Timed Frustration

I ran out of time. You’d think with a 4-day weekend, it wouldn’t be possible for me to run out of time, but when you spend 20 hours or so grading, plus a hike, plus trying to plan for the week when you have a sub one day, and all the new class changes with the new trimester…it’s not surprising. It’s just frustrating. At 11:20 last night, I was folding fabric (I did manage to buy the binding fabric yesterday, even though I couldn’t get to the point where I was putting it on, which is where I was SUPPOSED to be yesterday). I did not try to continue quilting after that for a variety of reasons…first of all, I have the wrong thread. I went out to the store to get more yesterday morning (after they drew blood from two different places, thank you very much, yes, I drank my bottle of water…that’s why I’m going to pee on your seat in a minute if you don’t get on with it.). I had the number of the color, but apparently they are now selling two different weights? And I didn’t notice? And I got the wrong one? And it’s super fine (and I don’t mean that in the 70s way), so it’s breaking all the time (rhyme that: super fine, breaking all the time…nice, eh?), plus I don’t know if I can tell the difference on the quilt or not, but FUCK.

So I was doing all these tiny little squiggles (OK, I know they could be tinier, but they’re pretty damn small and very time-consuming…my fault of course).

And really, I’m pretty close to done, being up in the tree section. But NOT done. And today is a bitch. It will be a bitch. There will be very little time in which it will not be a bitch (do not predict bitchiness. Predict Lack of Time. I predict Lack of Time, which may lead to bitchiness on my part AND the day’s part, but I cannot predict that. Maybe someone will bring me a donut and that will reduce said bitchiness. Ha! That’s not enough. I think someone has to come hand me a winning lottery ticket for said bitchiness to be truly removed.). Fucking big-ass giant sigh of frustration.

WANT TO FINISH QUILTING.

I don’t want to go to school. I want to finish this. But I’m a big girl, so I will do my job…which today involves sheep hearts. MMM MMM GOOD.

Cats are no help.

Yes, she’s lying ON the quilt while I’m quilting, and complaining as I move it. Although they do answer when I talk to them. Saw girlchild for maybe 2.1 minutes yesterday. Said maybe 10 words to me. I talked to my ex more than her. Hell, I think I talked to the ladies at the quilt shop more (they wanted to see my quilt, I warned them about the nudity, they hesitated, said something about “in the name of art”. Not sure if theirs was a positive response…whatevs. I’m not doing it for the likes of you.).

Frustration. I’m running out of time. I need to get this thing done and to the photographer and I need to start the next one. The have-tos are starting to pile up. This one is done. Essentially. I think that’s the problem. In my head, it’s done. Why isn’t it REALLY done? Damn reality check.

OK, so I’m mood-managing this week. Turns out (after lame-ass blood withdrawal yesterday) that my thyroid is yet again out of whack, and I have like ALL the symptoms. Blame my crazy moods on that stupid nonfunctioning organ in my neck. Doctor in two weeks. Then she can fix THAT, and my elbow and my toenail and maybe my life, because that’s a giant clusterfuck. Is there a prescription for that?

PROS: NaNoWriMo. I rock baby. See, I can do one thing right. I’m over 21,000 words. I wrote another 2400 yesterday…got on a roll. Started on the bike, did a little on the elliptical (harder to type on the elliptical), came home and did more while dinner was cooking, and then while I was eating, holy crap, it just spilled on out of me. And the first kidnapping has happened, which leads up to the second death (well, really, there were 8 other deaths, but that’s different…they happened before the story started). I’d really like to do one of the write-ins that are local, but I can’t fit one into my crazy schedule. All the flash write-ins are on Sundays, and I don’t have a clear Sunday ever apparently. The night ones that I could go to are all far away, like La Jolla. Ugh. Long way to drive to write. And maybe writing in public ain’t my thing (except now I’ve done it in meetings, at the gym, in an airport). So whatever. The story progresses. There might even be an ending in my head at some point. You never know.

Speaking of endings. This. It needs to end so I can go to school and make seating charts. Because I live for that moment. Yup. I do.

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.

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.

Ode to a Safety Pin

This poor pin…stuck into 4 or 5 layers of fabric pelvic girdle and Wonder Under, then somehow wrenched open and destroyed.

Probably it got caught on something. You know, I use a lot of safety pins in my work…but I reuse the same 500 over and over again (and yes, I think that really is how many I have…so I can have more than one quilt pinbasted at a time. I think I have at least one pinbasted right now besides the one under the machine). The thing about a wrenched-open safety pin is that it’s no longer useful. I tried rebending it, but the top section (OK, I did in fact Google the names of the parts of a safety pin, and despite the fact that many disturbing things pop up in that search, I did find out that the top portion is called the clasp. So you learned something today. Or not.) is almost pulled out and separating, so it is in fact now completely useless for its job. So I threw it away. I almost never throw them away. I’ve even been known to sand the burrs down on the pin part if they are snagging while going through the fabric.

I’m sure this is some metaphor for my life, that I am a useless, bent-out-of-shape safety pin, right? Eh. Whatever. I’m getting by. I’m getting shit done. I’m not getting it all done, but getting some done. It’s not easy. I don’t know why it is easy for some people. I guess nothing affects them. This is a continuous conversation I have with my counselor. I need to learn to barely react to extreme stress. Or something. Sigh. I think I spend too much time in my head with no distractions. I don’t think my brain works like those people’s brains. I don’t even understand how their brains work.

So when I finished all the work duties yesterday, I went shopping for stuff for the boychild (and me, although I failed at that) because snow starts Friday. And I don’t know. He might die. OK, not really. But I’m shipping him some stuff today, including a rewards card to the local sports shop (which is also out here). And I sat and finished my book. And exercised. Because drama. And girlchild. And stress. And garrrr. And then I made dinner after being screamed at, because it’s my fault Etsy people can’t ship stuff here by Thursday (sigh. Don’t leave Halloween costumes until the last minute if you want choices). And we ate together, watching the last and final episode of Big Love, which made me cry, and girlchild is getting all freaked out because I’m crying, and I say, HORMONES, like all the time, and she’s still freaked out (I’m a little freaked out too, because the hormones don’t seem to be mellowing out, and my face breaking out nonstop tells me it probably IS hormones, and hell…WTF? Leave me alone, you silly chemicals. I don’t have the patience for this.). I’m fairly sure all this chemical imbalance is not helping with my moods or my reaction to stress. And my blood sugar levels have been completely fucked up for about two weeks now. I’m getting tired of it.

I finally found the energy to quilt after 10 PM again. Ugh. I really need to go to bed earlier tonight and tomorrow night, because my Thursday AM wakeup call is actually in the middle of the night.

But I quilted two legs…

And a pubic area, plus pelvic girdle and uterus…and then I should have gone to bed, but I’m an idiot and I quilted a bird as well, because it was kinda fun and I didn’t feel like stopping.

That late-night bad judgement that tells me it’s OK, that I’m really not tired (I wasn’t. I had a really hard time falling asleep, even though it was almost 1 AM)…I don’t know what that is. It’s the part of me that wants a different life, I guess. I’m totally jealous of all those fulltime quilt artists I meet, the ones who have a marketable skill and can sell classes and books about their technique (OK, I really don’t want to do classes, to be honest), the ones who have a partner who fully finances their habit, their drive. Man oh man. Do they know how lucky they are? Do they know what it’s like to work a 60-hour-a-week job and come home to screaming drama and cooking dinner and no one will help you take out the trash (yes, we were doing that at 10 PM and she was yelling at me then too, because it was my fault we hadn’t done it earlier). Bloody hell. Maybe I would just be a shitty lazy artist if I didn’t have all that hanging over me. Maybe I would never get anything done because I wouldn’t have this incredible drive to create something to make up for all the other crap. Maybe I’d have given up on art completely.

Seems unlikely. This is who I am. This is how I am. But it would be nice if it were a little less ouch. And weepy. Tired of the weepy. Damn safety pin.