Never Really Done…

Sometimes I can be really damn efficient…like when I’m not sick and when a bunch of drama isn’t stalking me (have I mentioned that colleges have started notifying and the girlchild is a mess?). Yesterday was in fact one of those days. I picked up my quilt from the photographer after a science meeting, came home and graded an entire stack of crap, made dinner from scratch, exercised, and ironed for two hours. Well done, woman, well done.

I’m 9 1/2 hours in…so this sucker is taking much longer than I thought it would. I was obviously dreaming things though, because the last big quilt had about the same number of pieces and it took 12 hours to iron to fabrics…and I’m guessing that’s how long this one will take as well.

I ironed some sunflowers and this is a snake…

My snakes are usually green…I’m not sure why, seeing as how all the snakes locally are mostly shades of brown. That wouldn’t have worked on this quilt, though, because the snake goes all the way across her chest (not political or violent!) and crosses a wide variety of leaves, branches, a cat, and a heart…so it had to contrast with all that (and it does…surely it does). I always think of this kids’ book that is somewhere in the house (OK, I just googled “kid book snake turns yellow to green” and got the title)…Verdi.

Verdi is a python who doesn’t want to be green (young pythons are yellow). ANYWAY. Know that I am always thinking of that snake when I put them in quilts, apparently…or at least his coloring.

I ironed a bird next…more feathers…

I decided to keep it in the brown range, because it sits behind and under a bunch of stuff, and I didn’t want it to overwhelm…although that beak is a bit bright! I was having some major orange issues last night. It took 20 minutes to deal with orange and try to find something that would work. I don’t know why. My orange drawer is really unsatisfying at the moment. Designers go through different color stages. I got some really good yellows and off-whites last time, but the orange drawer needs help.

After that, I ironed a cat and a heart, but I didn’t photograph them. I wasn’t going to go that far, but it was just a few more pieces! Really! (Now you know how I stay up so late.) I finished the 500s and laid out the 600s, so I have a little less than 300 pieces to go…well over halfway, which is good.

Here’s everything I’ve used so far…

I added a lot of off-whites, browns, a few greens and yellows, some orange last night. I do reuse colors throughout the quilt, so one of the reds from elsewhere was used in the heart, and two of the browns from the ground were used in the bird. The cat’s eyes came from the acacia trees in the elephant section. Simple stuff like that. It’s a lot of fabrics though…and notice, I’ve added almost no blue…just the gray blue in the heron. No worries…the hair is the ocean, so there will be bright turquoises up there to support the water-loving animals. Really, I’ve finished most of the torso…I just have a little grassy knoll on her shoulder to do (grass and roots)…then we’re up in the hair. Hopefully I have some big enough gray/white pieces for the clouds. We’ll see.

Here’s the pile waiting to be cut out…

The box is getting full. I might need to graduate into a bigger box. I have quilt class Thursday, so I will definitely be cutting pieces out starting then. Wait. Apparently I don’t have quilt class Thursday. Huh. So much for that plan. I need to be done cutting by the end of next week. Cutting doesn’t take as much time as ironing. I lied. On the last quilt, it took 11 1/2 hours. So whatever. Marathon cutting sessions in my future. I have a soccer tournament this weekend. Maybe I can persuade girlchild to drive while I cut. Or I can sit in Starbucks and cut for hours in between games (can you say ugh?). I actually want to grade papers so I can have as little as possible to do over Spring Break. Of course, I always say that and it never really works out that way.

Progress…I’m getting there. Closer to done. For some definition of the word done, that is, because with art, I am never really done.

Ironing Like a Beast…

Sometimes stuff pisses me off.

I know you’re shocked by that.

But when it does, I do what my counselor always tells me: take care of yourself. Do something nice for yourself. Now with a normal female, that might mean a pedicure or shopping for a new skirt or chocolate. Eh. I make art. So when life conspired to punch me in the face yesterday, and I was sitting there, grading shit, still grading shit, always grading shit, hands shaking, so angry and upset and frustrated that I was about to cry, I took a deep breath, set a line for the end of the feeling and grading of shit, and decided to make art for most of last night.

Well, except, I also needed to sleep. So I did that too.

I kicked some ironing ass last night. But before I did, I started sorting all the recycled pieces from Mariah’s quilts for the second piece in Diverted Destruction 8, which opens June 27 in Los Angeles, by the way. I figure I’m going to need them grouped together instead of piled on the floor in the living room if I ever want to make a quilt out of them. Here’s pink sorted and purple piled…

And here I am working on the green.

Blue is mostly done. I did it while I had pneumonia. Sitting on the floor was doable then. So I have a few more colors to sort, and then I’m done with that. It’s overwhelming to sort these, so it’s better if I just do a little each day. I don’t have very much of most colors, so that makes it more difficult…lots of squares and triangles and strips…but that’s what this show is about. How do we take stuff that normally would get tossed out or put aside, and then turn it into art.

THEN I started ironing like a beast…this is all the flesh in the Ventura quilt…

There isn’t much, because remember? No nudity, no politics, no violence. So she’s mostly covered. Her face and hands show, and her shoulders. And there’s bits of flesh showing behind things. But that’s it. So to iron the flesh colors, I had to pull pieces from the 300s, which is where I’m at, all the way through the 700s. So now I don’t know how far I am, except that I have 7 hours in. When did that happen?

And then I pulled fabrics for the great blue heron that makes up her left arm…

Grays and blues, but the blue in the wings had to show up on the background, so that was a challenge. So now it has some purple in it. I’m OK with that. The idea of the heron will be there. And I picked some really interesting wing-feather fabric. Had to fussy cut the bits I wanted, because it goes all over the place into pink and I didn’t want that. Much. There’s some turquoise in there too. I left a little of that.

Anyway, so that got me to the end of the 300s, but half that wing was in the 400s (all the pieces from 435-485, basically…who numbered this thing?), so again, no idea how far along I am, but maybe have something over 500 pieces ironed? Maybe halfway? It doesn’t look like halfway, but what do I know? It must be halfway. I spent 2 1/2 hours ironing last night and then had a very hard time stopping. Made myself stop. Still tired this morning though…here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far…

You can see the fleshy run and the heron is all on the left. Next up is sunflowers I think…and then a cat? Or the heart. Not sure. Yes, she’s covered in plants and flowers, but there’s still a giant anatomical heart. This is all for a show where I have to jury in, by the way. So I might not get in. And I will only have one entry, because every single other piece I have has nudity, politics, or violence (or all three) in it. Sigh.

Here’s pieces ready to be cut out…filling up the box.

Two weeks until Spring Break…and I’m still on schedule. Miraculous.

Here’s a chair that Kitten has destroyed…

And now inhabits. I’m not fixing it until she’s gone. There’s no point, unless I use bulletproof fabric…and I’m not even sure that would stand up to Kitten claws.

Luckily, she leaves my fabric stash alone.

Not Thinking Too Hard…

I brought home 119 science packets last night, the last unit we completed. I had already graded 21 of them at school, one small class’ worth, but I really need to finish the rest over the weekend. Funny, this is the smallest number of students I have ever had (maxed out at 190 one year), but I still can’t balance the grading. You take a weekend off or you schedule it so everything is due at once, and all of a sudden, there’s an avalanche. I just started my 14th year of teaching, and I still can’t find a best practice on that part of the job.

So I sat there for about three hours…and I got through 68 of them. The pile on the right is done…

The pile on the left is still staring at me…balefully. I watched a bunch of TV to drag me through it, and I got faster and faster (which is why sometimes it’s better to just bully through and do ALL of it at once, because once you’re on a roll, you DO get faster and faster). I stopped and made dinner in the middle (girlchild blew me off for yet another Friday night…whatever), and at around 10 PM, I quit. I have my smallest class and my largest class left. It’s easier to grade the good students, because everything is there, complete, and in order. The ones that kill me are the kids who don’t put anything in order and put random stuff in there (one kid stapled a field trip permission slip in there…guess it made it look more full). Sigh. Worst part of my job…well, besides navigating politics and administrators.

Anyway. I was exhausted by then, but in true Kathy fashion, I don’t ever let that stop me from making art. OK. Sometimes I do. But not last night. Just grading all night and not doing something for me makes me cranky. So I dragged myself into the office and looked at what was next to be ironed. And remembered I needed to do a label for the quilt that sold, so I did that first. By the way, the second Catching Cancer is available, if anyone’s interested…

It’s 10 1/2″ w x 12 3/4″ h, $140. Let me know.

And then I started looking at elephant pieces. Teensy weensy wrinkles and eyeballs and lots of gray gray gray, which can be blue-ish or yellow-ish or brown-ish. Grays annoy me. I use them all the time. I love gray. But it drives me nuts. If I were really anal-retentive obsessive compulsive, all my grays would be sorted by their base color and I wouldn’t have to search all through a million bins trying to find the RIGHT gray (I never have the RIGHT gray. I am always buying more gray). So I needed a run of 7 fabrics for the elephants, because they are standing in front of each other, so you have to think about that.

Well, YOU don’t. I do.

There’s only three elephants, but they take up about 100 pieces of Wonder Under…

And I had to add fabrics for eyes and tusks. Here they are all laid out. The old Wonder Under is releasing like crazy. The new stuff is fucking awesome. It doesn’t release and the paper comes off like a dream. The only issue I’m having is that my iron is getting stuff stuck to it from the old Wonder Under, and I can’t get it clean enough, and that is having an issue with the paper of the new Wonder Under, which is really plasticky. I didn’t read the instructions (ha! never do…), so maybe I need to reduce the heat. Or clean my iron better.

It took about an hour to iron all the elephant pieces down…

The next thing on the ironing list is an apple tree with the tiniest pieces ever…because some crazy woman thought that was a good idea. Then I move onto HUGE pieces of body parts and bird wings. I might need to go gray/white shopping. Seriously. There’s a huge heron wing in there, so I have to figure out what color that is. Blue gray? Maybe?

Underneath my feet while I iron…

She was very tired. So was I at the end of it…girlchild came home way too late (apparently clocks are so passé). By then, I was sitting again (so tired yesterday…couldn’t stand to stand and iron for long), working on the binding, which has to get done today, so I can get it photographed tomorrow. Boom! Then I need to start the other recycled piece.

It’s good to be finishing these and moving on. I’m not enjoying the Have-To’s on the quilt front as much as I enjoy the Want-To’s, but those Have-To’s get into shows, and right now, with my rejection rate on the stuff I LIKE to make, if I’m going to be in shows, I have to cater a bit to whatever the hell it is they think they want. I can’t try to figure out why the stuff I really want to make, the stuff I enjoy, why it’s not getting into shows…unless it’s an invitational, so they don’t see it beforehand. I just have to move on and try to balance the stuff I really like with the stuff I need to make for whatever reason…paying the bills, participating in a group show. It is what it is. And I do actually think this Ventura quilt will be cool in the end…even though I really had to fight my own inclinations to get it drawn.

All right…I’m sewing that damn binding on now. Obviously I am Thinking Too Hard.

I’m Not About to Stop Now…

Getting up earlier is hard, but the sunrises are worth it. Couldn’t find the camera in time though…the pink faded too fast. I realized this morning that I only have 2 1/2 weeks until Spring Break and everything has to be at a certain stage by then, so I really need to get my act in gear. This quilt is harder to cut out, for some reason, than other ones have been. Maybe it’s because I’m tired. Who knows. But I did work on it yesterday for an hour or so…here are the mountains…

I debated brown and gray, but purple won (as it should). I was a little concerned about how dark they are because the background is fairly dark, but there’s snow and wind around them, so I think it will be OK. I don’t ever really know though until I iron it together, which is strange, I realize. It’s sort of half-colored in my head, but it’s staticky sometimes, so I lose the image. I color it as I go usually. Like the big black and white drawing is on a projector in my forehead and I grab some pens and color in each section as I pick it. I don’t really see the whole quilt colored in until…well, until it is. At the end of the fabric-choosing phase.

Probably not like other people do it. I used to color in copies of my drawings back when I did screenprinting, but with that, you have to know what to block out to keep it that color, so maybe it was more crucial to know ahead of time? I don’t know. I don’t do that any more. Now I pretty much wing it. I figure my color sense gets me through most of the time.

Then I picked out the acacia trees…

That was a little easier because I try to reuse colors throughout the quilt to make it more unified, so I pulled the browns for the tree trunks from the browns for the ground in the base area. There were a lot of pieces in the acacia section though. I’m still in the 200s…although I’m about 3 1/2 hours into the ironing. Based on that, I could estimate about another 7 hours of ironing. So I might be done the middle of next week? Maybe? Then I have to cut them all out. I’m still on schedule…I’m OK.

Here’s everything I’ve used so far…added the purples and a few more greens from the night before.

I would love to come home from work tonight and work on this for a few hours, but I have a union meeting and a soccer banquet. Ugh. Sounds exhausting. I’m still planning to do at least an hour though. It’s a good way to end the day. It helps me sleep. Brings some peace.

Although Daylight Savings is still kicking my butt on that, so probably I would sleep pretty well anyway.

My mood was better yesterday…guess whatever that weird wave of sad that threw me under the bus over the weekend has finally wandered off, which points directly to hormones, unfortunately. It was a weird deja vu though, a peek at the depression that haunted me last year at this time. This concept of free will we have…it’s hard to reconcile it with the instinctual and hormonal and plain old crazy shit that the body and brain seem to do of their own accord. I am glad, though, of my ability to balance the art within the larger scope of my whole life. My house isn’t as clean as it could be, my yard is a mess, I don’t always grade stuff as quickly as I could, but I have this other thing that helps me be human and connected to the world. I try not to let the constant rejections from shows from the last year bring it down. I know the work I’m making is good…but challenging…and maybe doesn’t play well with others.

I can’t be mad at myself for that. I’m OK with making art that is unique and challenging. I’m not about to stop now.

Fighting a Mood

I think I started yesterday’s post with Oh Holy Hell. Or did I? I was sick yesterday apparently. No really. I was. Ran a fever and everything. It was strange. Woke up nauseous as hell, ran a fever, fine today. I do not understand. I feel like I have completely lost touch with my immune system. Or for that matter, my reproductive system. Possibly my nervous system as well. Digestive? Fuck. HELLO BODY. Please come in. There is no connection. We need to re-establish communication here.

So seriously, need to get back to exercising and hiking and the gym. She says, as she looks at this week’s calendar and snorts Cheerios out her nose. Huh. Good intentions.

So after I lolled around on the couch yesterday afternoon, feeling like crap, tired as hell, supporting a cat’s claws with my fleshy bits, I eventually dragged myself up and did the stupid independent study contract I needed to do for the kid who will be gone for two weeks before Spring Break but who already does no work, so I spent an hour making this thing for him and he probably won’t do more than half of it, if that, based on his current grade. Dear Politicians: I didn’t get paid for that time, but I did it anyway.

Then I finally got my act together and started picking out fabrics…well, I started with laying Wonder Under out…

Which requires almost zero brain power, and yet I fucked it up. I love it when I recut a complicated piece and then find it later in the wrong pile. Did I tell you I was running a fever? I was. Piece 29 was down in the 70s. No idea why. I didn’t actually get very far…

Fewer than 100 pieces ironed…the flames kind of discombobulated me. I couldn’t figure my own drawing out. (FEVER!) Here’s what I’ve used so far…

There were a lot of clouds and snow. It was good to get started though. It will be easier to keep going now…momentum you know. It keeps you moving. Science!

At some point, though, I was too tired to stand. Or sick. Hard to know. So I sat and sewed bindings for a while…

Yes, I used kiddie fabric on the back of the cancer hands. It was happy fabric. I used it to make baby quilts. I think we should totally fight breast cancer with baby quilts. (No, I’m not fucking delirious. Why do you ask? The fever is completely gone this morning.)

I finished the smaller one.

Then I started the larger one and went to bed. Perchance to sleep. Until 5:30 AM, when the girlchild came in and told me she was sick. (no fever) And then I couldn’t go BACK to sleep. Sleep is such a THANG for me at the moment. I never get enough, even when I try to get enough.

So I have some other random stuff here, like this video from IQF Houston last November…this was the official video they took…

It’s pretty much the same as what Margaret Fabrizio posted (because she was standing there recording me while I did this one!). But you should go check out their other videos. I will…when I have time…I swear! They will just keep playing in a row, so if you’re standing there ironing fabrics, like I might be some time this week (looks at schedule again and chokes up with laughter), you could just watch all of them one after another. Though that might be more quiltspeak than you can handle.

And then there was this…the cats who hate each other…

I was sitting between them, but they stayed when I extracted myself and did not hiss at each other.

Cat in a box. All the cats have been in this box. It’s in the window in my studio, right behind the sewing machine. Apparently it is the best cat place ever.

I do not know why this cat tolerates this…

I delivered a quilt yesterday, so I had to put a label on it, dehair it, and provide sticks of hanging.

It’s a good thing I had that yesterday, because I got rejected from two shows in three days. I’m on a fucking roll! Whatever. While I was dropping it off, I was checking out the gallery space where me and one other artist will be hanging our dual show in January. So big fat whatever, right? Sigh. I don’t know what to think about all the rejections. Oh well. Move on. It’s not like I’m going to stop making art all of a sudden. I’m way too stubborn for that.

Yeah. I’m fighting a mood. I’m sure I’ll come out of it soon.

To Fray or Not to Fray

Some cats are sweet. Some are just annoying. Some stand in front of the computer screen while you’re trying to watch Walking Dead and iron at the same time, and if you move them, they squawk and jump back up, and then try to stand on your fabric AND your Wonder Under all at the same time.

I want you to guess what kind of cat this is.

I decided at some point last night to just jump in and start ironing fabrics with the upholstery samples…I mean, I have to start somewhere. It may make me nervous, because it’s outside my normal practice, but it’s going to make me nervous no matter what. So get on with it.

I needed a variety of shades of one color to do the whole human body. The only color I had enough variation in was an off-white color.

But I didn’t have enough of each texture in that shade for the two largest pieces in the quilt, so I had to piece them…and I had to piece a couple different types of texture together to make it work. They were about the same shade, though, so I think it will work.

I know they look different on the back, but that’s because some of the fabrics have a lining-type backing on them. The other fabrics have a sort of rubbery backing that comes off a little when I iron. Does that worry me? A little.

Sewing them together was an issue, which yes, does in fact worry me. I didn’t rip on this one, but cut the seam right off and tried again, because the stitches were too damn small and buried in the texture. And then I lengthened the stitch as well.

Here’s the piecing I did for the other large piece…

All the other pieces were much smaller, so I put together a run of medium to dark values, just like I normally do…

I finished all the body parts except for eyeballs, lips, nails, and hair.

So there are a couple of things I’m thinking about…first of all, I think these are going to fray like crazy. I’m hoping the Wonder Under will help a little with that, plus the backing on those that have it. Otherwise, I think that will just be part of the piece. I’m thinking of embellishing the seams and some of the pieces with stitching, a la crazy quilting. I’m also considering painting over this, but I haven’t decided for sure. I think stitching through the whole mess is going to be a disaster. I might have some issues with the weight and strength of the rayon thread I usually use, and my machine might balk at the coatings on the backs and the general thickness. That’s why I’m thinking I need a cotton background…like one if Mariah’s leftover pieces? Or a random tablecloth. There’s always a trip to the thrift shop. I have some old sheets too.

Tonight, I’m hoping to get the rest ironed to fabric and start on the second one. Or maybe cut these out. Who knows? I need to grade papers too, so it’s not a free night. They never are…

Procrastinating

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I finished ironing…

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

Found a background…ironed it down…

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this…

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

Sundays? I Got This…

Sundays for teachers are hell. They are the day you get ready for the week. You do all your errands, do all the grocery shopping, get your laundry done, and also lesson plan. You do your best to keep Saturdays free, but Sundays…hell, Sundays belong to the man.

I love Sundays during breaks. I don’t have to do any of that shit. Well, I still have to grocery shop, and I’m sorta trained by now to make them work days. They feel that way anyway. I remember back in the old days, before kids, when I was married but not encumbered, when I didn’t bring my job home with me and have it looming over my head on a regular basis, Sundays were nice then. Late rising, a nice hot cup of tea, reading the paper (who gets that any more?), and watching all those fix-it shows on PBS. Hours and hours of Norm showing you the right tools…if you only had the right tools, your house would be fucking amazing. And Sundays were lazy days. You might make it to Home Depot for all the tools you needed, but you didn’t have to. That could wait until next Saturday, couldn’t it?

Well that explains a lot around here, doesn’t it?

Sigh. So I feel like I wasted many hours this morning on god-knows-what, but eventually, I got my act in gear and started getting work done. I spent an hour and a half on kid budgets…a fun thing you get to do when you’re divorced and all the expenses are split. December is always a clusterfuck for expenses, made even worse by applications to college. I sometimes just want to crawl into a hole and pretend none of that happened (three apps left).

After grocery shopping (holy crap, having the boychild home is fucking expensive) and buying textbooks (not mine; boychild again), I managed time for art…bindings on the two birds…

They’re pinned down now…waiting to be sewn down. These are the first two quilts of 2015…at some point, I’ll get that summary post done for 2014, wherein I made a shitload of bird quilts.

Sometime yesterday I got the good news that Absolutely Nothing, the Women at War quilt, will be in the show at Grossmont College in March. More about that later. But cool. Yay. Happy.

And then there was this drawing. It so wants to be a quilt. It’s too many hours for the cancer quilt, but I don’t fucking care…

It gets to be. I drew this ages ago. The Wonder Under’s been trimmed for a few weeks. I traced it back over Thanksgiving break…not sure when I trimmed the Wonder Under…my task app is not being helpful.

So I really should have started the cancer donation, but this one has been fucking screaming at me. So I listened. It only has 160 pieces.

It’s mostly flesh colors…

Two sets of flesh colors. It took about an hour and a half to iron the whole thing down to fabric.

Twenty three fabrics…

This isn’t going to be very big. It’s not going to take very long. In fact, in a little over an hour, it’s mostly cut out.

Probably another ten minutes would do it.

Why do this one first? Before the one I know has to be done? Before the bindings are done? I told you. It was yelling very very loudly. In my old age, I try to listen to the ones that yell. There’s a few more that are yelling, but I will do the cancer one next, I swear. Although I have to sew those bindings too. I also need to grade papers and do about a thousand things tomorrow.

I have one more week of break until I have to go back to school. Balance is the thing. I have to figure out how to balance all of the pieces of my life so I don’t feel like shit. It’s kind of important. I’ve got my focus on that. Don’t drop any damn balls, but don’t let the balls take over your life either. I figure once I figure the whole life/balance thing out? I’ll be dead and it won’t matter any more. No worries. I got this.

One Step Closer

So even though I didn’t get home until 8 PM last night, and then I made a breakfast casserole for today’s holiday party at school and cookies for people who deserve way more than that for how they support me, I was determined to finish ironing last night. By my standards, it wasn’t late when I started, around 10 or so. I start that late all the time, and honestly, there wasn’t that much left to do. So I ironed…

She looks creepy with no eyes.

This quilt really isn’t huge or complicated compared to most of mine. It’s funny that 768 pieces is what I consider uncomplicated. Yeah. I know. So I have 11 days to finish this and get it photographed, and if I’m really nice (and smart), I’ll email my photographer now and let him know that…although I think I could get away with an informal photo on this one, at least to start.

I got another art rejection the other day. I’d forgotten it was coming, but it wasn’t a surprise. They took 38 out of over 700 entries. I need to enter more shows soon. Although I have more work to do for shows as it is. It will be a busy Winter Break getting started on all that. And starting to think about the big quilt for summer, whatever it might be. There are some calls for entry that are intriguing, but I haven’t had the mental space to figure them out in terms of my own work yet.

Anyway, I had gotten to that point above, and it was late, but not really late, and I didn’t know how long ironing it down to the background would take…sometimes it’s a total bitch, especially with all those tree branches and leaves. When they come loose from the ironing sheet, they get all tangled up and make me swear a lot. But I wanted it done. Because I knew if it were done, I might stitch down tonight. Maybe. Although boychild flies in tonight.

So I went for it. Because this is where my head is. In the art. It’s what it wants to do.

I had a significantly stressful and shitty day at work. Technology (and kids) kicked my butt. I was cranky as hell, going out to dinner with friends made it worse (they were talking about school), and then the girlchild was an absolute brat in between (separation from mom imminent), so I had no mental strength left. And finishing this would make it better…would make me less likely to go to bed feeling like a complete and total failure.

Yeah. We all feel like that some days, right?

So I did it.

Yeah. I like it. With black outlines in the quilting, this is gonna rock.

Sigh. Deep breaths. Because I’m at the point in my art where the last three quilts have just felt so good to get to this point, where I can actually SEE them. I can finally take what’s in my head and really just bang out a good piece of art. Just like that (100 hours later). And that is awesome. I am so grateful for that. Finishing that ironing last night makes it easier to get through today.

Yeah. Sorry. Still makes me all emotional. Not that you can see that part. Someone remind me of that all day when kids are running rampant.

Part of yesterday’s mental exhaustion was leaving school right when the bell rang to get to the girlchild’s soccer game…

They tied. Not that any of that matters. I took two wrong turns to get there because my brain was offline.

She’s always angry at me these days. I know it’s normal. It’s just hard to get that every day and not have someone standing behind you, holding you up and telling you it’s OK. It will be OK.

Sigh. Look at the quilt again, Kathryn. It will be OK. One step closer to done. Sometimes you just have to do it all yourself.

An Ode to Jake

Some of you may remember the big German Shepherd who occasionally graces these pages, especially his escapades of a few years ago. Jake was my ex-husband’s dog, never mine, but he loved me in a very special way. I was either his mistress or his best girl on the side, because every time I’d show up at my ex’s house, this giant-ass, 115-pound beast would jump up and try to put his paws on my shoulders (and often succeed). He almost broke my wrist once with his enthusiasm for seeing me, as I was holding his collar at the time (not sure why; never did that again), and it’s only recently been that he didn’t greet me with crazy behavior.

For a while, Jake was climbing or digging under fences and escaping my ex’s yard after 6 years of not caring, and he would come over here. I’d get calls from my neighbor that Jake was back, or he’d be sitting on my front doorstep. So for a while, he stayed here during the day, but we quickly learned that the destination was not the game; it seemed to be the escape he was after. He would climb a 6-foot fence like a monkey and take off towards places unknown, and then someone would call and say they had him because he was running around on a busy street. He never got hit, but after that, he had to stay inside during the day. The kids would go let him out after school, but it wasn’t ideal for a big dog like that.

In the last month, Jake’s been sick. They thought it was a doggie cold. He went off his food. I got no enthusiastic greetings. I would walk in and he would lean his big body up against me and whine, and I would pet him, and that would be it. Some tests had been done, mostly inconclusive, and he was signed up for an expensive procedure today to hopefully help with diagnosis and treatment, because there was obviously something seriously wrong.

When my daughter got home to her dad’s house last night, Jake was dead. We don’t know why. His dad (ever Scottish at heart) jokes that he heard how much the ultrasound was going to cost and he died to save him the money, but whatever the cause, it was kind of a shock.

He wasn’t very old, maybe 8 or 9, and physically OK until recently? And he was a good dog. It seems somehow different, easier, when they age in front of you and you spend time dealing with the elderly aspects of pet ownership, even though that’s a pain in the ass. It’s a relief when they die from old age. You know they had a good long life. On the other hand, I don’t think he suffered for long. He wasn’t sick for months on end like some of our pets have been.

Doesn’t really matter. Just know I will miss the big dummy. He was a freak in many ways, but a sweet freak.

So yeah.

Did I iron last night? I did. I wasn’t going to, but I guess I needed to clear my mind. I only worked for an hour or so…I did all the things hanging in the tree…

Maybe 100 pieces down. I also laid out all the 500s, so the next step is the body in the middle…and then I’m done. I’m not sure I can do it all tonight, but I’m going to try. (OK. That was crazy talk, just so you know.) There’s about 260 pieces left, so maybe 3 hours, but I know I won’t start until late because I’m going to the gym and I’m in charge of dinner. And I really need to get my butt out of here this morning too for a parent meeting. It’s OK. My lunch is made. My tea is boiling. The progress report is printed. I can go.

Sigh. Miss the big dog.