I have still not managed the sleeping-in portion of summer vacation, mostly because of other living creatures. The neighbors banging things into a dumpster at 7:12 AM on a weekend. The house that’s being built at the bottom of the street. The girlchild getting up early to work for Grandpa, but leaving the dogs under my care. Whine whine whine. They do that until I get up. I lie there very quietly, barely breathing, hoping they’ll forget I’m alive, but it does no good. Sure, I go to bed late, but the boychild and I were up trying to figure out the wifi issues and then looking at music (like you do). He’s stolen a good chunk of what I own.

So I’m often tired. And it’s vacation, so you’d think I’d nap, but no…I’m determined to be awake and getting work done, artwork preferably. Yesterday, I spent over 6 hours ironing Wonder Under pieces to fabric on this giant piece. I’m just over 13 hours in, and I’m not halfway done, so I think it’s going to take a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s fussy little things…like owls…so I’m working from a few photographs on most of the animals and plants. If I google “owl in flight,” I get a ton of pictures and then I pick a few and draw something using those as reference, but if I want to use the colors of the actual bird, it gets a little wiggy sometimes. I’m supposed to be doing this owl as a commission as well, but I think I’ll do color a bit differently on that one…still realistic, but…well, until I iron it together, I really don’t know what it will look like.

I guess that’s the more experimental part of what I do…I don’t color my drawing or cut out little samples of fabric…I imagine it colored in my head, and I find the fabrics that match that. Which sometimes takes a lot of time, because I’m looking for a range that flows well, and that’s not always easy.

The giraffe below took forever because I couldn’t find the right background color for his spots. I’m still not sure it’s right, but it’s more right than the first four fabrics I started with. So I think that’s why it’s taking longer…

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The iPad has all the links I saved while I was drawing, so there’s about 700 tabs open, and I go back and look at whatever I was looking at when I drew the animal or plant, so I can try to color it appropriately. Although since I’m looking at multiple pictures, that’s not always helpful.

I’m less worried about the flowers and plants, but it’s important to me that the animals look right. Realism! Strange for me, I know, but I liked the parts of the last Earth Mother that approached realism. The snake, the elephants…and yet the mother herself is obviously constructed of all these real and semi-real organisms.

There’s lots of time to think while I iron, but really, it’s meditation…artistic meditation of the best kind.

Here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far…I’ll reuse some of them as I keep going up the body.

Lots of variation in greens and browns. Seriously, there’s about 20 greens in there so far.

So one thing I was having problems with on Thursday was sore feet. I’ve been hiking and working out at the gym, and then I’m basically standing all day to iron. I don’t want to wear tennis shoes or the equivalent, because it’s hot and I don’t do well with my feet enclosed when it’s hot. On the other hand, my feet hurt too much to stand for long. I can’t afford to replace the flooring in here (but when I do, I will be doing something with padding or rubbery bouncy stuff for sure), and I thought a mat would even be too expensive…oh cool, they’re called anti-fatigue mats. But whether I do that or not, and I’d have to do a better job of standing in one place than I do, I needed a solution for NOW, because Friday morning, my feet were already aching.

Yup. Crocs. They’re cushy. Still pretty open. The blister on the back of my heel (which is ugly as hell) could be avoided by pushing the strap up. I didn’t need to go find or buy anything, and they move WITH me…I don’t have to try to remember to stand in one place. And? They worked. So cool. Well, Crocs aren’t cool, but they serve a purpose. And this is one of them.

I just have to keep them away from puppy. He likes them too.

So I got into the 500s yesterday…although again, I have pieces ironed higher up than that, like ribcage pieces etc, which I did all at once. I did an owl, some daisies, some trees, a uterus and its accoutrement, plus a giraffe. I’m still in the main torso area, but I’ve done more than half of it.

It’s time-consuming, for sure. But I think it will be awesome when it’s done. I probably won’t get 6 hours of ironing in today, because of the Oceanside opening, but I can get 4 or 5 in. Here’s where I turn into an art hermit: I don’t leave the house unless I have an event or an appointment, or I have to go to the grocery store. Or a hike. But otherwise, I hole up in here and iron and sew and cut and just be a full-time artist, because although I consider myself a full-time artist ALL the time, it’s hard to just spend an hour or two a night working on something that I am so obsessed with…and going to work in between and having a job that eats so much time and energy…this is such a relief. I can just BE what I’m supposed to be.

Meanwhile, I forgot one of the shows I was in this weekend: SAQA’s Oasis exhibit (which disappeared for a bit last year) is currently in Reno, Nevada, at the Sew Original Quilt & Creative Expo, probably scaring people. I’ve put the catalog somewhere very safe, unfortunately (cough can’t find it), so hang on…mine’s on the right, Part-Time Oasis…

Crap. I really can’t find the catalog or anything online that shows me who the other artists are. Sorry. I’ll fix this if I find it, but now I really need to start ironing grapes. Lots of them. Like fabric grapes. Not real ones. That would be really messy.

When you’re already tired, the best thing in the world to do is have to get up even earlier to go to a meeting. Seriously. You should try it. The alarm goes off and you think, WTF. I know I don’t get up now. And then you remember. Oh yeah you do. Because you have to go to that meeting. Damn responsibilities. I did go to bed a little earlier last night because I knew this was happening, but I didn’t want to.

Because I finished ironing this down…

And here’s what’s so funny about that background. I just realized it was the wrong one…but I like it. I had pulled one of the many dark blues I have lying around, just for this purpose, way back when I started picking fabrics (OK, not really WAY back, but a few weeks ago). This one was in the reject pile. But I didn’t remember that last night after a 2-hour union meeting and another 2-hour art meeting (both necessary and useful, but exhausting after a long day of persuading kids to write about bird beak adaptations). I just reached for the one that was at my eye level. The other one is on the floor. With the fabrics I used in this quilt. A perfectly logical place really, but not in my line of sight. I just saw it this morning.

That said, I think this looks good…it’s hard to see the swirly batik in the photo, but it works well.

But that’s what tired does…picks a different background.

So I wanted to start sewing as well last night, but it was a quarter to midnight and you already saw my note about sleep, wonderful sleep. So I went to bed. Ironing took a whopping 5 hours and 42 minutes. I really should do more of these small pieces, just to remember what easy looks like. Says the woman whose next quilt is crazy complicated. As usual.

Oh well. This is my life. I was reminded last night that I have to do a weird project this summer involving a nightstand. I say weird because I can’t quite get my head around it. I’ll have to figure it out sometime in the summer. They haven’t set a deadline yet, and I’m hoping it’s not until September or October, but who knows? We did a catalog with our most recent show. It changes the deadlines. In fact, the show I was helping to plan for 2017 will have a feminist coloring book, so if you’re one of the people who’s been trying to tell me I should make a coloring book, well there will be one of my pieces in it…I’ll let you know when that’s available…hopefully by November.

Which means having to draw something to size. Ah well. Opportunity knocks and then you are buried in work. Seriously, my summer is chock full of have-to’s already and it hasn’t even started yet.

So I’m hoping to have enough energy to stitch this down tonight. I don’t think it will take more than a couple of hours at the absolute most. And then I can sandwich and pinbaste…quilting next week? I still need to finish the other drawing as well. I have another meeting tonight and two openings tomorrow night, so hopefully I’ll find some free time and energy in all that. Maybe.

So the good news is that I finished ironing all the pieces down onto fabric on the newest quilt. It’s not a huge piece, maybe 18×26″ or so. It’s from one of my smaller sketchbooks. It’s not FOR anything, no show, no deadline. Although it technically has no nudity in it, so that’s a plus for those weird little shows that want small pieces but can’t show boobies. After the last few demanding pieces, I wanted to do something just for me, something mellow, something easy, something that didn’t have a million hours attached to it. So it took about 5 hours and 45 minutes to pick out fabrics. Next I’ll start trimming them, probably at my quilt class on Thursday. I might work on the drawing tonight, try to get it done, since it’s probably the next one I’ll work on. That perennial debate between working on what I want to work on, and trying to make work that will get into shows. Everything has a theme and this one doesn’t fit many of them. That’s why I’m doing it though. Just a break from the artistic rat race.

So I had all these cactus spikes lined up in order for ironing…

I had misnumbered some of them (I do this all the time), so there’s double numbers with letters to tell them apart, but in the long run, it’s cactus spikes. It doesn’t matter much. I actually used three different colors of spikes. Kinda crazy there.

Here’s the fabrics I used. Shit. I usually count them.

64 fabrics for a piece that has about 400 pieces. I needed lots of variety in the greens because she has lots of different types of plants covering her, from cactus to vines to sunflowers.

Here’s the pile, ready to be cut out…

It’s not a very big pile. I figure cutting them out will take less than 4 hours. I do remember that I’m missing part of her eyeballs. I had the Wonder Under pieces and then they disappeared. Probably on a fluffy cat butt somewhere.

I have two other smallish drawings like this that I copied and numbered. I thought I would work on them next, but I think looking at the time available (and yes, I am already thinking about summer projects…), I need to start on the big one next. I like to have at least one big project planned for summer, since I have more free time for long bouts of standing at an ironing board without having to work the whole day before I do that. I have a job that requires a lot of standing and walking. I hardly ever sit down. So walking all day and then standing all night is pretty tiring.

Last year I did it a little differently though. I had a piece I wanted to work on that I started in May or so and finished in late June…there was a show I wanted to enter. Ironically, it didn’t get in, but another piece did. Then I wanted to enter another show at the end of July, so I finished a smallish piece for that. It’s been gone since September, I think. Some of that was a shipping issue (not mine), but it won’t come back until late October this year, I think. Then I finally worked on the big monster piece for the summer, not starting until the end of July, which honestly, is right before school starts. This year, we have to go back August 15 (oh god, way too early). So the summer is really July. I didn’t finish that big piece until right before it was due, the end of October I think. Or was it September? Can’t remember. End of September. And I forgot the other giant Earth Mother I did last year, which I finished in April. It’s strange for me to finish a big piece during the Spring. It’s so crazy at school this time of year. But I had a deadline for that one as well.

So there’s the question. Do I work better with deadlines? Yeah probably. More efficiently anyway. So I guess I have to accept their existence. If I sucked at it, I might be able to ignore them and wander willy nilly through my artmaking process, but I’m deadline-oriented and it makes me get work done. So there we are. Try to pick deadlines that make sense with my work and not just make it for the theme. Make the stuff I would make anyway.

But instead of making right now (and I would like to be, trust me…know that I leave for work most days with art screeching at me to STAY STAY!), I need to work to pay the bills. Like most of us do…

Whoa Nelly, this feels like Monday. Teachers get Sunday panic, and then we don’t sleep Sunday nights, and then Mondays are rough. Then again, I’m just not a morning person. Don’t talk to me until I have one full cup of tea inside me, whether it’s a 6:30-AM wakeup alarm or an 8:30 version (when I’m not in school). Something woke me up around 6 AM and I thought, Holy Crap, it can’t possibly be morning. I just fell asleep. You always know that’s a good start to a work day. Don’t feel like I slept last night. I even went to bed a bit early. Well. 15 minutes. And then I couldn’t fall asleep. Brain in a twizzle.

Twizzle is probably a bad word somewhere. Then again, everything is a bad word somewhere. Nope. It’s a move in ice dancing. A twizzle is a multirotational one-foot turn in figure skating. The twizzle is most commonly seen in ice dancing, where it appears in a number of compulsory dances and is a required element of step sequences in the short dance, original dance, and free dance. Ah there we are…also a word for a form of crystal meth. Then again, probably every weird-sounding word is a form of crystal meth somewhere.

I’m working my butt off every weekend, it seems…trying to get school stuff done, getting through art stuff, not even catching up with anything. We must be getting near the end of the school year. I thought I had 43 days of school left, but it turns out we’ve been back after break for three weeks, not two, so there are only 38 days left. That’s good. I was thinking 43 sounded long. But I also lost a whole week in there somewhere. That’s gotta be a problem.

I had a meeting with one of my art groups yesterday, so I had to finish a bunch of stuff Saturday to make sure I had food in the house and my school stuff was ready. It was a good meeting…long drive, but good news about upcoming shows. In fact, membership is coming up in October, so if you live in the Los Angeles/San Diego area and you’re a fiber artist, and you can commit to 4 Sundays a year, then joining California Fibers might be a good thing for you. I’ve picked up some great shows with this group; plus they bring a wide range of talents and information. There’s membership info on the website here. I’ve been in the group for a few years and enjoy it.

We have a presentation of sorts every meeting, and this time, two of the members had been to Guatemala to look at the textile collectives there, and they brought back some samples. If you’re on Facebook with me, you probably saw the detail of this…

This is the bottom of a strip of fabric that would become one leg of men’s pants. Which is boggling in itself. This is machine-embroidered by a Guatemalan man who does it all freehand. Amazing stuff. He works out of books, looking at the pictures for ideas. There were other things, beautiful soft scarves and beading, but this thing blew me away.

Anyway. So that was yesterday. I was so efficient that when I got home, I realized I had a chunk of time, almost free time. Because it’s never really free, is it? I really should be grading stuff at all hours, never-ending. I needed to straighten up the studio a bit, put fabrics from the last quilt away before I started a new one. So I did that.

And then I started laying out Wonder Under pieces and I hung up my original drawing with all the numbers all over it.

And I started picking fabrics. This is her hair. Blue is in.

I was trying to figure out why all of a sudden, after two weeks, now I feel like doing this.

Here’s the flesh…really not much in this quilt. She’s sorta covered in stuff that’s not flesh.

At the end of the night, I cover up the Wonder Under that’s still laid out so I don’t come back to it all over the place, some stuck to cat butts. The bin at the bottom is everything I’ve ironed so far, which is in the low 200s, I think. I believe the box to the right is all the 300s.

It’s a small quilt. There’s not a lot of pieces in it. I spent about 2 hours and 40 minutes ironing and I’ve probably got another 2 to go and then I’m done.

Here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far. There will be more color once I get into the bits on top of the flesh.

So what got me going? Well I have all these shows coming up now with no work that will fit. Four of them have themes, although the themes are not necessarily limiting, and two of the shows have the same theme. I didn’t like the theme though, until I let my brain play with it and I think I got there, but for two different shows, and at least one being juried, I might need more than one related piece. And then I need a smaller piece for another show. Waiting to hear on nudity or not for that one. All these deadlines are in the next year, but it’s potentially about making 4 large quilts and 1 smaller one.

Although I had a few hours of whiny crap in my head where I just wanted to make whatever I want, damn all the themes. It passed, though, because I’m fairly sure I can still make what I want, but force it to work for these shows. But I can’t sit around waiting any more, because there’s work to be done! Beyond just staring at that drawing every night.

So I’d better get my butt in gear. Because I want to make the Earth Mother one too, and does she fit with any of the themes? One…barely…by the skin of her teeth. Wait. Dammit. She doesn’t have teeth. You get what I mean.