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.

Halfway Through

So I’m about halfway through. And that’s OK. I’ve got Wednesday…maybe some time on Thursday. That’s enough. Four soccer games this week, though…and the boychild comes home in four days. That’s freaky. We’ve survived the first four months of college. Me without his calming influence; him in a brand-new, demanding environment. I wonder if it will feel relaxing being here, or just more stress? At least there is good Mexican food here.

Halfway through the ironing, by the way. I don’t think I’m halfway through anything else, except maybe my life, if I’m lucky. I have 5 hours and a bit of ironing done and I’m in the low 400s on the pieces. Now that said, I think that pile of bodies was the worst of it. Everything else is pretty straightforward, so you’d think I could get it done in less than 5 hours. About 350 pieces to go…a little less than half.

We’ll see.

So first of all, when I got the pile ironed together, I realized there were a couple of spaces that needed the dark fabric behind them…

There’s two right there. No biggie. This is easypants. So two pieces traced…

And then ironed underneath.

I like that my iron is Anti-Calc. I also did not enjoy Calculus, but mostly because of my teacher. He was kind of a jerk. Assumed math was more important than language. And yeah, I teach science, but writing? Words? Communicating? Pretty damn fucking important. But here’s an interesting question, from last week’s warmup for my kids: words or pictures? If there were someone you liked and you could ONLY communicate via words OR pictures, which would you choose? Yeah. I prefer drawing to express myself really, but words would make more sense to me in communication with others. I love that someone I was texting this week corrected himself, his SYNTAX. Wow. In a text. Can’t beat that.

And then I had these two random pieces left over. Here’s one.

No freakin’ clue where it belongs. Or the other. Just set them aside. Obviously not crucial.

Moving on. Ironed the damn cat.

I don’t usually draw the cats as the two black cats in the house. Not sure why. I usually draw calicoes. I think personality-wise, I am a calico. Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about! Yeah. OK. They’re feisty. And troubled. Black cats…they can go either way…we obviously have the Queen here…

And she’s a total bitch. I am going to get in so much trouble with the boychild for not combing her belly for the last four months, but she claws the fuck out of me as it is when I comb the rest of her, so he can handle that shit.

The other black one is just mellow. Mostly. So I don’t fuck with her. Much. I can’t really tell you why the calicos end up being in the quilts most of the time: Juniper, Limbo, Kitten. Even Cinnamon, if you go back enough years.

So there’s DNA hand again. Like we can control any of it…

The background on this quilt is a deep dark blue, so this hand is gonna pop right off of it.

And then there are the flying hearts.

These have popped up in the last few months. I think of them as hope for my future. Like I have a heart and love and all that gooby stuff, but they’re just loose, flying around, waiting to land/be captured, I’m not sure which. So this is like the third or fourth drawing where they’ve appeared. Never been in a drawing before this Fall, I think. Weird, huh? I used to always have Christmas lights in my drawings. None of those today.

I did pull that drawing from yesterday out again, but it didn’t speak to me tonight. Weird how that works. Sometimes it’s so adamant that I hear it, that I draw it; it just fucking takes over and commandeers the pen, grabbing my brain and making it listen. And then…then it’s silent, like I pissed it off too many times. It won’t listen. It lies in bed with a pillow over its head.

So fuck the drawing.

I was going to stop and go to bed, but it (the ironing) kept dragging at me, so I started the tree…

The stuff on the tree is next, and then the human figure in the middle of all that.

It’s exciting. I like when the image starts to appear…when it starts to BE a quilt for real. When the shit in my head gets out there and kicks some real-life ass.

Speaking of kicking ass…blurry pictures due to late night, fading light…

Girlchild made an absolutely awesome twisty header goal…

And then her coach, being a rancid idiot, barely played her for the rest of the game. But when he did put her ass back on the field in the last 7 minutes, she continued to kick ass. Thus proving that assholes are out there and we all have to deal with them.

Sigh.

So here’s what you need to know about me this week. It is survival this week for teachers. We are about to explode on a daily basis, because we are in a classroom with kids who cannot stop thinking about Christmas. I’d like to say they were thinking about other things, but in my school, it’s all about the presents…not the present. So even though I’m trying to get them through a major project, by the end of third period, I’m about to throw things. And I significantly appreciate those who bring me back down to Earth, who ground me with their sanity, their competence, their caring, their profanity, their beauty, their hugs, their Google Docs. I will be saying Thank You about a million times this week. Maybe even out loud. Maybe I will just hug it out. I think I actually told my co-teacher that I loved her for managing the tail end of a meeting so I could go to my kid’s soccer game.

Working on a creative endeavor, a quilt that means a great deal to me, to my existence, to my core, this week makes it all that much more…well…HUGE. So that’s good. And the rest? Well, fuck it. Hug someone. Then move on.

Ironing the Pile

Finally Fucking Ironing! Sorry. It felt so good. Why do I forget EVERY TIME that it feels good to start putting the damn thing TOGETHER. Seeing the image in color finally going together. It always seems like such a torturous thing…ugh…after working all day long, standing, I’m tired, especially on a Friday night, to consider STANDING and ironing for hours.

And then I start.

And then I cannot stop. First we sort…and I should have sorted the next 100 last night, but when I finally decided I was tired, I was REALLY tired. And sorting is boring. So I don’t like to do it. Which is why I try to do it at the end of a session, so it makes it easier for me to start the next session. Because I didn’t do it LAST night, now that’s the first thing I have to do today. Ugh.

Anyway, I ironed a bunch of dirt and rocks…

Pretty easy stuff…then moved on to flames.

Yes, I am still watching Next Generation…plus Orphan Black on the Tivo. Good show that. Not sure why my quilts are so often on fire. I think of the depths of the earth as being at the base…which in reality, I think the flames should be on the bottom, then rocks, then dirt. I’ve done that before, I think. I don’t know why I didn’t do that here. Except the PILE is on fire. And I’m OK with that. This is a quilt about the war against the female, isn’t it? Then let’s set that pile of men on fucking fire.

Um. If the boychild is reading this (and he probably isn’t), I still love you. I just have some issues. Big smile. Mom wave. HI!

Just so you know, I’m writing all of this with an intermittent cat claw in my butt. She wants her chair back and is quite demonstrative about it.

Then I started on the pile.

This damn pile. Fun to draw. A pain to trace. A bigger pain to pick fabrics. Ironing? Holy crap. I’m just going slowly and trying to make sense of it all. That’s two different bodies…but I’m missing some of the pieces on both of them (one of them is headless anyway). I misnumbered one of the fingers, so it’s in the 200s instead of the 0s pile. I think the leg is in another box, and there’s a continued leg for the first body, plus two of the parts on the first body were in the wrong box, the 600s, because they were 60-something, but with letters, because I forgot about them, and they looked like 600s when I was sorting. Yeah. Crazy stuff. So it’s really hard to get motivated to iron more pile together because it’s a rancid pain in the ass. EXCEPT. It will look fucking awesome when it’s done.

So my plan for the weekend (you mean besides soccer etc and grading and putting ornaments on the tree before the cat eats all the needles?)…is to get this thing mostly ironed. I’m behind. I think I’m OK, but only because I have Winter Break coming (WINTER IS COMING), but I also know I’ve got some stuff that’s distracting me from working straight through like I have been, like the boychild coming home and other stuff, so I have to just manage my time better than I did this week. Although this week had some good stuff that distracted me, so I can’t complain.

Anyway. I’m ironing the penis pile. You can think about that.

I Was Tired…

Yeah. I know. I missed a couple posts. I was really tired. And sick. And then I went on a hike, which made me tired again. And sick is still hovering, though mostly only at night. And when I’m tired. And when you hear me talk. Anyway. Hopefully I did enough sleep catchup in the last few days to last for a bit. Still missing a big chunk of my working voice though. Oh well.

The good news is that I finished ironing everything down on Friday night (yes, I went to Sea World with 180 kids and then came home and went shopping with the girlchild and THEN I ironed).

This is what the tree looked like after I pulled it off the ironing sheet…

See why I was scared to do that? I untangled that thing about three times Friday night, trying to get it to fit on the background…because all of the quilts for this show are supposed to be the same size, which I have a really hard time doing. I can easily do a range, but god forbid I draw the piece so that there’s some leeway on each side. NAW. Let’s make it go RIGHT to the edges.

Yeah, I know. My fault. So I cut the background with about 2 inches to spare on the horizontal and vertical measurements, and then made it work. Maybe. We’ll see when I go to trim it.

And then I put the whole mess on the floor and started putting the parts on to make it fit…and that’s where I have to stop showing pictures. You’ll have to wait until January, when the show opens. Here’s the bottom…

I had some issues with the batik bleeding again. I’ll have to figure out what I want to do about that…you’d think I’d remember to use that stuff when I wash it, the Retayne…but I always forget. So either I’ll be using pencil or pen or something to handle that. More work. Oh well. Maybe next time I will remember to wash it special.

I was going to be all gung ho after the hike Saturday morning, but it kicked my butt (yeah, hiking while getting over being sick all week was maybe not a great plan, but I really did need to get the fuck out of the house and into nature, so I just did it), so I didn’t get anything done Saturday afternoon. And then girlchild had night soccer, where I graded…

We were missing a bunch of kids for a variety of reasons, so even though they should have won (they’ve beat this team before), they didn’t…

And the girls basically had to play all 90 minutes, so girlchild went down with a calf cramp after getting kicked there…

Thought it was her knee for a minute…dammit…never going to get her through a whole season! But just a cramp. She’s fine today. But we didn’t get home until after 8, and my brain was in a mood, so I fed it and made it meditate. I haven’t been meditating enough, because honestly, a lot of the time when I’m doing the art stuff, it does the same thing for me as meditation, focuses my brain, calms me, gives me some mental strength. But last night, I just felt unfocused and cranky and tired, so I did it. And it was good.

So I came in and did the final step of the ironing down…totaling the ironing out at 15 hours and 18 minutes (my estimate of 15 hours holds!). And then I started stitching down. I wasn’t going to, because I was still tired, but I really wanted to get a START on it. Because Sundays are notoriously bad for artmaking, due to the grocery shopping and the prepping for school and the hanging out with parents. I usually don’t get to do anything until late at night. I wish I were more efficient in the morning, but it really is the only morning I can just space out and make English muffin pizzas for breakfast and hang out and not have to DO anything or BE anywhere. Yes, I’m hanging out with myself (actually, girlchild was here this morning early), and that’s often depressing, but whatever. Someone claimed they were going to “laugh at the loneliness” once, and I thought it sounded like bullshit then and I still do…you don’t laugh at loneliness. You stare at it for a while and eventually you just embrace it, hold on to it tight, and if you can make it go sit in a closet for a while because you’re hanging out with friends or family, or because you’re at school, or because you’re in the artspace and haven’t come out yet…that’s awesome. But mostly, you can try to ignore it or yell at it or just accept that it’s there and hold its hand…but laughing at it is kinda stupid. It’s not gone because you laughed at it. I laugh all the time. It doesn’t make it go away. It’s still there, staring at you. Stupid depression. Doesn’t help. Stupid hormones. Also don’t help.

Stitching down…

one of the more boring parts of the quilting process. I know that to stay on schedule, I have to keep MAKING a schedule. So I look back at the Celebrating Silver quilt, because I’ve been basing everything on that one (about the same size and number of pieces)…so I’m guessing 5 hours to stitch it down, another 2 to pinbaste, and about 14 hours of quilting. I want it pinbasted by Saturday night. Quilting starts Sunday? I should remember I have some obligations this week…maybe.

Anyway. Progress. It’s always progress here at Kathy Central. If I keep running forward, then the bad shit can’t catch me, right? Naw, sometimes it’s pretty fast and I’m hiking with dead legs (that was yesterday going uphill…dead legs). Now I’m going to be running forward into the 70 million errands I need to run today in order to be ready for the week. And you wonder why I’m so tired.