Bathtubs

I finally made it to the best part of making the quilt. Well, besides the drawing. I love the drawing part, but I usually make quilts a really long time after I’ve drawn them, so that’s a totally separate endeavor in my head. My favorite part of making the quilt is ironing it together. I don’t make a master colored drawing, so I never really know what it will look like until it’s all ironed together. It’s all in my head up until then. My head’s a big place, apparently, with lots of colored drawings in it. And undrawn drawings. And piles of worry. I did try drawing last night, but I’ll need a redo. It’s OK…it’s a process…especially if I haven’t drawn for a while. I can get a little rusty. It’s harder to get what’s in my head out on paper. But it’s coming. Today I think.

Anyway, so you’ll see the not-so-good drawing and then the better one…I promise you. I hide nothing. Well, almost nothing. I’ve hidden how many cookies I’ve eaten in the last five days. But who needs grocery shopping? We have cookies! Breakfast lunch and dinner, there’s cookies. Yeah. I know. Whatever.

So I started ironing yesterday, just like I planned…I didn’t get far.

OK, I got a little further than this…started on the rug on the right side. But it was a good start. A pile of books, some scissors, some embroidery thread, and a hoop. Because yes, that’s what I have hanging around my bathtub. Just to clarify, I don’t have a free-standing bathtub like this. At all. I don’t even know if I’d like one. I do love baths but don’t take them often because the kids’ bathtub is not particularly comfortable. And cats like to walk the edges. Well, not all cats…just Midnight. And she’s a big ~~fat~~ fluffy cat, and occasionally she falls in. So that frightens me. Well, and taking a bath is such a thing…I used to do it in the old house all the time, especially pregnant. Soaking in warm water. It sounds quite nice at the moment, but I don’t have time. Maybe that’s part of what this series is about…taking the time to soak in the tub with all your things around you, populating the room. Yes, I am admitting now that I didn’t think out this series before I started drawing. Yup. That’s pretty much how I always work. Just start drawing. Sometimes there’s an idea or a spark or a phrase or a theme, but the bathtubs came out of nowhere. That thing I used to do to relax. Hmn.

Anyway, I’m hoping to iron for 4 or 5 hours today. Isn’t that what I said yesterday? Can’t remember. Yup. But I also said iron a few hours yesterday and that turned into about 45 minutes, because it took longer to pack stuff up to ship, and then I finally FINALLY finished the Christmas letter (it’s OK, I titled it Holiday Letter, and it’s still the fucking holidays, so get off my back) and printed it, and now all I have to do is address all the envelopes and put stamps on them and decide if the kids should sign them, and yes, it would have been smart to sign the original before I copied it, but here’s one OTHER thing I decided…sometime between now and the start of the next school year (that’s 8 months from now-ish), I’m buying a new color printer, because mine is crap. It’s seriously older than my divorce and it won’t print color for shit…and I’m done with it. So there. Maybe even in a combo with a scanner so I can get rid of that beast as well. Maybe. I have a small space in here. Because that would be cheaper than copying the letter elsewhere, plus I print color stuff for school sometimes.

So. I did that and I moved money for college, and that’s where my head went down a giant financial rabbit hole, because that’s a whole shitload of money I need to make in the next 5 months. OK. So there it is. I need an extra 1-2 K a month. Deep breaths. I can do this. Probably not if I spend a bunch of time in a bathtub.

Really it’s much better to deal with the short-term goals for today: shower (always a good plan), grocery store (for something besides cookies), clean up a little, maybe even start pulling quilts for the exhibit before I put everything away in my room, and then iron. I’m even going to grade some shit. Seriously. I am.

Bathtubs though. I’m thinking a big deep white bathtub somewhere in the house (is the boychild coming back this summer?). Or maybe just in my head. For now.

Taped

Last night was a piece of cake. I managed to enter an art show, make a decent dinner (only a little charcoal was involved…I am not good at paying attention to multiple dishes unfortunately), watched a new interesting show (new to me, True Detective…don’t tell me how it ends please), and then decided with the available brain power, I could probably handle cutting and taping pieces of paper together. It really says something when that’s all you can do at 9:30 at night. OK, I realize most of you are lolling on the couch by then or curled up in bed, but I suck at that.

First of all, I looked at Bathtub 1 and realized that the other end of the bathtub was bothering me, not because it didn’t have a head, but because I couldn’t see the rest of the bathtub. So I added another strip down there…

And I’m going to have to decide how to handle that, because I really don’t want a head down there, but I’m not sure I can draw the bottom of the bathtub without something of a head popping up. Or maybe I’ll just finish the watery bits that are there? I don’t know. I just know it was bugging me last night.

Then I started taping Bathtub 2 together. I think this is the one I’m going to do first.

It’s been talking to me for the longest time. Since right after I drew it. And I need a new piece done at the beginning of the summer, so maybe this one is it. Certainly, I need to make a decision soon. Like this week. Because I have the quilting on the other recycled piece and some binding left to sew on the Earth Mother, and then I Have Nothing to Work on. And that is just not allowed. Nor is it healthy. So. Decisions to be made.

Here’s the whole thing…

It’s not huge. I only enlarged it 250% and it fit entirely on one sheet of paper in my sketchbook (how strange). So. Maybe I number it tonight and see where it’s at.

Then I went to tape Bathtub 4 together (3 is not going to be a quilt)…

OK. Oops. This happens all the time. I copy in pieces and I miss the stuff in the middle because of the size of the sketchbook and trying to fit it on the copier, but usually I miss stuff in the middle. On Bathtub 1, I had to draw in a small section about 5″ square. It wasn’t hard. Now I need to draw this in. Huh. So I taped a piece of paper in there. I’ll look at it tonight. Maybe.

I have a parent meeting this morning, so I’m rushing. Plus I had to make a lunch this morning. I usually try to do that the night before, but I was too busy cutting things and taping them together. Oh yeah, and I finally did my dishes. Priorities. After all that, I did spend an hour stitching bindings. I need to be done by Sunday for a meeting and then I need to contact the photographer, but I need to finish the other one first. It’s cheaper to have him set up for more than one at a time. And they’re both done early (not needed until June 1 and June 15, I think).

Brain is fuzz. School is stress. Thinking about all that? Eh. Making art instead.

Friday Nights

Some days are just exhausting. Friday nights I often sit down on the couch and never get back up. I was determined to be efficient last night, though. I’m behind in grading, and that’s because technology is not being friendly, but also because I have this assignment I gave and it HURTS to grade it. I graded stories about DNA replication last night for close to 4 hours. Yes, I make my students write stories. Replication is hard. It’s confusing. It doesn’t matter how many times I explain it, they have a hard time with it. So I make them think really hard about it. And then I torture myself, because I have to read all their stories. But when you get a good one (I’ve had three so far…THREE…out of 120?), then you take a deep breath and say “YES. There it is. Understanding.” At some point, I got tired of writing, “Not showing understanding of the process,” because that was a requirement (not just defining words and copying from the book), so I just started writing NSUP. Saved me a lot of writing. I still have one class to go. I couldn’t do any more last night. It was going to kill me.

You have no idea how difficult it can be to grade something you know is hard for students to do…and you know you’ve really done everything you can to get them to understand it, but some of them just aren’t engaged in school and they’re not going to pay enough attention to get it…like when I teach Punnett squares, which are coming up…they either get it (because they were paying attention) or they don’t (because they weren’t). And it’s incredibly frustrating as their teacher. I’m sure some of the crazies out there would say it’s because I’m not a good enough teacher (and we all think that at some point, trust me) or because I don’t make it interesting enough (come to my class…you’ll see), but it’s really because that kid doesn’t have something they need, like a parent at home who tells them school is important, or the meds or support that would help them concentrate, or something else I don’t even know about. By the time we get this far into the school year, I know who they are, the ones who won’t get it. I hope they’ll try, and I don’t give up on most of them, but if you’ve been busting your butt all year with a kid, trying to encourage them, meeting with family, and you still get NOTHING? Hey. That kid over THERE responds when I give him support. I don’t have time for the both of you. Let me know if you’re on board and I’ll be right back there with you, but I can’t spend any more of my limited time with you until you at least follow the simple instructions. I have one kid that loses everything in his backpack and it will take him all period to find a single piece of paper. I can walk over and find it in less than 15 seconds, but it will take him 51 minutes. I could find his stuff for him EVERY SINGLE DAY, but that means the other kid that needs my help will never get it.

It’s an incredibly frustrating job sometimes. So at 9 PM, after three classes of essays, I quit. I decided to try taping another drawing together…and I made the decision to number the bathtub drawings in order of drawing, even if they don’t all become quilts. It’s OK, because it’s really just for accounting purposes (accounting for time). They will probably get renamed at some point.

So I took the headless one and taped it together.

There was one part missing in the middle (I was not copying intelligently…all the tax-preparing people were hovering over me and making me nervous. YES! I am enlarging pictures of naked women. Walk away!). So I just drew it in…one of the knees. I debated adding some at the bottom and giving her a head, but I kinda like it headless there too. Two headless women. Huh. Please don’t psychoanalyze me.

I taped more on to the top. Will have to figure out what goes there later.

This is officially Bathtub 1, never finished…notionally because I ran out of paper. It used to really frustrate my 5th-grade teacher, who was an artist, that I couldn’t stay on the paper…that whatever I drew obviously continued out further. She’d try to get me to draw/paint smaller so it would fit, but you could walk into her classroom and figure out which was my work on the wall just by how full the page was. I needed a piece of paper that would enlarge as I drew, so it would fit my ideas. Even now, I just accept that failing of mine. It’s part of how I draw.

I was too tired to tape the other two together, but not quite ready to sleep…so I headed to the office to sew more binding. Because it’s never-ending.

I teared up at Worf’s wedding (sigh. I am a geek. Possibly an uber-geek. I wanna get married to a Klingon. OK, no I don’t. And he’s too damn cranky.). I didn’t sew for long. Just an episode’s-worth of Deep Space 9, enough to allow the brain to slow down and mellow out for sleep. Besides, I had this on my shoulders…

She really wanted to sit on my lap, ON the quilt (um no), but settled for being a cat scarf. A cat scarf that occasionally meows. And sometimes catches you with a claw. And is vibrating (not a bad thing).

So I didn’t get much art done, but I got most of the stories graded, so that was a win. Friday nights are never great for me…too tired, too spent, too exhausted, too overwhelmed. I did OK for all that.

This weekend is a whole shit ton of soccer. Plus a Visions opening that I’m hoping I can get to. And very little sleep. And a lot of time spent in a coffee shop in Temecula probably, torturing myself with the rest of the replication stories. Not a lot of artmaking. Can’t be helped.

Found this last night…first of all, do not watch this video if you don’t like natural death…like death in nature. Like you don’t watch Nature because it upsets you. And don’t watch it if you’re Sion…it will give you nightmares. In fact, I couldn’t watch the whole thing in one go. Too many creepy crawlies. Unlike that stupid-ass bird, I wouldn’t go anywhere NEAR that fucker. So I’d be fine.

Holey crap. Yikes. Crawling under the covers now.

A Saturday Suddenly Free…Sort of…

Well, I was supposed to be leaving for a soccer tournament any minute now, but girlchild is too sick to play, or even to get out of bed, so I guess I am the lucky one who gets to stay home with her. She’s asleep still, so it’s pretty easy, but last night’s whining and nose-blowing drove me out of the living room, so then she started texting me things like “MOOOMMMYYY.” Yup. She’s 17. Anyway, I was planning on getting a bunch of grading done on the soccer field, so I will probably still try to do some of that, and certainly I was going to stitch on birds, but I think I’d rather do some yardwork (seriously, it’s getting that bad), since it’s currently kind of cool in temperature out there. Yes, I realize there’s still snow everywhere else, as boychild reminded me, but we’ve been in the 80s on and off all week, so it is Spring and the plants are going bonkers. But it’s like I suddenly got a free day, a Saturday without any preplanned stuff, except that I am so capable of filling it almost immediately.

Yes, I will do art as well. Don’t panic. In fact, I finished the bathtub drawing last night…

This one’s all about menopause.

Here’s the first one I did, which still needs a head (ran out of paper)…

Perhaps it needs two heads. I kinda like no head on the one in the water…It’s a little disturbing.

Then I did this one…which honestly is the one I think for sure needs to become a quilt…

Wait. Except that’s not done. Turns out about 6 weeks later, I added stuff…

Because it’s not just about what’s in the bathtub…it’s about what surrounds the bathtub too. I still have ideas for this. I like the parts that are submerged and slightly showing, like the fingers and toes. And not knowing what’s under the water. And I just thought of something to add to the one I finished last night too! Anyway. It’s all distracting me from what I really need to be working on (but that’s not a bad thing…a little distraction like this is beneficial to the artmaking process).

Last night, I sorted the browns for the recycled quilt…

There’s a lot of them, which is good. Funny…Mariah tends towards mostly browns and blues, like my daughter. We’ll have to see if the quilt tends that way too. It might have to.

I also sorted the grays, which took like 13 seconds and I didn’t even photograph, because she only had like 5 of them. I have yellows and blacks and a pile of owl fabrics that don’t fit in any specific colorway. So I could stop procrastinating and pick those fabrics for that quilt today. It’s small. It won’t take long. (trying to persuade myself…it’s gonna be a challenge to only be able to use what’s in the box.)

And then I spent over two hours cutting tiny pieces out…

At some point, I had to stop and do arm and finger exercises, because they were cramping, and the muscles in my forearm were definitely sore after Thursday night’s cutting session. I’ve actually woken up with a swollen hand before. It feels OK today though, probably because of the exercises. We did figure out that the elbow pain from the Fall is not from weightlifting…it’s from moving the quilt under the sewing machine. So I have to wear an elbow brace while sewing. It’s an extreme sport, people. An extreme sport. The pile on the left is cut out. Trash is in the middle. So colorful. Still to be cut out is on the right. I’m over 4 hours in…still thinking 12 hours total, but maybe not? I don’t know. I get distracted and have to take a technology break, check Instagram to let my brain recover from staring at pencil lines on Wonder Under. That’s part of the task time too…persuading the brain not to give up.

OK. Girlchild is awake. Not happy about it, but being upright when you can’t breathe due to snottiness is better than lying down. Gonna get some work done, whatever that consists of…garden, house, school, art. Hoping for some recharging time later…

Artistic Meditation

I realize photo-wise this and the next stage are remarkably boring. Miles and miles of Wonder Under…although hey! I bought a new bolt of WU yesterday and it feels really different. You have to realize I’ve been using Wonder Under to make quilts since 1999. Or maybe 2001. Had to go look at the quilt list…I did start making art quilts in 1999, but I wasn’t a Wonder Under user until 2001. Most of my earliest quilts, I cut out the fabric and just lay it down on the background and pinned the fuck out of it. Stabbed myself a million times too, which is pretty damn stupid. But that’s how Joan Colvin showed me how to do it (and that’s how she did it too, and her quilts are beautiful).

Anyway, so here’s the miles…

I’m on the 4th yard, but had to start a 5th one because one of the pieces was too big to fit on the 4th piece…so probably around 5 yards of pieces. I was trying to keep the detail to a minimum (ha!) so I would be able to finish it in time, so there are some honking big pieces. I think, “oh cool, I’m gonna use up some of my stash!” but I know that it really doesn’t. I rarely run out of a fabric…I might get down to the tiny pieces that can really only be used for little things, but if you think about how much fabric I have (well, you probably don’t think about that, but I do), it’s really just a drop in the bucket. Kathy York was making a stashbuster quilt here, and made some comment about how it barely used any of her stash up, and it was only one color, and it was a huge quilt, and I’m like…YEAH! But we have to use it to justify buying more, right? York buys fabric for specific projects, too, so she is a much better person than I am. I buy fabric because I need it in my palette. I really do think of the stash as this huge palette from which to paint my quilts. And you always need more colors.

Anyway, my special fabric psychosis aside, there are some stash-busting pieces in this drawing, where I’ll need huge chunks of gray or white, and then blue, and some foxy red, which doesn’t mean a red that makes you look foxy, but a red that’s the color of a fox.

I traced about 200 pieces last night before I stopped. I really wanted to just keep going, but that would have been close to an allnighter, I think, another 2 1/2 hours and it was already midnight. I do still have to get healthy and teach and function like a semi-normal human being. Apparently.

And then the NEXT step will be cutting all those pieces out, which is another batch of boring pictures. The fabric-choosing…now there’s the pictures y’all will enjoy, because you get to see my stash and what I’m currently watching on Netflix. Always exciting.

But the thing is, even though the pictures are boring, this is sometimes one of my favorite parts of making the quilt. Tracing all those pieces out, standing at my light table, it’s really meditative. I have the TV on and I’m half-listening and maybe a quarter-watching, and I’m looking for each piece (sometimes it takes me a while to find them if I didn’t number particularly logically), and then I’m evaluating each piece for whether it needs an overlap to go under the pieces next to it, and then I’m looking to see if it continues underneath to another section at all, and it’s this place in my brain that’s like a big soft pillow. All the other shit just wanders off, looking for a bar where it can start a fight, and my brain just settles down, takes a deep breath, and does its work. Analyzing, drawing, going on to the next piece. And the next one. And the next one. And really nothing gets in the way of that, except when the tea gets cold (take break to walk to the microwave…should take regular breaks anyway), or when I need to pee (see breaks), or when the show ends and I have to pick the next one or fastforward through commercials. It’s peaceful. It’s relaxing. It’s a weird-ass form of meditation. The Wonder Under Meditation.

I always feel so much better after tracing. Fabric-choosing is kind of the same way. They use a part of my brain that pushes everything else out, which is why I lose track of time when I’m doing it. When I finally thought to look at the task-measuring app I was using last night, I had been working for over 2 hours. Just working. Just tracing. No way I could do that with grading without getting all antsy and irritated. Even quilting irritates me (mostly because thread is breaking or because it’s so much more physical).

Anyway, I had another idea for a bathtub drawing (a series!)…I think I’ve done two drawings so far, but only one really deserves to be a quilt, and now I have a third one in my head, and it’s really not pretty, but whatever…

This was the first one, and she’s still headless…

I actually like it now that I’m looking at it, but I would finish it much differently now than when I first drew it. Which is fine, because I’d enlarge it and THEN add the head. Only the top head. The bottom head is supposed to be gone. These are of course inspired by Kahlo’s bathtub painting…which I know I posted on here, but now cannot find. What the Water Gave Me, 1938…

And then the one I really want to do…

It’s next on the list…some day. But now there’s another one. In my head. And you aren’t going to like it. But it needs to get out.

But drawing is another form of meditation, one I hope to rediscover someday soon…really. It’s been long enough.