if you hang out with me long enough, you’ll realize logic isn’t my strong point. I’ve got it…it just doesn’t look like yours.

I had a goal last night of finishing grading one assignment from December (ugh) and then I would be allowed to work on the two quilts that are hanging out in my office at the moment. Or is it my studio. Some days it’s hard to tell. It’s my Offudio. Or my Stoffice. My Studice. Those are awful. It’s my workspace. Anyway…I managed to grade everything during the girlchild’s game because she was sick and only played 20 minutes…so instead of sitting there and stitching (I could have worked on birds…although I haven’t been doing that much), I graded those suckers and got them done. Insert hallelujah here. Don’t get really excited yet though, because the huge project from before break is still ungraded and mocking me.

Dinner was in the crockpot, although despite an email, a verbal reminder, and a text, the boychild forgot to put it in and turn it on (sigh)…when girlchild got home, she put it in on high though, and it worked fine. So while dinner finalized (aka tater tots…the sign of a good mom), I logged grades and listened to the snuffles of the sick child who has three college apps due today that she has not done. After dinner, I started working.

I started with the outline quilting of the FFAC The 100 donation quilt…

This is not a big quilt. When the outlining was done, I went on to the background quilting…

That didn’t take long…seriously, total quilting was barely over an hour.

Trimmed it. It’s about 10×12″.

Then I trimmed the other one that’s been lying around for days and found a binding that worked for both of them…they’re kind of in the same blue tone, although the donation quilt is much brighter…and I got the binding on…

This one is bigger, about 19×18″. It needs ink too. I’m about halfway done with the binding on it. Yes, I stayed up way too late. At some point, I looked at the clock and chastised myself, realizing I COULD stay up and finish the binding, but that was fucking crazy. So I went to bed. You don’t want to know what time.

I did actually finish the binding on the little one. Ouch.

The ouch is for the hole in my finger. The quilt’s really not that lumpy…in the picture above, it’s all pinned and it distorted it. I’ll photograph it for real this afternoon. It’s nice and flat and square corners. Really. It still needs a label. I couldn’t name it last night…but this morning while resizing the photos, it came to me: Fly, Be Free. I say it all the time. So there’s my third finish of 2015. If you like it, you have a 1 in 100 chance to get it through the FFAC The 100 donation drive on February 4.

It’s funny. I want to make another big quilt before Spring Break. I really do. And I have no shortage of drawings that could become a large quilt. But then it’s so easy to make these little ones…it’s tempting to just do one every couple of weeks instead. I have enough smaller drawings…I could totally do that. And there’s the greater possibility that small pieces will sell. There are two small ones I’m doing after this, the hand/cancer cell pieces. The big ones are the better pieces for shows though, so I need to work on that (so I can get more rejections! Now there’s attitude for you.). Realistically, I can only make 5 or 6 big quilts a year, and that would be starting now. I’ll have to decide soon. Because I have this art drive that does not freakin’ stop. No down time, I guess. I should not complain…no artist’s block for me. Knock on wood.

Soccer…yeah…even sick, she played well…

Although this was a moon ball.

Back to work. The school type of work…another day of trying to explain how the brain works. I probably shouldn’t be talking…

Remembering How to Sleep…

Remembering how to sleep…something I have to relearn each time we start school again. People ask me all the time if I sleep, because I do all this stuff (I do a lot of it at the same time? Maybe?). I read at the gym. I am still writing that sci fi novel, mostly at the gym. While I’m waiting for dinner to cook in the oven, I’m in here writing or resizing photos or cutting stuff out. Drawings build in my head during quiet moments in the car or staff meetings (shhh…don’t tell). They color themselves in while I’m cutting onions or listening to a parent make excuses for their child. I grade papers at soccer games, in waiting rooms. Hardly anything in my life happens just one thing at a time. Right now, I’m eating breakfast and typing, while listing the things I need to take to work with me, accepting that I might not finish this post before I have to leave.

I do sleep. I don’t sleep much, that’s for sure, and the sleep I get isn’t great. I know that’s not good for me, but I can read any number of articles about how I should sleep more and better, and they don’t actually help me sleep. I’ve never ever been a good sleeper. I’ve always been a night owl. Nothing has changed. I’m just older. When I can sleep, I do. Last night was not one of those nights.

I didn’t start ironing until after 10:30. I was lucky and got out of school meetings early, raced to the gym (wrote my book and read my book), came home and cooked dinner, graded some papers (part of my plan to get caught up is to actually grade every day…what a concept), and then headed to the ironing board. It’s not like it would take long to iron this…

But ironically, I had missed numbering and tracing a part. That was lame. Picked a background…

Needs outlining. Nice camera strap in the photo there…late-night art photography. Did it on purpose! I would have stitched it down and pinbasted it last night if I didn’t have another quilt already under the machine. I hate changing out thread, so I decided to finish quilting this instead.

It was only another 37 minutes. Now you know how I stay up so late.

Even after that, my brain was racing, on overdrive. They talk about shutting computers off, that electronic light messes with your sleep. Hell, it wouldn’t matter. My art brain messes with my sleep. It wanted to finish both quilts last night and my adult/mom brain put the kibosh on that. Are you kidding me? You have school tomorrow. You are teaching young minds something tomorrow (shit, wish I could remember what I’m teaching…something ironically to do with the nervous system…this is why I lesson plan on Sundays, when I’m awake). You did not get enough sleep Sunday night. Now is not the time to take a stand for your art.

Anyway, so the one needs a binding and the other needs a couple hours of work. Honestly, it’s bigger and more complicated than it should be, but I’m OK with that at the moment…because it’s getting done. And the next big quilt is chomping at the bit in my head.

Making a Donation Quilt…Finally…

It figures I would wait until the day before school starts to actually begin work on the FFAC donation quilt. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here to read about Virginia Spiegel’s fundraiser to raise $10,000 for cancer research in one day: 100 artists creating 100 works for a donation of $100 each. The event is February 4 starting at 10 AM Central time.

Yes, you’ve read my whinging about trying to come up with an idea for weeks now, and it finally took an episode of The Walking Dead to get it in my head (which is amusing, because all I actually drew during the episode were the hands). I did have the heart part in my head, but got distracted by good TV Saturday night (not an oxymoron), and waited until Sunday night, after dinner was made and was in the oven, at my parents’ house, sitting at their table, before I could draw it. I did actually steal the heart from the Gender Equality quilt that is in the Visions opening this Saturday, so if you’re there, you may recognize it…

The wings were new. And it’s not that I got the idea from the TV; it’s that the TV distracts the talkie annoying part of my brain long enough for the artist brain to just jump in and draw.

I persuaded the boychild to let me drive by the copy place on the way home from the parentals, thus vastly confusing the girlchild, who was driving home in her car, as we turned off north, away from the house. But after I had cleaned up and started laundry and graded some papers (hey, there’s a reality check…school starts in an hour and 13 minutes…shut up!), I numbered it (41 pieces) and traced it onto Wonder Under…

Then I cut out the Wonder Under while finishing up Fargo, a series that really grew on me. Back to The Next Generation for fabric choosing…I’m almost done with this whole series…will miss Jean Luc supervising my fabric choices. He’s been so helpful.

None of it took very long…because it’s small and it doesn’t have 2000 pieces in it. Duh.

I used 12 fabrics. TWELVE.

And then yes, I stayed up to cut them all out, even though school started in the morning, because you know what? Teachers don’t sleep well the night before school starts after a break anyway. Our brains are worried the alarm won’t go off, we don’t have everything done, the power will go out, the world will end…although why that would be a bad thing in terms of making it to school on time, I don’t know. I just know we don’t sleep.

I also did a redraw on the breast cancer cell in the hand.

There’s a possibility that either this one or the previous drawing might become a quilt as well, but first I have to finish the FFAC quilt. Ironing tonight, hopefully, and as far as I can get on the rest of it. But right now, I need to find something besides pajamas to wear to school (the laundry wasn’t quite dry). This is the hardest part of being an artist…going off to the day job when you just want to work on the art.

Twitching Eyelid, Missing Stovetop

No, this is not a single-mom’s version of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon…or is it?

So this is where my stovetop used to be…

Yeah. I had a replacement, but it was too small. We can talk later about why it was too small. Let’s just say it was too small. Meanwhile, the nice installation guy had to cut the wires to get the old one out…it was half-functioning, which is still a lot more functional than this hole is. So when we realized it was too small, my day kind of slapped me upside the face.

It’s OK. I got my car back. I’m just going to drive it until whatever caused issues with it up on Sunrise Highway happens again and it dies again. Not much else I can do. He wouldn’t charge me anything for trying to figure it out. I offered him a turkey. The stovetop installation guy also wouldn’t charge me anything for not installing a stovetop. Turkey? No? Getting the car back meant I had time to go to Sears, return the too-small stovetop, and order one that would fit, because the girlchild now had a car to go to her soccer game. The stovetop? For January 19. OK. It’s all right. I have a mostly working oven, a toaster, an electric tea kettle, and a microwave. Oh, and a crock pot. We can eat. We can toast things. We just can’t fry things or make sauces. Or pasta. Although there’s been some contemplation if we boiled water in the tea kettle over and over again and kept pouring it over the pasta, it would cook to some extent. Insert evil eye glare here.

So there’s that. And I went into my classroom and found all the crap for Monday’s lab and organized some stuff and copied the stuff I need for Monday. So I don’t have to go back there until Monday. Which is when school starts, so I really should be there. But I can sort of ignore it for two days. My left eyelid, however, is not ignoring it. It’s still twitching like a motherfucker.

While the guy was not installing my stovetop, I started sorting all of Mariah’s hand-me-down fabrics by color…

The kids say they couldn’t possibly make the decisions I do about multi-colored pieces. Or where I draw the line between brown and orange or white and yellow. Or even green and blue. Whatever. It will probably take me months to do this.

The day kicking my ass found me in a bar (oh yeah) with my sketchbook and a glass of wine, trying to make sense of cancer donation quilts once again…first of all, breast cancer cells are alternately terrifying and beautiful in their spikiness.

But I think I need to draw something not related to cancer. I think these spiky cells will end up in something though. How can they not?

And when I came home, I figured out how to cook the previously planned dinner without a stovetop, because someone, whose name will stay unknown, kept texting me that she was hungry but couldn’t possibly handle making dinner, and then I tried to quilt, but I was really really tired…

Yeah, drinking in the early evening after a long stressful day can do that to you. So I didn’t finish her. And today I’m hiking and I don’t know what else, but it isn’t quilting and it isn’t grading papers…it’s whatever it takes to get the damn eyelid under control. Because that’s a sign of stress and it needs to wander off somewhere else.

Drawing Cancer…

Oh holy vacation we call Winter Break, as you slither from my fingers and wither away into workload from hell, I miss you already. I spent time yesterday writing homework for next week. I had to go to school to find the journals I thought I had brought home with me. I have tried to pin my brain down to decisionmaking on the lesson-planning front at least five times, and it wanders off halfway through, complaining that it would like to finish the book it’s reading, or go see a movie, or even clean the kitchen, because that is way more engaging than slogging through a lesson plan revamp. Or is there any point in the revamp? All the science standards change next year…why am I working so hard on adjustments this year, when I won’t even be teaching this content next year?

Who knows. I don’t. It was easier last year to let things like that drop. I should keep remembering that. Let It Go. Oh god, now that fucking song is in my head; make it stop.

All right. So yesterday was a giant clusterfuck of you have to be here or there or everywhere and then sit for an hour in a parking lot, and girlchild’s formal dress disaster (aka the genetics of the female body and how none of us look good in those skimpy dresses), and finally at some point, I found myself realizing that I need to get this cancer quilt done. Or at least started. It’s not going to take long, but I know what the next three weeks look like and I’m flailing.

So instead of taking the endless Christmas stocking that will never be finished (hence the endless part) to my monthly stitching meeting, I took my sketchbook and a couple of pens. I figured I would force myself to draw and even if it was crap (boundless crap), I would have a start and maybe I could come home and draw something that wasn’t crap. The night before, I started with the hand in the middle…

Totally fucked it up. Decided to keep going and drew the mouth, and then the pizza just jumped in there. Crap drawing. But drawing. And I haven’t been doing much of that, so I’m out of practice again. Remember my plan to draw every Friday night? Yeah. So do I. OK. The drawing isn’t crap. The cat is crap. The rest…I could do something with that. The hand sucks. Whatever.

So then I was staring at the paper in this Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble, and although I often draw in public, I don’t really draw with people watching me much. So I drew the hands…

Which I think are good…remember this had to be simple. But then the bird. And I hated the bird. This morning? Staring at the picture of it? I don’t hate the bird. But he’s got too many damn pieces for this one. I could do the hands again and put something else there (like an anatomically correct heart…not a uterus…I mean, I COULD put a uterus there, but…that would kind of mess with my decision that this piece should not scare the crap out of some poor donor in some state that can’t handle the existence of a uterus). So reject. For now.

Meanwhile, I’ve got Julie and Kathy talking to me about cells and cancer and infusion and ports (I purposely took the sketchbook to this group because Julie’s a survivor and Kathy’s a science person…I knew they could throw some stuff at me that would poke at the sleeping drawing brain cells and wake them the fuck up). So we were talking about more abstract representations of when the chemo goes into the body and attacks the cells, which Julie has obviously visualized (and experienced), and I’m trying to get my head around it, to make an image out of it that is still a Kathy quilt but goes where I want it to go…and I started with the side view…

Except now I have a breast in there, which breaks my rules for this quilt, and then it deteriorated into a tattoo from a photo I saw online and then there were antennae. If you are in charge of filming my retrospective, you should totally record Julie and Kathy, in a Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble, describing my drawing process. Because Kathy knew it was endoplasmic reticulum. And Julie wasn’t sure about the antennae.

Hell, I’m not sure about the antennae. But I’m getting closer. Really. I know it seems like I’m flailing all over the place, but I’m getting closer.

When I got home, I was tired…but wanted to get a start on the quilting of that other small quilt, which now has a name…

I woke up to it this morning…the name, not the quilt…

I do not take my quilts to bed with me.

I finished the outlining. It’s not really dark on that side…I just couldn’t get the camera to behave last night and I was too tired to fuss about it. Now I just need to do the background and bind it and it’s done. Except what I REALLY should be doing is lesson-planning and grading. UGH. I hate responsibilities.

Speaking of, I finished the two commissioned birds and sent them off to their owner yesterday…this is Owl 3…

And this is HeyBird 3…

The first two quilts of 2015.

I’m still watching a lot of this…

And honestly not getting a whole lot done while I watch. A tiny bit of grading, maybe some stitching, but mostly just watching and brain dead. I know it’s OK to have some down time after finishing major work, and I’m trying to let my brain have that, but there’s definitely a push in my head for getting the next thing done…today being the last real day of vacation before going back, I’m definitely kind of buried in that rushed feeling of checking stuff off the to-do list. Which sucks. And I still need to draw the cancer quilt. Damn.

Procrastinating

I don’t want to go back to school yet. I guess I have 4 1/2 more days, but this always feels like such a slog from January to Spring Break…even with the three-day weekends. The Five Weeks of March (not the Ides, but the Weeks…all you teachers know that awful stretch of time) are coming. You know the kids’ brains are going to be all damaged by three weeks off, and by the time you get them back, they’ll be affected by whatever weird pollen that causes teenaged brains to go all hormonal in Spring. We see it every year. This is the hardest trimester in terms of content, for science at least, and after grading all their science journals yesterday (that was 5 hours of my life I’ll never see again), their grades will show it. I know I should be planning today, setting up the next unit, writing the next assessment, making sure everything’s ready to be copied, but I just can’t do it. I can’t immerse myself back in the slog yet. My art brain wants to play…it wants to wander about outside and draw things. It wants to be free for just a bit longer.

It’s OK. I go through this every year. I am pulled screaming into the first week of school in the new year. For some reason, Spring Break doesn’t do the same damage…I think because it’s close enough to the end of the year that you can smell it. See it. Feel it. I don’t want to deal with grades or assignments or even kids. I just want to stay up late and make art and hang out and be a human without a job that sucks so much energy. Back to that balance thing. Constantly on my mind.

So what all that really means is that I’m procrastinating. I’ve been grading stuff, but not killing myself (OK, yesterday was a stretch, but I wanted the damn things done). And last night, when my brain was racing, totally wired, I let it iron stuff together that is totally irrelevant, not a deadline, nothing that needs to be done. I just wanna make this little quilt. I got to here before I needed to go to sleep…

Because I knew I had to be up early. And the left eyelid is already twitching with either tiredness or work-related stress, hard to know which. It’s not like there’s a different twitch for each. So maybe both.

This isn’t a big quilt…it only has 160 pieces in it. I thought about doing it for the FFAC cancer donation quilt, but it’s way too complicated, too many hours. It’ll finish up about 20″ square and I already have over 8 hours in it. For those who are always devaluing an artist’s time, consider how much you get paid for a day of your actual real-life job. I know what that amount is for my job…in fact, I know my hourly rate. Now add in the cost of materials and a 40-50% gallery commission. And taxes. Now you know what an 8-hour quilt is really worth, and this will have more than 8 hours in it by the time I’m done. They want the cancer quilts to come out to about $100, so I need to draw simple and keep it small. I’m hoping to do that today too. Later. (Procrastinating…small and simple is HARD for me.)

This morning, what I SHOULD have done, if I were a good little worker bee, is do the next batch of grading. Ugh. Could not do it. Not after yesterday. I have grading PTSD.

So I finished ironing…

Again, I could have stopped there, been responsible. Hell, I am being responsible…just responsible to my own self. Sigh.

Found a background…ironed it down…

Again, I could have stopped there. I could have.

Fuck it. Stitched it down and pinbasted it. Ha!

Then I stopped. Before the quilting. But it was hard. Now I just want it done. And if I didn’t have any other have-to’s today, like getting a new stove to replace the one girlchild killed, or going to her soccer game, or grading freakin’ papers, I would get it done.

But one of my have-to’s is the donation quilt drawing. Plus there’s another drawing lurking in my brain. Maybe an hour or two in front of the telly with my sketchbook tonight? Balanced by some grading (fuck grading). Sigh. Yes, the art brain is STRONG in this one. As I get older, I am less likely to say no to it. But the kids are getting older and are way more self-sufficient than they used to be, so I can ignore a lot of stuff that I didn’t used to be able to ignore.

And I can grade for a bit at the soccer game…until it gets too dark…

Because it gets too dark to take photos too…except I keep tracking the sky for clouds like this…

And this…

So I’m procrastinating, yes. But not in a bad way. There’s certainly something to be said for not getting too far behind in your job responsibilities, but I will always argue that once you’ve put in an hour or so on that crap (because for a teacher, it could be hours every night if you let it), it’s time to let your brain does what it wants. And mine wants to make more pictures.

2014 in Quilts

I finished 21 quilts in 2014. Holy crap. There were 6 major quilts and 15 smaller quilts. Twelve of the smaller ones have sold, all birds…

This collage doesn’t show all 21 because there were duplicates…I think there is one more dove, another eyeball bird, another HeyBird…at least. It was a prolific (and somewhat crazy) year. Cats for next year instead of birds? Maybe. Thinking about it. Or maybe I’ll just try to have a life. You never know. Just looking at it is a bit crazy…I made one major quilt every two months. That is nuts. Even the major quilts are an achievement…two of them were slightly simpler, but two of them were just plain old crazy complicated. Yup. It’s official. I am nuts.

Anyway. I do feel good about what I did, despite the insanity. Moving on to 2015. I’m out of the hole now…let’s see what happens with the art.

More Birds and a Birthday

Hello Friday night. How are you? My son turned 19 today. That makes me ancient, right? Not really.

We did not set any fire alarms off, but it was a close call…

He did not blow them all out in one go…girlchild’s amazing decorating attempt included car-shaped sprinkles (hey, you go with what you have in the house). I made the cake; she frosted and decorated. She always does the fun stuff.

It’s OK. I was baking it in between doing two more birds, commissions.

But first, the piece for the equality exhibit, which opens the 17th, needed a label. Apparently I need to actually deliver it so they can hang it (what a concept).

So that didn’t take long. The birds were all trimmed up and ready for ironing…

HeyBird is easy.

The owl…it’s a little fussier because of the wing tips, but still not too hard. This is the third color version of the owl…

Onto a background…

I need to remember that these take about the same amount of time the cancer donation quilt should take, and they don’t have a ton of pieces…the owl is the most time-consuming with 32 pieces, I think. So I can’t draw something complicated. It has to be simple. I was going to take a sketchbook to the boychild’s birthday dinner tonight, but I couldn’t find the small one…

Oh well. These are so freakin’ fast…

But relaxing nonetheless…

Easy to quilt…

Fast…two done in a day, basically…

By the time we went to dinner for the boychild’s birthday, I was on the background for the owl…Calli loves Grandma…

Girlchild is crankily doing yet another college app tonight…this may kill me. Look at that face…

Three more apps after that, all due the 15th. It Never Ends.

So I quilted the background after cake was eaten…

And then I picked out bindings and trimmed the quilts and got everything ready for when I have time to sew all that crap on.

Here’s some photos that were stuck on the camera while I was trying to set up the new computer…here’s sewing the binding and sleeves on while watching hours of television last Monday…yes, the backing is covered with skulls…

Calli lying right next to me on the couch…

There you can see the binding and the backing…

The pin marks a piece I missed in the sew-down AND the outlining stage…so I had to go back and fix that at the end…

And here’s a detail of some of the inking I did in the body pile.

I’m glad it’s done and out of my head. OK. Hiking tomorrow. Need to take myself to bed and be ready for snow! Seriously. There’s snow. Crazy.

Considering Women in Society

The last few quilts I’ve made…OK, let’s be fucking truthful here…the last 50 quilts I’ve made have been about women in society. OK, maybe two or three of them weren’t, but mostly? Yeah. That’s where I land. I write what I know. I draw what I know. I create what I know. And what I know is that I’m a strong woman and that strong women get by in society, but it isn’t always pretty, especially if you’re the reflective type, the kind who is always analyzing this or that or how or why or wondering what the fuck THAT was all about. Talk about my clothes, mention my boobs, please look at my face, write me off because I’m old and female, oh wait…then there’s the whole medication thing and health thing and assuming you must this or that because you’re a GURL.

Sigh. It rubs me the wrong way; always has. You should go read this article…it’s about nerdy males and entitlement. Now don’t get me wrong…I love me a nerdy guy, even gave birth to one, so you know I don’t have an issue with the nerd, the geek, or even the dork. They are my people. Except, honestly, it doesn’t matter whether you are a buff, white, football player in Texas (can you say stereotype?) or a pale pasty white nerd with glasses in Silicon Valley, you have to admit that you have more privilege than a woman does. And if you can’t? Then you are a problem. I don’t care how fucking smart you are, how many feminist blogs you read, how you’re able to quote Gloria Steinem verbatim (whatever THAT might look like)…you don’t get it. You are part of the problem. If at any time in your life as an adult (I’ll give nerdy teens a break…give them time to read up some more) you have told a woman that her uterus is not under attack by the government, the Republicans, or her health insurance company, while your Viagra prescription is refilled with no hassle, you are part of the problem. If you don’t understand why we walk the streets at night with our keys between our fingers, swinging our eyes side to side, you are part of the problem. If you don’t get that so many comics and video games are just fucking over my daughter and her friends with their giant-ass boobies and killing the hos, you are part of the problem. Don’t whine at me about being friend-zoned, don’t fucking tell me it’s not about the boobs, don’t tell me I’m imagining the shit I’ve heard, seen, felt, and smelled since I was born. You Are Part of the Problem. Listen to me. If I’m saying it, it happens. You’re telling me over and over that I’m imagining it? You are the problem. You are the rapist, you are the harasser, you are a continuation of the problem. Get the fuck out of my world. And my daughter’s world. You don’t belong here. I’m sure there’s an island somewhere that you can live. Just get the fuck away from me.

Yeah. That’s angry. I hate the entitled telling me it’s not a problem when it is.

So when my art group brought up this exhibit idea of Women at War, I didn’t think of women toting guns into war zones, or of women living in war zones trying to protect their children (although that did pop into my head next, because of the population I teach). I went straight to the war I’ve lived my entire life. The one that begrudges me birth control, but won’t support babies that come out once I follow their rules. The one that makes it OK for a boss to talk about my body and my reproductive status (sure, that’s supposed to be illegal, but let’s be real…most women have experienced some level of sexual harassment at work no matter what). The one that makes it OK to attack me if I dress in a certain way, but also gives me shit for NOT dressing that way.

That’s where I drew from…the idea had been in my head for over a year, since I think that’s how long it had been since the show theme first was floated in our group. It had one venue, but that didn’t fly, and then we found another venue and the dates were solidified, and the image burst into my head. It had to be quick…I only had 6 weeks…and that’s how long it took, one day short of six weeks. I started November 18 with the drawing and finished Monday December 29th. As I wrote before, it’s named after the song War by Edwin Starr: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!”.

This is Absolutely Nothing, 35.5″ wide x 50″ high…

I haven’t priced it yet. I don’t even know if it got into the show yet. It doesn’t really matter if it did, because it needed to be made. It was yelling at me…

Yes. That’s a pile of naked men. And she’s standing on them. There’s ink on it too.

And it was good. She said.

And maybe the next quilt won’t be so angry. I don’t actually have a problem with some anger showing up in my quilts or extreme sadness or even happiness or annoyance or joy or whatever. This is not just anger though…it’s honest frustration that it’s not any better than it was when I was a kid, except that we talk about it more and then a bunch of entitled white boys whine about how they had it hard in middle school and why do girls want to read comics anyway, and they’re really not good at science. DUDE. We all had it hard at one point or another in middle or high school, or in college, or at some point in time. Write that shit off. Now take a deep breath and walk out into the real world and let me know about the women you know, the ones you really know: your mom, sister, daughter, wife, aunt, cousin, best friend, whomever. Listen to them and let me know if you really get it, if you can have empathy for their existence even if you’ve never given birth, never had a menstrual cycle that kicked your ass, never felt so nauseous during a work event that you wanted to crawl into bed, never had a man touch you when you didn’t ask for it and didn’t want it, never had a man or group of men comment on how you look, how you dress, or what they might do to you. Never felt someone looking at you and felt afraid. Because that’s what it’s like, and it’s not like that every day, and if you’re lucky, it’s rarely like that. But if you’re female, it will be like that. Because you were born with two X chromosomes and that’s it. That’s the shit I want to kick out of the ring.

Anyway. Deep breaths. Time for a meditative moment. Read a book, drink some tea, look at the men around me who aren’t like that (and some of them are, whether they want to be or not). Rejoice in the few.

I had about a three-day period of braindead, holy-fucktitude, can’t possibly make another big quilt EVER AGAIN…and then tonight…this afternoon…I want to make another. Please may I make another? OK. Seriously. I’m fucking nuts. I have so much grading to do. I have so much other stuff to do. I’m down to a little over a week of break left and then THREE LONG MONTHS until the next one (OK, there are three 3-day weekends in there). But…I have two birds to do ASAP, and I’m going to do my damnedest to get them mostly done in the next few days, and then I have the cancer donation quilt, and then I need to look at the upcoming deadlines for April and June and I think next fall and see what needs to happen, but I think I can make another big quilt before Spring Break. Can’t I? Sure I can. Because I am woman. Hear me roar.