It Don’t Feel Right*

So I think yesterday was one of the most productive art days all summer. Sad that today is the last DAY of summer. And I’ll be at school for the whole morning. Oh well. At least I know I can still do those monster days. (because I’ll be doing lots of them this year…)

What did I do? I traced Wonder Under…for HOURS.

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The cats love this part of the project. I personally do not so much love their involvement, since it is mostly their fluffy butts that are involved.

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Sometimes I have to push or pull them, or pull things out from under them.

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So while I’m being thankful that this cat is still alive, I’m also cursing her existence. Or at least her existence on the light table.

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She might be cursing me a bit as well.

Really, I spent a lot of time with the cats yesterday. Wonder Under is a fascinating thing. Plus light emanating from tables. Which might be a thing if it were cold out, but it’s not. I have a fan pointed at the light table, and they don’t generally like fans. Except for yesterday. Yesterday fans seemed OK.

So did laundry baskets…

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And really, just staring at Mom on a regular basis and meowing plaintively because I am so obviously ignoring their asses.

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I traced for over 7 hours yesterday…I’m 8 1/2 hours in, I think. I’m in the high 600s, so I’m only halfway. THAT is the part that sucks. That and the fact that I might run out of Wonder Under. Sigh.

I’m four yards in? I think?

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This one doesn’t have quite so many tiny pieces as the last one. And it has about 700 fewer pieces as well, which is a good thing. I might actually finish it in time.

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Which reminds me, I’m picking the others up from the photographer today. I think. After school. And then tracing for another (insert number of hours here).

Girlchild leaves tomorrow morning. Early. That’s a hard one.

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She’s leaving so early because she’s doing orientation for the incoming freshmen. It sucks that she’s not around to help the first few days of school for the first time in like 5 years. I can’t persuade the boychild to do it. Not sure I blame him.

OK. School first. Then art. Then family.

(Apparently Pandora has decided I need some rap to start the morning. She may be right…)

*The Roots, Don’t Feel Right

Conehead

Well so this is morning. Apparently. After being up after 1:30 AM, trying to settle cone-wearing Frankenstein cat (now baby, that’s a scar…), then a 4 AM wakeup for meds (for the cat) plus something puking, and the dog going ballistic before 9…I feel semi-drugged, definitely not rested, just half awake, if that. Ugh. Reminds me of the baby years.

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The poodle trimming of her legs is also nice. Especially since they told me to take off the bandage when I got home, and then there was blood everywhere. I wanna see you hold a pissed-off and drugged cat with a cone and blood oozing and try to one-handedly get a bandage on that. The kids had left, of course. Sigh. I’m really quite amazing in a hard place.

Last night, she was decidedly more pissed off about the cone and surgery in general (the photo above is this morning. She hid in the fabric drawer hole for a good long time.

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Yesterday, the girlchild got her hair done in a pinkish manner. I don’t have a final picture…

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I’ll have to get one.

I’ve been stuck in places where sewing on these is all I could do…so I finished these.

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I only have three left to embroider, and then I can sew them together. It’s very relaxing. Funny though…a year ago, I had nine left to embroider…so I’m really slow. I guess that’s why I’m years behind. Whatever. It’s not a race. I always tag this as Bird Crazy, but I realized its real name is Bird Dance. This is a Sue Spargo BOM from a few years back. I like her stuff…it’s got depth and fun stitching and it’s relatively easy to do. She’s released this one as a book now. In fact, she’s released all the ones I have except this year’s, so I can post about all of them now (there were issues with people copying her stuff before). Seriously though, her instructions are so amazingly good that you’re an idiot (and a jerk for stealing her ideas) if you don’t buy the book/pattern/whatever the heck it is. Plus she’s going through cancer treatments at the moment and deserves all your money. The one she just released, the Folk Tails quilt, is absolutely amazing. I can’t wait to get done with this one for real so I can start the embroidery on that one.

I did iron finally last night…I had to finish copyediting in the morning, then check out the girl’s hair, then do counseling, and pick up Kitten, and cook her shit she wouldn’t eat, and cook myself shit I would eat, and THEN…then I could iron.

I’m 26 hours in…LONG time picking stuff. This is the tiger on one breast…

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I also did the cat (aka Kitten) and flower vine on the other breast, the lungs, and the heart. So I did a lot…I’m in the 1500s now, the high 1500s I think. I have all of the torso done…just the head and an arm left to do.

I do have two more chapters to copyedit, but they’re not due for a while, so I’m taking a break. I want to get this fully ironed today…I probably only have about 300 pieces left, so that’s 3-4 hours. Then I can sit and cut pieces out for another 20 hours. While syringing water into the cat’s mouth, because I haven’t seen her drink anything yet. Plus I need a break. It’s been a lot of work lately, and that’s good, because it means I might be able to pay for the cat’s surgery AND college (ha. Well. Maybe.), but I also need to draw and sleep and relax and read books. Like a normal person does on vacation.

Thread-Free

Well that was a stressful day. Yesterday. No need to test my adaptive abilities. Really. First there’s 8 hours of jackhammering, wherein I almost lost my mind, but then Kitten decides to eat thread.

So I’ve been quilting since I was about 22 years old. I’ve sewn longer than that, largely around cats, so yeah, I’m aware that thread and cats are a bad mix. I’ve had multiple cats over the years who were thread-munchers. Some even tried to get bits out of the trashcans, so I had to work hard to keep it away from them. But these two that I have now…well, Midnight likes the poly/nylon-y stuff, but I never leave that on the sewing machine because that stuff is really bad for them. I’ve pulled it out of a couple of cats who literally stalked the machine until I went to pee, and then went for the thread. It’s one of the reasons I always use the quilt under the machine to cover the machine when I’m not sewing. Cat can’t sit on quilt. Cat can’t eat thread.

But the regular sewing stuff, these two cats have never given a shit about it. They sit back behind the machine all the time and have always left it alone. And Kitten’s been here for 6 years, so I don’t know what bug got in her ear, but I turned around, maybe 5 minutes after she went to sit back there, and she was swallowing black thread like there was no tomorrow. Yeah, I pulled. I’ve pulled (gently of course) on multiple cats and been successful. Not yesterday. It was stuck. Dammit. Well, I cut as much as a could (a foot or so) and then called the vet, who had me call the emergency vet. Damn cat. She’s the most expensive cat I’ve ever owned now, between the nasty dental surgery a few years back (she’s got some genetic thing and had to have 12 teeth removed) and this thread thing. They sedated her, tried to release the thread (it was around her tongue). Pulled gently, it’s stuck. Scoped her. By then it was in her intestines and they couldn’t get at it.

So those who have gone through this realize how much money all this costs, and it’s funny, because I went into this summer for the first time in YEARS (like pre-divorce, baby) feeling like my head was (temporarily, due to upcoming college payments) semi-above water. Well yeah. And that was after the car costs from last month, which were fairly horrendous. But I thought I could get through the summer and actually pay the mortgage and groceries and half of the boychild’s health insurance, due on August 1. Because I’m a teacher, and I don’t get paid until the end of August. Summers always make my guts clench financially. But this year seemed doable (unlike last year, which was a giant clusterfuck until I sold a quilt).

So yeah, Kitten had surgery last night. Luckily it was quick and easy and her intestines weren’t shredded by thread and she’s recovering, but she doesn’t want to eat. And every time the doc calls to update me, they reassure me that they’ll do everything they can to make the cost as low as possible, probably because I completely lost it in the exam room. Well. You know. I guess life just wants to remind me that I am not in control. Like I didn’t already know that.

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She’s making a funny face because she only has one fang and it sometimes gets stuck on her lip.

So I had to get one of those pet loans, which luckily I qualify for, and when I start getting paid again, I’ll pay it off quickly (I’ve done this before)…but it means all the extra money I’m earning now is no longer being put away for college. So there we are. I don’t even have a total cost yet on the cat, but I know it’s bad. But she’s also my baby and my responsibility, so I didn’t really feel like I could do anything else. I know some cats pass these just fine, but it’s not a huge percentage. So the quicker I did stuff, the easier it would be on her.

And yeah, I guess my takeaway is to hide the thread no matter how the cat acts about it for the first 6 years, because cats do stupid shit just like humans do. And she’s gonna be fine. And I’m gonna find the money somewhere. Here she is just yesterday, schooling Simba in cat/dog interactions.

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I spent the rest of the evening trying to focus on the copyediting, once they stopped jackhammering…Simba is such a goofball.

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Realizing that my ancient keyboard really is nonfunctional if you’re trying to FIND a specific letter or whatever…

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The kids have been complaining about it for years, but whatever. I type mostly from position, not watching keys…it’s been an issue with the copyediting in the last few weeks though, so I had ordered a new one. Work expense. Which I’m now questioning, like I’m going to be questioning every damn penny for the rest of the summer. And it is probably 15 years old. They did come out in 2005…so maybe it’s only 11 years old. Anyway, I must be rough on certain keys…

Girlchild made dinner and the vet called with the post-surgery news in the middle of that. At least it was quick and there were no complications.

After I finished the first run-through on the lesson I was copyediting, I gave myself permission to iron. It was probably 10:30 by then. I did the octopus, the grassy knoll (OK, it’s not really a knoll), a giant artery (the aorta or some version of it anyway), and the cactus. There’s some cactus pieces.

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While I was working, I was listening to and watching a few of the Coursera courses I’m signed up for this summer. I’m taking two basic college chemistry classes, because I will be teaching a lot more of that this coming year, and I’m decidedly shaky on it. I haven’t had chemistry since high school and I was never great at it, which might make you worry about my teaching it, but trust me…I’ll understand it or I’ll figure it out as I go. I didn’t know anything really about light before I started teaching it, and I did OK. The new standards move the content around quite a bit, and it’s hard to go from being a life science teacher to being a middle-school, 7th-grade science teacher in the days of NGSS if your background is biology. So I’m working on it. Boychild keeps trying to answer my questions, which mostly center around WHY, proving I haven’t changed at all from high school. WHY do electrons do that? WHY do they get excited. WHY do we call it light when it’s really EM radiation? Or IS it? Fuck. I’m still in lesson 1. Let’s hope I figure it out. I have a couple of books from NSTA called Faking It…written specifically for teachers who have to teach this stuff. I might want to read them quickly.

I’m also taking a class called Sexing the Canvas, about art and gender, which not surprisingly, I know quite a bit about. So I watched some videos, did some math (ugh), and took a quiz last night. I think I’m gonna fail the chemistry quizzes, but I’m really just trying to get the concepts more than understand how to work all the equations. We don’t do a lot of equations in 7th grade. I think. I’m OK with failing my first college class (not for credit) at 49 years old.

So I’m in the low 1300s now in the pieces…coming up is a lung and a tiger and then…well…Kitten…because she’s been in a ton of my quilts.

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And I hope she’s in a ton more of them. Thread-free.

Making a Gift

I occasionally make quilts as gifts…I sometimes get hints from people that they’d like a quilt, but often that’s just not an option for me…whether I don’t have an idea for them or because my larger quilts are pretty significantly time-consuming. You’ve got to be a fairly important person in my life to have one of those, and it might be even more difficult now, because I did give one of my big ones away and now I wish I hadn’t. It’s hard to think about one of my babies out there where I don’t think they deserve to be…but that’s life. I don’t mind selling them…that’s a fulfilling transaction. But if I give you a $2000 quilt, hell, you better deserve it. That’s months of work.

Anyway, so I made one gift quilt this year. I was making those cats and realized someone I cared about would probably like a quilt of his cat…so I took some pictures of Satchemo’s squished little face…

He has a tiny nose and kind of a grumpy cat facial structure. These pictures were dark too, and I realized I had no full-body pictures, so I trolled Facebook to find this one…

Perfect for his body coloring and how he curls up. Then I spent about an hour trying to draw him…the first few weren’t quite right, but then I got his face right, traced it, and added it to a better body shape.

So if you’re wondering if I could make a quilt of your cat…well, probably. Because if you had a perfect picture, that would be awesome, but obviously I can take one cool picture (the sink one) and mess with it to make a straight-on quilt. Although maybe I should have done the sink too. Except then there was no way I would have finished it in time.

Tracing the Wonder Under…

That’s all of it…

And then cutting it out…

Satch has 40 pieces, so more than most of the small cat quilts I did earlier this year. Some stages of the quilt took longer than with other quilts, because I wanted to make sure the quilt looked like its namesake. So color choice and drawing were kind of time-consuming. I’ve found that people like the quilts to be in the $100 range, but with the style of quilt I make, that’s really difficult. That’s about 3-4 hours of work, not counting materials, and I make these in more like 5 or 6 hours. And yes, I know people who would work on something for 10 hours and charge $100. I won’t. I work hard to put my kids through school and keep my head above water (most of the time). I’m not working for $10/hour, because my 25 years of quilting experience has to pay better than that.

I had the sink photo up for the body fabrics on my iPad. The face photo was up earlier. The grays are always a challenge.

Here they are all ironed down. I thought his back end was too dark until I saw him sitting there again. He really is darker in back.

It didn’t take long to trim the pieces…although now I’ve lost my little scissors. No idea where they went…and that’s the second pair gone missing. I need to do a deep clean. There’s gotta be 50 pairs of scissors in this house.

Ironing is the next step…I did the head separate to make sure it all went together well…

Before I put it on the body. Faces are important. If it’s human, I iron the eyes together separately and then put them on the face, to make sure they’re not horrendously crooked.

Then to pick a background…can’t be too dark, because of the dark parts. Can’t be too gray or too light, because the lights won’t show. Has to be a color and pattern that isn’t too busy.

I finally found one…mostly blue with some green in it. Then I stitched it down and pinbasted it. Starting quilting with a dark thread around the cat itself.

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Then found the thread for the background, except it wasn’t anywhere near a full spool. Oh well. It’s a small quilt, right?

Oh yeah, I ran out. Oh well. I did a fairly good job of quilting evenly around it before that happened.

It does change colors in different light.

Then yesterday, in between cookie-baking, I trimmed and bound it…

Finishing the hand-sewing about 15 minutes before I was supposed to leave to meet the recipient (it’s OK, I had a backup plan).

I forgot to measure it though. I can do that later. But here’s the finished piece.

Satchemo took about 6 1/2 hours to make, not counting drawing time…in a commission, I would count that…legitimately. I think he looks like his namesake. That cat spends a lot of time on my lap, clawing the crap out of my thighs and/or boobs, so I’m prettty familiar with his face. And he was the 25th quilt I finished in 2015. I’m unlikely to finish another one by January 1, so I guess he’s the last quilt in 2015. Not bad. Now on to the next one…

Back to It…

The week we get off at Thanksgiving has never been a relaxing vacation for me. Whether I stay home and do the whole deal here, or go to Seattle for four days, or what we used to do, which was go to Lake Arrowhead and hang out at my parents’ cabin…it was never relaxing. It was hectic, full of crazy errands and grading before, during, and after. Sometimes I’d manage to quilt or stitch down or cut out a bunch of pieces, but mostly it was tense chaos. And I’m not even the one who usually cooks. I support the cooks by cutting stuff up or whatever. This year, I barely did anything (thanks to my cousin and all HER hard work).

Last week did not break that trend. I did not shop on Black Friday or even Small-Whatever Saturday, mostly because money’s pretty tight right now. Property taxes are due next week and I need to be able to pay them and a credit card bill. Deep breaths. Then I will think about Christmas. I did hang out for a while on Saturday because I needed to do just that. Not grade more papers like I did Friday off the plane. Sunday was the inevitable catch-up day. Five stores later, I think I had got there. Although there are at least two more errands I need to do this week…I lied, three. Maybe more. And then I came home and worked until about 10:30 PM. I did make dinner in there somewhere. My SIL’s convinced I’m eating all this hidden sugar in my diet. She’s wrong. I know where all of it is. I mostly cook from scratch. Seriously, on a good day, I eat fairly healthy. I made kofta balls from scratch, put in lettuce wraps with a cucumber/yogurt sauce and a bit of brown rice. I do OK some days. And there’s leftovers.

I’m not ready to go back to school though. Then again, we never are…teachers. I’m sure the kids aren’t ready either, but they have it pretty easy. I have all the lesson plans done. I’m hammering grammar starting this week. I’m tired of reading their work with no spaces after punctuation, no first word capitalized, the word “I” never capitalized, starting every sentence with “And,” never putting in periods. The computer age may be upon us, but my students aren’t prepared. The English teacher is coming along for the ride. If I have to read all that stuff online, then they better be improving their practice. Meanest science teacher ever! Yeah whatever.

Meanwhile though, and I feel good about this, I finished cutting out the Wonder Under (finally!) for Bathtub 5, which got totally sidelined by the holiday.

It only took about 4 1/2 hours to do it, but I just didn’t have the time before I left for Seattle. I was determined to finish it last night, so I stopped grading tests (because that was kind of depressing anyway), and finished this instead. Tonight I can sort them and maybe start picking fabrics. Except I’m not sure if I have a background big enough. I’m pretty sure I do, plus I’m supposed to be at the local quilt store tomorrow after school to deliver one of the sold quilts, so I can manage that then. I’m hoping (moneywise) that there is something here big enough. I will need some blues and whites though. I think. There’s some really big white pieces in this quilt, and big is always an issue for me.

But the next part is the fun part…the fabric-choosing part. I’m going to need to clean more of this space up to manage that though. Damn. Forgot about all that. Sigh. So maybe NOT picking fabrics tonight. We’ll see.

By the way, if you’re interested in one of the smaller quilts (cats, birds, hearts), I suggest you tell me soon, because I’m going to put them all up on Etsy sometime this week, and I’ll have to raise prices to do that. Under Recent Work, Catching Cancer 2, Owl 2.0, Cats 1, 2, 5-7, and Heart in Hands 1 and 2 are all available. Also, Birds 7, 11, and 13 are also available…see below.

Bird 8: Purple Bird, 18.25“ w x 14.5“ h, $205.

Bird 11: Dove 2, 10“ w x 8“ h, $100 (no binding, no sleeve, hangs on rings).

Bird 13: Diving Bird 2, 10“ w x 8“ h, $100 (no binding, no sleeve, hangs on rings).

Just contact me on the website or in the comments. Shipping is included in the ones I did this year, unless it’s going international. The birds will need to have shipping added. I include hanging hardware. Think of the holidays…

Get on with It…

You know there’s some mornings when you get up and you think it’s going to be fantastic, it’s a reasonable hour to rise on a weekend (well, your dad wouldn’t think so, but he went to bed WAY before you did, so he can just bite your booty), you have a list in your head that is miles long of all the tasks you need to get done. You’ve even prioritized them based on when things like the damn post office close, but you need this container and the post office won’t have it, and even if they did, if you had to cut it down, you’re pretty sure you’d be arrested with a box cutter in the post office, however logical it might seem for a relatively benign science teacher to have one.

So you make your first cup of tea of the day, you’ve actually showered (some mornings that just seems like an affront to sanity), and you’re raring to go and then shit just starts happening. Some of it is still amusing to you, such as the package of 300 razor blades that arrived randomly yesterday in one of three Amazon boxes, only one of which was supposed to ship here. Girlchild sent something here instead of to school, so I’ll ship that to her, which is fine, because I had some slippers to send her anyway and just hadn’t gotten around to it, and they fit in the box. The razor blade box has no shipping slip at all, but is definitely addressed to me, so boychild and I go back and forth on whether friend or family shipped them to me or if it’s some sort of bizarre threat, like I don’t like you and I want to kill you but I’m too lazy to do it myself, so if I send you all these razor blades, maybe you’ll slip into the bathtub and take care of it for me? Or something like that. A quick email to Amazon clears up that a friend DID send me a gift, something to ameliorate the sore callus pokey bit on my quilting finger, but NOT razor blades. I’m still laughing over this one, because Amazon’s email, definitely not sent by a native English speaker, at no point tells me if they will actually send me my REAL gift.

All good, but then I’m in the rabbit hole of school assignments for next week, because I needed to write/revise two versions of the test and all the answers and then decide if the resource teacher should be allowed to have the study guide answers, because if she just hands it to my kids, I will have to throw things. And I’ve been doing that a lot at school already. And making enemies is not a good thing, but I’m just not in the mood for stupidity, especially in people who work in schools. And I wasn’t going to do the school stuff until tomorrow, but one thing on the test was really bugging me, so I made the mistake of looking for that ONE thing and now the tests are done. OK. So the preparing of school stuff came in and sucked up time, and I realized I needed food, went to stand up, and broke the mug my daughter made me that said “World’s Okayest Mom”. Damn. I liked that mug a lot because I thought of her every time I saw it, and so I picked it up and went to carry it to the kitchen, stepped on one of the tiny sharp fragments, unbalanced myself, and dropped the whole damn thing again, and now I’m leaving bloody footprints all over the house.

Fuck me.

Really it’s another do-over day. Or not. Accept. I accept that the quilt that needs to go to Austria is not leaving today. It will leave Monday. I accept that the quilt that needs to go to New Hampshire is also not leaving today. I accept that shit happens. I’m revising my priority list right now. I still need boxes for those two quilts and I need to ship girlchild her things. I can do that today. I can sew labels on those two that need to ship, which I should have done last night, but couldn’t handle for some lame reason. I can prepare them to ship Monday. I can finish the school stuff so I can stop worrying about it. I can do some cleaning, because that is part of the stress I’m feeling, that the kitchen is a bigger disaster than normal (I haven’t been home much at night this week) and I don’t like it when it’s that way.

I can accept that I am a klutz. Why not? Everyone else has. I do actually accept that.

I was playing a game last night and didn’t get home until after 10. But I did manage to poke a deeper hole in my finger long enough to do this…

Cat 5, 12″ square, $175. She’s cute. He? Hard to say. This one took longer to quilt than its brightly colored counterpart, Cat 7, mostly because the thread was cranky and kept breaking. Not fair.

Two more cats and two hearts in hands left. Maybe finishing today? Who knows. I honestly don’t think my finger can handle that. It’s funny, because I know my friend Ina gave me some finger protectors years ago and I put them in the white sewing supply drawers that I kept in the living room until we moved everything last year, and now I can’t find the drawers. Did I do something with them? The things I haven’t moved back into the living room until the shelves get installed (some time in 2020 apparently) are mostly in my bedroom in boxes. But this isn’t there. I’m going nuts. I know it must be somewhere in the house. It’s not small.

Yes, it’s chaos here, but I usually know where everything is. Sigh.

OK. On with the day. There’s nothing else to be done but to get on with it. It really isn’t so bad. I think the bleeding’s stopped, the girlchild says she will make me a BETTER mug, and now I have time to make and sew on labels.

Issues with Starting…

So hi. It’s morning. We’re not friends, morning and I. Never have been. Although it feels incredibly bad to miss morning completely, because then it feels like I’ve wasted so much time. But OK. It’s here, brought on by the alarm clock and time passing and all that crap. I’m running two major labs over the next two days. Plus: kids will be engaged. Con: I might have to kill some of them. We’ll see how that goes. I’m sure teachers shouldn’t have to talk about killing students. We aren’t really. Everyone knows that, right? It’s just that consider the one point when your own child is at their most annoying and you want to strangle them, duct tape their mouth shut, and lock them in the closet. Well I have that kid every day. Sometimes more than once. So when I’m doing something in class that requires people to listen to instructions or there will be a giant mess to deal with, I get a little cranky when that one kid goes, “Wait, what are we doing?” Or makes a dumb joke and looks around the room for attention. Or is messing with the lab materials. I can be very calm. Please get up out of your chair, take all your stuff, and go sit outside. In 7th grade, brains are often absent. It’s a special form of senility.

So I’m hoping it goes OK. I prepped yesterday all day and I have more to do today for tomorrow. It’s just stressful.

Quilting is going slowly…but it’s going. I had to do some other stuff last night (always do) before I could start, so I only got one done. Plus I was tired, so I tried to go to bed early. Mostly I suck at that. That might have something to do with not liking mornings. They start too damn early.

Cat 4 in all his spotty wonder. His? Hers? Dunno.

Thread kept breaking. Probably I should change the needle. Always forget to keep track of that.

I have this one fabric I bought about 4 or 5 years ago that I really love. I love it so much, I’m down to about a 4×6″ piece of it and a bunch of tiny scraps. Of course, I’m never going to find it again, but I was trying to find a replacement. The top one is too yellow and I think the one on the right is too busy (I’ll still use them…don’t you worry), but I think the one on the left works as a replacement.

It’s still more lines than white space, unlike the other one, but it might work.

OK, well my car has been having issues with starting, and with my luck, this morning will be the one where it dies completely. A day when I have to get in early to get the lab ready, right? So I have to leave early enough that I can call for help if I need it. I really wish I could spend less of my life calling for help and more of it just living. Or drawing. Or quilting. Or something.

I spent all day yesterday trying to make these gels for the lab. The first batch was too hot so it melted the tape and went everywhere. Then I dropped one. Then at least 4 of them split down the middle, probably because I was moving them too early. They take so LONG to harden up. I guess the lesson is patience, which I suck at in the first place. I don’t have time to be patient. Unless it’s with cutting out a million tiny pieces, and that’s not even really patience. It’s just how long the job takes.

Speaking of which, I need to start the next big quilt. I just realized how much time I’ll be gone over Thanksgiving and how busy I’ll be with school up until then (and after, because of all the stuff due right before). And I have a baby quilt to do in December as well. Not enough time. Never is. I guess it’s all about having issues with starting! Quilts, cars, me. Taking on another large project…I’m ready but I’m buried with school, so it feels like a mistake…although I know the bigger mistake is letting school take over my life. Setting boundaries. Priorities. Knowing what you want but not knowing how to get it. Story of my life…

Good Things…

So lots of good news yesterday…the 8 exhibits of quilts that were missing reappeared (it’s like magic!), so they’ll be winging their way home. Lost out on two exhibits. Oh well. Then I found out that Work in Progress made it into ArtQuilt Elements, so it will be in Pennsylvania at the Wayne Art Center from March through May.

It’s nice to get into a show again.

And most important of all, so I don’t have to deal with 7800 wet towels and no hot water, I have a new hot-water heater…hallelujah. Yesterday’s shower was a little more intense than I like on a Monday morning.

And my morning starts with the dog at 5 AM finally figuring out that she needs to pee. Didn’t need to at midnight last night, nosiree. Now would be the time. Ugh.

So my evening was a little discombobulated by car trading, a car that was refusing to start, a plumber still installing a water heater, and dad wandering around the house. No walk, no gym. Unfortunate. Because then I couldn’t get motivated to do shit for a good long time. I cleaned up a little, started laundry, ate some food, tried to focus. I spent all day at school mostly unfocused. Not sure why. But I swear I have a kid who is stealing piles of paper off my desk. I know that sounds like an excuse, but these are piles of blank assignments, maybe 20 sheets, and this is the second time a pile has gone missing from that area after that class. That’s too much of a coincidence. So I’m gonna leave out a dummy pile and watch her like a hawk today. Yes, it sounds just about as crazy as it is. I’m pretty good with piles of paper. And I had just used it that period. I’m feeling a little nuts.

I finally gave up on trying to grade and came in here to deal with emails and bills. Then spent 20 minutes trying to sort through all the crap that was in here before and is now piled in the boychild’s room. It’s a little crazy in there too. I can’t move stuff back yet, because the water traveled under the whole wall and a little up it in places. It’s warm here, so it should dry out quickly, but I want to give it a fighting chance, so nothing goes back for a few days.

Then on to the quilting…except that’s where I sit…

I moved her back a bit and perched on the edge. She’s not interested in the other chair at all, because I’m not in it. This one will do nicely thank you. Eventually, she left, but not until I was on the second quilt.

This is Cat 2…

Yeah, I gave her something to lie on. I think if I redo that one, I will give her an actual fabric thing to lie on. Maybe.

And here’s Cat 3…which is so obviously Kitten.

She sleeps like that all the time. They each take about 30-45 minutes to quilt. I suspect Cat 6 and the owl will take longer, because of the outlining. I do that first with a darker thread, and then background quilt after. It makes the cats pop up off the fabric nicely.

So yeah, progress. And lots of good things happened yesterday. I’m OK with all that. So the universe kicks your butt with a leaky water heater and then rewards you for…for what exactly? Oh yeah. Because that’s not really how the world works. It’s all just random shit, partially predictable (like it was an old water heater; it was bound to do this some day).

I’m not looking forward to putting everything back. I just hope I can find a way to get rid of some of it…I already found some books I know I don’t want, but I couldn’t get rid of them before…maybe they just get donated. I used to buy a lot of quilt books when I was learning to quilt and finding my way in the fiber art world. Now I buy mostly catalogs of shows more than anything else, and a lot of those early quilt books are completely useless. So I should get rid of some of them. Might as well do it now, before I move them back into the room. Same with all the other quilt and fabric stuff. I found a whole drawer of my hand-dyed fabrics that I didn’t even know I had. Gotta remember that stuff. Access is part of it. This is a fairly small room and there’s a ton of stuff shoved in here.

Anyway. School calls. I think I need a lot more caffeine to actually DEAL with school, but that’s a whole ‘nother problem.

A Slow Drip…

My dad called me about 3 three weeks ago and asked me how old my water heater was. I read all the stickers on it and told him I didn’t know. He said it was on there somewhere and I just wasn’t seeing it. Generally I’m a pretty observant person, but whatever. He sent the plumber over (who was replacing my garbage disposal, which died about three weeks ago, coincidentally) to look at the water heater. He’s a nice guy, so he admitted he had to look up some code to see how old it was. But 2000. Yeah. So 15 years old. I told dad I thought it predated the divorce, and I was right…because I distinctly remember it going last time, water everywhere, having to dry the carpet and the pad underneath, plus my studio being watery, and I was a copyeditor then, so piles of paper everywhere on the floor. Not enough desk space. Just stacked manuscripts vertically.

So dad said he would schedule a replacement. He’s in this mode where he fixes everything before it breaks. Me, I wait until it’s catastrophic and I can’t live without it, right? Which is why we lived without a stove for two weeks last January. My house is at the age where everything breaks and falls apart. And I can’t afford to fix it.

So yeah, yesterday morning, the water heater was leaking. Luckily it wasn’t a fast leak (isn’t…because it’s still leaking). By the time I found it, the water was halfway across the studio floor, but almost everything in there is in plastic. I learned from last time. Very few piles of paper on the floor. The water heater is in a closet that backs up onto the studio, and instead of inundating the laundry floor with water, it goes under, into the studio.

So I got all of one wall of crap out and deposited it in the boychild’s room…

Then I sent him that photo and promised it would all be gone by the time he came home for Winter Break. Settin’ myself some goals! That’s 8 weeks, by the way. And now that it’s out, I’m going through it and culling. Because I can. I was kind of shocked by how much stuff was in such a small space.

Here’s Kitten exploring before I got the bookshelf out of there. It’s in the living room. All the stuff that was in it is in the boy’s room, though. It was full.

When Dad came over, he said something about replacing the floor. Well yeah, it has two holes in it, but NOW? Now is not the time. I can’t handle it right now. I can’t even handle THIS right now. Except I am. Because I just have to.

I had to clear out part of the pantry so they could get in there to replace the water heater, which is happening this afternoon…which is why I had a cold shower this morning. I could get the gas off, but couldn’t turn the water to the heater off, so it’s still dripping. Faster. But it’ll be OK.

The towels in the basket are sopping wet. The washer is full of more of them. I’ve used every beach towel and big towel that I have.

And I pushed everything else into the corner. It’s kinda dysfunctional in here on a good day.

Today is not a good day. But in true Kathy fashion, I cleared enough space to quilt last night. Because the presence of drippy water and leaky water heaters and minor disasters in the home should not stop you from making art. Seriously. I could have started going through the crap in the boy’s room last night, and when I finished grading, I surely thought that, but fuck no. I already had a significantly stressful day, and I need the wall to dry out anyway after they install (thank god for unseasonable warmth in San Diego over the next few days), so I’ll start tonight. Set a timer and do 30 minutes, and then move on to grading or quilting. I did grade a ton yesterday so I don’t feel bad. And Saturday. I did my duty. Plus I can’t move the bookshelf back by myself, and I won’t have help until Tuesday. So it has to all stay outta there.

Here’s Cat 1. She’s small and sweet. And quilted.

I did finish stitching down (obviously) this one and Cat 2. Then I quilted. Tonight I’m hoping to quilt some more. I’m also hoping to have a hot shower tomorrow morning and be able to do laundry tonight, because otherwise, I gotta go do the laundry at my parents and their wifi sucks. I’ve got too much work to do right now to not be working for 2 hours or more. And cold showers suck.

All this after I spent about an hour on Saturday calculating and moving money around and divesting college funds and texting kids about money in their accounts, just so I could make two college payments by the 1st. So I made one, calculated it out, decided not to make myself broke completely this week…gotta eat, although boychild reminded me of the large bunny and raccoon population (is eating raccoon a thing?), plus my well-stocked cupboard. I can eat! OK, really, I went to Costco back in August and bought a bunch of meat, so I’m using that up, and whenever it’s on sale, like yesterday’s BOGO sale at the store, I just buy some for weeks like this, when there isn’t much money, but I apparently still need sustenance. And then I made him pay for part of this month’s college…”made” isn’t really fair, because I just stole it out of one of his college accounts and he said OK, because what else is he gonna say? Same with the girlchild. I still need $8000 though. That’s more than I thought. If I think too hard about that, I might cry.

It could be worse. I’m still quilting. The water heater is a slow drip…not a rush of water like last time. The sky was pretty this morning. I’m not eating the raccoons yet…saving them for later.

Even If I Suck at It…

So I think my head is exploding. Probably because I’m being so efficient. I’m sure that will stop soon. Surely tomorrow is a clusterfuck of scheduling, so I should remember that. I shipped all the Halloween stuff and birthday presents I needed to get out of here. A miracle. Four packages to four different cities…four different states even. Made it 16 minutes before the post office closed. It’s really NOT convenient to those of us who work during the daytime, by the way. I was at school until 5:30 last night with a parent meeting. I came home and worked. Then I did some more stitching down of things.

I made it through three of them. I was tired last night; I’m still tired right now. I know I slept long and hard, but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the week, I guess.

Here’s the black and white kitty. I could do any of these in black and white, I guess. Yes, these will be for sale, soon I hope. And I could take any one of them and redo it in another color scheme. Last year’s owl was done in grays, then in purples, and finally in browns.

This is the orange kitty…kinda foxlike in some ways.

And I think this is my favorite, because it’s so obviously Kitten. Plus curled-up kitties are just cute.

There’s two more to be stitched down, and then I can start quilting, binding, etc. Some of them will need whiskers and eye bits that will be hand-embroidered. I wanted them all to be done by Halloween, but I think that’s unlikely. I am going to go through my drawings and pick one for real soon, for the next big project. I think I have some already enlarged; maybe I should pick one of them. I’m hoping to get more grading done today and tomorrow. I have a meeting tomorrow, but I often grade right through it.

In other news, the SAQA Oasis exhibit that was supposed to be in Palm Springs and at PIQF in Santa Clara is lost at the moment. There were 8 exhibits on a pallet that all disappeared from the shippers’ warehouse before they left for the first show. It’s over a hundred quilts estimated lost. Insurance has been contacted, videos watched, people notified. All we can do is wait. They’re somewhere. I know that. Meanwhile, this quilt, Part-Time Oasis, can’t be entered anywhere though…

It sucks. I’m crossing my fingers. This shit happens.

Plus you can buy the book! From here! Currently $12.99, free shipping with Amazon Prime. I really do think these will have to show up at some point. They’re in a warehouse somewhere stupid and someone thinks they’re part of something else and haven’t even looked.

(Neighbor is up on the slope coughing up a lung…putting the music back on)…

If you didn’t know, I’m an INFJ…

Does not matter how many versions of this thing I take, I get Introverted Intuition Feeling Judging: The Advocate! Rarest on the planet! Less than 1%! Famous INFJs include Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa. OK, that kinda makes me laugh. Way to make me feel inferior, guys. But yeah. I’ve had people argue that I’m not an introvert before, and I’m like, wait WHAT? I totally am. I need to recharge on a regular basis. I unfortunately have a job that fully sucks up all my energy. In fact, I use this as my excuse for not doing lunch detentions at school. If I do those, I want to kill people. In fact, tutorial often makes me feel that way too. Sigh.

So I still want to draw. I keep running out of time to do the things I want to do, because NEED is such a fucking asshole. October has been just as much of a clusterfuck as September. I have not figured the whole balancing-time thing out, despite kids being gone. I seem to be more buried than ever. I’m finding it incredibly frustrating. I keep trying to get a handle on it.

I don’t know why Doctor Who is fucking around with Clara, when I obviously need his help, like now. Time machine? Really? Get your ass over here, Doctor, and help someone with some real time constraints.

So I’m going to go sit and watch some stuff today and try to bang out some major grading this weekend, even if it kills me. Plus finish a story, stitch down the remaining two quilts (two or three? There’s only two left. Did I say three up above? Damnit), get ready for school this week. Major crazy lab prep this week. And money is super tight, with two college payments coming up on the first, both of which I’m trying to pay, at least some of each anyway. Boychild reminded me that I always have a fairly well-stocked pantry though, and he’s right. I have frozen meat in the fridge and pasta and rice. I shouldn’t need much to get through the week. Milk and veggies I think…thinking it through.

Will draw. Even if I suck at it.