it IS that late…

The book I’m reading has these characters, the slake-moths, which have hypnotizing wings, so to avoid being hypnotized and then eaten, essentially (they actually only suck out your dreams, leaving you a drooling lump of flesh that needs diapers), the characters have devised a way to look at the moths using mirrors, looking backwards at them, which protects them from being sucked dry…but two mirrors doesn’t work. They counteract each other. Strange concept, I know, but the thought of viewing everything through mirrors, trying to distract oneself from the hypnotizing death wings, that’s where I’m at today. How many things can I get on my plate that will distract me from the things that drag me down? Lots. I made the mistake of trying to nap (too many late nights and not sleeping enough) this evening, and finally gave up, because my brain was falling into that depressive hole and it was hurting me. So I got up and made yet another cup of tea. And here I am, again, at holy-shit-it’s-late, still awake. Brain is fucking with me.

The house destruction and reinvention is part of it, the distraction…but ironing was a good bit today…a difficult bit…and still not done. I had time in between painting tasks, so I started ironing earlier than usual…

That human figure in the middle actually has almost 200 pieces in it, I realized today. And when I numbered it originally, I forgot to number the face and hair, so although the body runs from piece 316-469, the face and hair are in the 1200s box. Hmn. The view above is the other direction from where I usually photograph the ironing, so you can see how small the space is for my butt between the ironing board and the table where I lay my pieces out. There’s a lot of stuff in this room. Scares me sometimes.

Anyway, so while I was waiting for one coat of paint to dry and for the girlchild to come home from somewhere, I started ironing the figure that’s kinda down in the water…or is she just in front of the water? Hard to say. I kind of imagine her sitting in front of a glass aquarium somewhere. Just so you know. When I drew her, that’s what I was thinking…not that she was IN the water, but that she was IN FRONT of the water. Not sure why that’s important.

Here’s the 400s laid out in groups of 10.

There’s some freakishly tiny-ass pieces in there. Piece 470 and on is an eyeball and then some tears. I haven’t ironed them together yet. I only got through 469. I ironed for about an hour or so before dinner, although I think I did two more coats of paint on the window moldings during that time period too. Girlchild cooked (oh blessed child), so I didn’t have to. She and I ate out on the deck because the kitchen table looks like this…

Actually, it doesn’t look like that any more. We managed to paint the whole dining area today and put some of the furniture back. Because the next step is carpet, we can’t really put everything back. It will be chaos here for a few weeks more, whether we like it or not. Boxes everywhere. Boychild is watching some weirdo webcomic that’s kind of a gif/video thing as well, so he hid in the computer room for dinner while we were sociable. Sort of. As much as any of my people ever are.

Girlchild helped for about 40 minutes before she had to go out. She dances and sings while she paints…

Can you tell? Unfortunately, it does not make her a better painter. Boychild pitched a fit about painting near the asbestos ceiling, so I did that…he did edges and corners and bottom…so that wasn’t bad. The next step is the main part of the living room, probably in two sections, because of the mirrors and the stuff next to the fireplace that needs work. I think the drapes are coming down and out. I never use them, I hate them, the color sucks. If I sell the house later on, I’ll deal with it then. Or I’ll buy some crazy purple stuff and hang it with beads or something. Whatever. Boychild hates them too! It’s not just me.

We may not be the most efficient painters in the world, but we get it done. It’s a 3-day cycle: Day 1-remove and pack stuff up. Day 2: spackle and wash. Day 3: paint. Rinse and repeat for the next section. Two sections done; two to go. At least in this iteration.

After dinner, I did my exercising and then my SIL called. She was driving to her parents’ house back east and it was really late and I think I kept her entertained for two hours on the road. I ironed while talking, which was nice…

I don’t have a lot of adult interaction during the summer. This is really harder this year than previous years…well, last year was bad too. I need to remake my life. This really has been a bitchy section to iron…probably won’t be the last (as I blaspheme against the designer yet again)…

Yes, I am the designer. Ironing always makes me angry at the designer…OK, not angry, just irritated. Couldn’t I have done a better job of drawing this? Wasn’t there a better order for numbering? What the fuck is my problem with the tiny pieces? Do they really add to the final piece? I can’t answer that. I draw it the way it’s supposed to be. Everything else is just fate.

The whole body is done, minus the head (I did actually finish the hand later). Lots of fussy pieces in this section. I’m about 6 hours into the ironing and about a quarter of the way done with the whole thing, so my original estimate of 18 hours of ironing pieces together seems a little low…it’s hard to say, though, because this was a significantly fussy section and I was on the phone as well, and I know I’m not as efficient with ironing when I’m talking on the phone. I get distracted…distracted from the distraction! Didn’t I say I wanted to be done with ironing by the weekend? Yeah. That’s not happening. I always set these goals that I don’t achieve…but I find I am better when I set some goals than when I don’t set any at all.

I’ve also been writing; I’m up to a few thousand words on my story, most of which will probably be edited out, but that’s OK. It’s a start, and that’s all I need. If I write a little every day, then there will be something substantial in existence by the end of the summer…and that will be a good thing.

So I entered an art show last week and was all proud of myself, but it came back yesterday short of postage, and now it’s too late to send it out again. It needed a postmark date. Dammit. I even weighed it though and checked amounts online, so I’m not sure what happened with that. It motivated me to get another entry in today, though (online! much easier than the mail…y’all should pay attention to that if you’re putting on a show). I will be entering shows all summer. It’s good to get the work out there into the public.

OK. Tomorrow? Life drawing, more cleaning/furniture moving, plus ironing I hope. I’m being purred at right now. Surely that’s a sign that it’s bedtime (it truly is. don’t look at the clock. it IS that late).

Demolition Day

Today was all about demolishing things that have been driving me nuts for the last 16 years. Seriously. And then I ironed. So that’s like putting things back together. Plus I need more fabric.

No really, first I went to a meeting, kind of a pre-installation of an exhibit that will be up for 2 months in the fall…it was interesting, and I have tons of ideas rambling around my head right now, but I really do need more fabric. And a drawing. And some wire. I was just at Home Depot (yes, again…it’s currently a daily occurrence). Forgot the damn wire. The drawing? Maybe this weekend.

I did iron tonight…

I love to write about what I did backwards. It makes sense as I think about the day backwards. What did I just do? What did I do before that? This is probably more than you need to know about my brain and its lack of function. Seriously, I’ve screwed up payments this week and postage, and god knows what else. My brain has wandered off again. I forgot to eat too. Luckily, my blood sugar reminds me of that, kind of boisterously, honestly. Yo! Bitch! Eat! Now! It’s kinda rude.

So I ironed more on the big quilt. I quit doing everything else (there was plenty to do, trust me) and just walked in the studio and ironed, which was a damn good thing, because that’s where my head went. Into the artspace.

Out of the bad place. Into the good place. I could live there, I could. It’s peaceful and I barely think about the shitty things that shitty people do. Plus my brain is fully occupied by the ironing of tiny bits that need to fit together and numbers of pieces, and then X-Files in the background takes care of the part of my brain that would normally wander off and try to find things to upset me. It’s not allowed on Facebook any more. It just makes trouble. Really, it’s better to just give it television and let it watch.

I managed to iron all of the water down…

There is a fairly obvious human figure in the middle of all that…it will get ironed next. Plus there’s a huge eyeball. You know. Like there is.

This is where I needed to be today. In art. Making it. Letting all that poison sad shit wander off somewhere else while I accomplished something of note. Well. Accomplished something anyway.

We actually accomplished a lot today. For instance, the house is now a giant mess. Really. It is. If you thought it was messy before, now it’s a fucking disaster. But it’s a move in the right direction. I think.

Dad came over to help with that giant-ass hole in the wall, which he fixed while I demolished shutters that had never been used. And then I spackled. Or maybe I spackled first. It’s all a fucking blur, this home improvement shit. It’s all the same, day after day. What day is it? What phase am I on? I did manage to find someone who can take the mirrors out, but not until next week. I’m OK with that. Then we started looking at the mantle. The mantle and shelves to the right of the fireplace are this godawful pinky ’80s crap and it’s in totally the wrong PLACE as well, hung too high. The previous owner, the wife was an artist, but apparently she never learned not to bisect the vertical plane exactly in the middle. So it’s always bugged the crap out of me. Plus it’s fucking pink. It’s just wrong.

After telling Dad about 5 times that no, I did not want him to saw through the screws, thus leaving big metal pieces poking out of the stone of the fireplace, he and the boychild and I manhandled and pried and pulled the damn things off with pure brute strength (I am a beast at times, yes)…and then went after the paneling, which turned out to be two layers of paneling (which was better than more mirrors, which is what we found behind the first set of panels).

I must have a picture somewhere of the mantle. It’s in my driveway now. Feel free to come take it away.

You can’t really appreciate the ugly while it’s lying there.

That’s asbestos flying through the air. You think I’m joking.

So. Mirrors are still there for another week, but paneling is gone. Let’s assume I can deal with the mastic and paint that sucker, and then Dad said if I drew something up for bookshelves, he would have the boychild build it (um. Does the boychild KNOW how to do that?).

Maybe all this destruction is a good thing. I mean, at least I will be able to look over at that space and not be annoyed by it. I still need a replacement mantle, but I will deal with that eventually.

Meanwhile, I’m making art. The house is getting painted. There’s art in my head. And I found the missing cat (no idea where Babygirl was for the last 5 hours, but she just showed up…good thing…boychild would be pissed if I lost her). Fuck the rest of it.

Uninspired Title #17

Staying focused on the things that keep my head in the right place…is apparently a challenge. I hadn’t been to the gym in way too many days and my muscles have apparently all atrophied. It doesn’t seem fair that two weeks away will do that much damage, but it felt good to go back. Now to get it back on the regular calendar. I cried while I was there…too much time alone in my brain. Bad place.

I wanted to start painting the smaller room yesterday, but barely made it through washing the walls and then found more parts that needed spackle. This is the part I hate. You can’t just paint. You have to prep. And most of the prepping activities have to dry afterwards and it just takes forever, and everything lies around in chaos during that process and I just really hate it.

We’re painting today. Hopefully this morning. Then we can put the room back together tomorrow and move on to the next chaos-making space.

Yesterday I also went to a writing workshop…well, I wouldn’t really call it a workshop because there wasn’t anything planned or taught…it was more like a writing networking/critique/brainstorming event. It was interesting. I’m not sure what I’m looking for in writing support, and maybe the answer is just that I need some accountability to actually force myself to write and to complete some sort of outline. I don’t know that I need a group for that. I know I can’t go to the next meeting, but it did help me solidify a plan (sort of), so maybe I’ll just hold myself accountable. I do a pretty good job of that with my art, so one would think I could translate that into writing as well. Word count per week or something. I’m still the oldest in the group by far. And you know what? I just don’t understand electronic cigarettes. At all.

Being really tired is always part of the first week of vacation after school. It’s like I’m trying to make up for months of sleep loss. Because I am. But then it’s hard to fall asleep as well…last night I was just so sad but I wanted to go to sleep, but then I couldn’t, and crying yourself to sleep multiple nights in a row starts to really suck. Plus it messes with the dreaming and I wake up in a bad mood too and I don’t know how to make it better. I was talking to someone yesterday about the negative effects my depression must have had on my kids this year, and she reminded me that the worst I had done was cry a lot and forget a bunch of stuff…that they were fed and safe and clothed in clean clothes and I wasn’t a raging alcoholic and I didn’t attempt suicide and I didn’t stay in bed for days on end, and if that meant that they had to see their mom sad and worry about her and all that, well that wouldn’t kill them. It might make the world a bit more real for them: here’s what really happens when people treat each other like shit and someone doesn’t just bounce right back up all perky and getting a new haircut and wanting to go out and make love to the world. This is what sad looks like. And this is what you do when you feel that way. You keep going.

She’s right of course. Part of the book I’m writing is about this. It’s hard for me not to write (and draw) autobiographically, at least on some level. Here’s me and there I am on paper, in fabric. The quilt I’m working on right now, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to talk about it without crying. I’ll write a script and someone else can read it for me.

I did want to start ironing last night. I don’t want to NOT be making art just because I have to do all this other stuff. Being tired doesn’t help…but I drank some more tea and made an effort…the biggest issue was that before I could start, I had to put all the fabrics away. Ugh. Hate that. Especially since the containers are crowded at the moment…boychild actually came in a few days ago and asked if there was any possibility that I would use up all those fabrics before I died. Hmn. Probably not.

Inevitably I will need to pull some of these back out when I can’t find a piece. I’m currently missing a finger bone. It may show up…a few pieces have been in the wrong bin so far. It took about an hour to put all of these away, to find all the bins and shove stuff in best I could. I don’t really need to buy more fabric these days, except for backgrounds and backings and binding. Even backings, I try to do those from the stash, even if I have to piece them. I don’t really care what’s on the back. I might as well use up those larger pieces I bought for some bizarre reason way back when.

Then I finally started ironing around 10:30 or so, maybe later.

I really liked how the dirt fabrics were fitting together colorwise…such a complicated section, but satisfying when it all got together.

Then I added skeleton parts. This one is really broken into pieces, no ribcage or pelvis at all, hands reaching out, broken skull.

Yeah, no imagery there. Shut up, you Freudian. I use the applique sheet on top of the drawing for the big pieces, but then pull the drawing out so I can see it when I’m trying to iron stuff on top of it, like the skelly parts. I spent about an hour and a half and finished about 150 pieces. At that rate, it’ll be about 18 hours to get everything together, and then another couple of hours to iron it down. If I’m focused, I might get it done in a week…remembering that I do unfortunately have a ton of painting to do and the cleaning and stupid prep that goes with it, plus there are actually OTHER things I’m doing. Shocking, I know. I’m not looking forward to next weekend, because it’s a whole lot of soccer a long way away and I don’t have anything I can take with me, unless I get all those birds traced (huh, motivation for that?).

Anyway, at this point I am just procrastinating the painting. Of course. Here’s to hoping tonight’s mood is better than last night’s…not sure what I can concretely do to make that happen…it seems that being busy and checking tasks off a list is not enough. Neither is getting some artmaking done or meditating or exercising, all the things they say will work. Sometimes I think “they” should just go bite themselves, honestly. If any of their magic lists for pulling oneself out of depression actually worked for anyone who wasn’t just a little blue because they had a bad day, someone who had serious depression clouding their mind, well the world would be a different place, wouldn’t it? I wonder how much of the art and music that surrounds us would still be here. Is that a good trade-off? I don’t know.

Seen on a car on the way home yesterday from the writing thing…

Found it sad. Then again, I find everything sad at the moment. At least they’re taking responsibility for their actions.

Falling Apart

I spent my weekend ironing her together…

Really, she deserves better than me. A nicer artist, one who doesn’t bitch so much about her parts. And once I’d gotten her all together, there was the issue of backing. Well, I had one left over from the Celebrating Silver piece…I’d originally wanted to do it on this dark purple batik…

which really IS dark purple in real life (my camera can’t handle it). And I couldn’t remember if I’d picked something else for this piece. I doubted it, since when I pick backgrounds, they go in a specific pile to the right of the door…and there were the two I bought for the Menopause quilt, which is up next in the progress pile, and then the purple was still sitting there from January or December or whenever it was I got ballsy and bought a whole ‘nother background for the first time in my life.

So I auditioned it…

And I had already convinced myself that it wouldn’t work, that the hair was too dark, and maybe I should pick a blue, but then that would make the lungs too important and the bird wouldn’t stand out enough, and fuck it, maybe now was the time to go with yellow, but I fucking HATE yellow.

Anyway. It worked. It’s a good thing I don’t really listen to my brain. It’s a stupid prat most of the time. It worked. I ironed it down. Total ironing time from start to finish? 6 hours and 8 minutes. This is not a particularly large or complicated piece. It’s good to have some of these in your stash…not huge but with a forceful impact. It has 366 pieces. That’s like nothing for me. So now I have two tops ready to be stitched down, sandwiched, and quilted. Hopefully I’ll start on one of those this week. Of course, I have to do grades too, and at the moment, I think I have a meeting every night this week…close to it anyway. So I’ll try. Then I’ll start ironing the big one together, and maybe by then, I’ll have enough brain power to draw the one that has to be done in November. Plus there are like three other drawings that want to be quilts right now. These two were just the least challenging emotionally. The next one will be a bitch to make and a bitch to finish.

Such is the artmaking at the moment. Bitchy.

Last night, I did a night kayaking event…

We loaded up on the kayaks at about 8 (there were a lot of us) and then set out in Mission Bay towards Sea World…

Why? Fireworks. On the water…for free.

It was awesome. Well, except there were a LOT of kayaks in a small space, so that was difficult. There was one kayak of two young girls who were always in sync (unlike my partner and I, who had never met, let alone kayaked together), but overcorrected like crazy, so it looked like they were tacking a sailboat directly in front of us. Avoiding others was a challenge.

It was about 6 miles and 2 hours. And did I mention how awesome it was? We were sopping wet by the end.

Kayak oars just drip water on you. But it was June in San Diego, slightly chilly, but not too cold for flipflops. The lights on the water were freaking beautiful, my kayaking partner and I had a lot in common (divorced moms, kids the same age, etc.), so we had a good conversation while waiting for the fireworks to start. I had never kayaked at night, and I loved it. The peaceful feeling of being on the water and not really being able to see anything was great. Plus it didn’t hurt my knee. I might try a baby hike next weekend to test the knee out. Who knows.

Anyway. That was a good thing.

I got notification on Friday of yet another rejection: “Your work isn’t quite right.” Yeah. Whatever. I had actually forgotten about it…a European magazine that was interested in writing an article about my work, but not everyone was on board, so there we are. I’m not trying very hard at the moment to put anything out there. It takes too much energy…energy I don’t have. So much energy wasted dealing with teenagers, trying to negotiate shit. That would be my own kids, mostly. My counselor said I should just ask her (them?) to tell me what they want from me. So often, though, the answer is “I don’t know.” It’s true…they don’t know…they just know to pick fights, to push away, to make it difficult. Again, I know it’s normal. I just can’t handle it.

And then one of the teenagers in question turns around and offers to cook every night this week and comes up with recipes for every meal (OK, every night I have her anyway). I might have to cook one or two of the meals, but I didn’t have to come up with them. That’s a gift in itself. I think I try to take every positive interaction and hold it close to kind of cushion me against the negative ones. It’s hard, though. Very hard.

Meditation talked about being present throughout the whole day, this concept of being mindful (sometimes I think I am Way Too Mindful, that I would be better off if I were a bit more oblivious…there is no Obliviousness Training). He says that everyone wants to be happy, but negative emotions can be so strong that we can’t banish them. That’s where I’m at, I guess. Although I do manage some days to banish the negative, but there’s no positive to fill up that space. I get brief snatches of enjoyment: when I was kayaking, when the lights of the fireworks were reflecting off the water, when I hung up the new quilt top. Then reality kicks in and tries to brush all that aside. “You didn’t prep for school. You should have graded more. You shouldn’t have spent money last night on kayaking.” That’s a hard one, the money. I have to really budget for any frivolities. Seriously. Like how many book clubs meetings can I do a month, because each one wants money for parking and money for anything I might eat or drink there, and I can’t just put off eating for hours any more…my blood sugar raises its ugly head (actually, it sinks like a stone), and on good days, I remember and feed myself or carry food, but every $20 on a glass or two of wine or a kayak for a night…it all adds up. Everything I have planned for the summer is going to cost more money (renting a wallpaper steamer for the two bathrooms, painting interior of the house, steam-cleaning the disgusting carpets from the 1980s, going to life drawing, making quilts). I so much want to take a week-long trip somewhere away from all this shit and just recharge, and that isn’t going to happen. There isn’t money. And where would I go? I would probably just fall apart.

I am falling apart. I’ve been falling apart all year…like a constant tipping over and pieces falling to the ground, then cycling back up to do it again. Nasty shit that. Falling apart over and over again so I can fall apart again. Broken.

Hermitlike

Hermit mode. Grading and ironing. Head barely comes up for air. Or communication. I’m not sure this is the healthiest place to be when you don’t have some sort of anchor at the other end of the making. I used to have that, something that pulled me up and out when I was done making for hours and hours, that would make me be out in the world and talk and make decisions that weren’t just fabric-related. Now I have to force myself to do that. It feels painful sometimes, like, dammit…I don’t WANT to try and be social with other people and make small talk and try to NOT think about the art in my head. But I know I need to do that fairly regularly, or I will be that hermit. It’s not a happy place to be. It’s too much like hard work. I’ve done a lot of hard work in the last year…

So tonight I am headed out to an activity that sounded fun, but it’s with a ton of people I don’t know. I’m OK with that. I could have played it easy and gone to the other gathering with all the people I normally hike with, but this sounded better. I picked the activity, not the people. Hmn. Not particularly healthy if I’m trying to not be a hermit. Oh well. The brain does what it wants.

I spent about 4 hours ironing things together today…

I graded in the morning too…up way too early because the girlchild had SAT subject tests. But it meant I got a bunch done in the morning and then rewarded myself with hours of artmaking time.

I’m wasting time playing Clash of Clans…I’m not very good at it and I don’t really understand it (yeah, I know), but some people from school are playing. There was a war today and I was supposed to fight two battles…I’m better at defense than offense, shockingly.

I don’t spend hours on it. I don’t spend hours on anything except for art and reading books and drawing. Maybe sleep.

Putting the lungs together was kind of a pain in the butt…lots of little overlapping pieces that tried to drive me nuts…

But eventually I got most of the torso ironed down.

Yes, those are fish on her arm.

Then I managed to make the face fit where it was supposed to fit, although I needed to add two little pieces of hair color under the ear for some reason…

The bird was the last thing I ironed together.

My real problem is that I don’t remember what I was going to use for the background. I’m not sure I ever chose a background fabric. So I might have to find something here or go shopping for something that will work. But it’s ready to iron to the background fabric. Success! Wah. Whatever. I think I am looking too hard for that feeling of fulfillment. I think I have to wait patiently until it arrives. What kind of artist am I? The tortured kind. The drawings spill out of me in some attempt to heal the breaks, the cracks, the dust of a former self, but it does not stop. It’s shattered. It hurts to finish things.

I’m almost done cutting out fabrics for the other big quilt…you can actually see the bottom of the middle box…the stuff to be cut out. So maybe another couple of hours? It’s deceptive to see that few pieces…they don’t get cut out quickly, unfortunately.

Kitten is still coming out to visit in the living room at night. It’s nice.

OK. I have to try and be sociable now. You can’t make me.

Exorcising Demons

It’s interesting how angry I am at this piece. At all of them maybe. Certainly at the Earth Stories piece…I don’t ever want to see it again. I may get over that. I’m angry at myself for letting my emotional existence affect my enjoyment of making art. Yes, I know that doesn’t make sense. There’s no point in being angry at myself for something I don’t really have any control over…despite all the happy shit on Pinterest that says it’s my decision to be this way. Fuck you Pinterest. Seriously. Who asked you?

Yeah right. Anyway. I’ve avoided this sucker all week…too tired to stand after work. Seriously that tired. Somehow today, when I taught just like always, then went to finish up the refi after work (this might be how I survive the summer), then came home and went directly to the gym, came home again and cooked and did dishes…plus graded papers. On a day like that, you’d expect me to just collapse on the couch, never to rise again.

Fuck that shit. I’m not going to be that person. It may kill me to keep making art when it feels so sucky to do so, but hell, it can’t be worse than sitting around and doing nothing. So I ironed…and I wasn’t sure about it at all until I saw the photograph.

Oh yes. That’s nice. That’s going to kick some butt when the fingers are all stitched down and outlined. I am liking that hand. It’s a pain in the butt to iron, of course, because the overlaps aren’t logical and nice, but I’m getting there. This is about two hours in (with the torso already ironed below). Not a lot of pieces…just a pain in the ass. Nothing new in Kathy Art world. Welcome to my ability to punish myself with my own artwork.

I also cut pieces out…

a little of both worlds tonight. I’m 16 hours into this, and probably still have at least two to three more to go. This is the biggie that will eat up a large portion of the summer. Plus the next one, which doesn’t exist. Then there are at least 3 drawings done in the last year that want to be new quilts. Plus I need to do some smaller ones for shows that don’t like boobies. Assholes.

Who needs a personal life. I’ll just keep making art and hiding in my room, coming out for work and the occasional something or other. Fuck the world. I wrote that all over my notebook in high school. FTW. Not sure my attitude’s changed much in 30 years. I guess I’m more likely to say it out loud now.

I’ve spent all week explaining to my female students that Nature isn’t fair, that there isn’t an equivalent to their 40 years of periods and giving birth for the boys…although I personally think that giving birth and nursing babies is one of the most fucking awesome things I’ve ever done (not wanting to do it again, though, and pregnancy was hell for me, like want-to-die hell). But it would be nice to not have the rest of it. They’re pissed, my girl students. They don’t think it’s fair. They want payback. I don’t blame them.

I was ironing and the cord was hanging down in front of Babygirl. Apparently she thought she needed to play with it (smart animal) and got her claws stuck in it while I was ironing…

Sigh. She is not particularly bright. So she’s semi-yowling and trying to rip her claws through an electrical cord, and I’m trying to free her from the nasty beast, and she’s trying to kill me in the process, because that’s how her tiny little brain works. I do feel sorry for her. We take in the losers and the mutants here.

The mood is still bleak. Then I look back at that ironed breast up there and smile, slightly, to myself. That’s good. Keep doing that. The smiles might stick if you do it enough. You don’t have to like them once they’re done. The Earth Stories quilt? It can travel for years. I don’t particularly want the memories of making it under duress back in my house. The quilt itself is fine…it’s all the emotional shit that’s sewed INTO it that can go fuck itself. So yeah. When you make art to exorcise your demons, it’s better if they stay gone, out, far away. Don’t let those assholes come back home.

Earth Stories: Sticking It Together

My continuing saga of how the Earth Stories quilts came together…

Once the pieces are trimmed, I iron them all together. I do this by putting the original drawing right-side up on the ironing board and putting an applique press sheet on top. You can see the lines through the sheet, so I pull the paper backing off the pieces one at a time, line them up, overlap them where necessary, and iron them down.

On a quilt this big, I needed multiple sheets going at a time…the quilt is 72″ wide and the sheets aren’t.

I try to iron big sections together, but not necessarily all the pieces. I need room for adjustment later when I go to iron it down to the background.

When I have super-small pieces, like in the skeletons, I often don’t cut those pieces out until I’m ready to iron them. Otherwise, I lose them. I’m not sure WHERE I lose them…it’s like that extra sock you can never find. Sometimes I find them two quilts later, a randomly numbered piece that has no home. So sometimes during this stage I have to redraw and recut a missing piece.

If I can get away with it, I just make a note about the missing piece…they often show up later in a different bin.

This section below has about 250 tiny pieces in it. It was a little crazy.

Oh yeah. This was also crazy. There was a lot of crazy with this quilt. It might have been funny if it weren’t so crazy.

Earth Mother’s face coming together…and her heart. Her heart didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted. I remembered that when I did the next heart.

And here’s the main character in the dream bubble…

I actually divided the sky in half, but ironed both halves on the same fabric…

Did I mention crazy? This is corn. I’m not sure in the end product that it was worth the level of crazy that I drew, but there it is.

You can see the little corn tassels and leaves above ready to be ironed. If you ever see this quilt in person, please appreciate the corn.

Then I pieced the (huge) background and laid it out on my entryway floor…which it filled. My mom’s entryway is bigger, so I have done this at her house too. If I ever move, I will need one big empty floor…

I lay the pieces out on the background and make them fit together. This is sometimes a really long and painful process. The dream world bubble was all one piece at this point…much easier to deal with.

You can see I had the Earth Mother figure divided into three main pieces…top, bottom, and belly.

Here’s most of it in place. I iron it down, best I can on a lumpy tile floor…I just need it all to stick together long enough to get it to the ironing board. Did I mention this is 72″ square? Yeah.

And then I transfer it to my ironing board and spray each section with water (hoping fabrics don’t run) and put the heat on for 30 seconds at least, trying to get all the layers to fuse down.

It took almost 31 hours to iron this sucker together. I worked from July 11-31. I should add that I was going through a significantly traumatic event while this was happening, so I know I wasn’t working very well or efficiently. Technically you’d call my mental state shock. So I guess I should be impressed that I can create anything while in shock, although this task is really just about getting it done, not about being creative. An assistant could probably do this part. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing to distract me from the other crap, but I had a really hard time doing that well. I really didn’t care if it got done or not, except that I had committed to make the quilt for the exhibit, and I’m usually pretty good about commitments like that. I’m not a flaky artist. So I did it. It was, honestly, something to do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 months…just making the art, even though it doesn’t feel good…there are other things that feel worse, and this seems to occasionally make me feel at peace…so I keep doing it.

But just looking at that piece lying on the floor brings back how awful I was feeling. I would get out of bed, trudge down the hallway, sigh deeply, and just keep going. Every day. That’s not a life. But it’s the life that birthed this quilt.

Next post, stitching it all together.

Earth Stories: Coloring It In

Once I have all the pieces sorted into bins (in this case, I had 21 of them…I actually had to go buy more), I start ironing Wonder Under onto fabric.

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Each bin has 100 pieces in it, and if I was really organized when I numbered the pieces, it gets ironed together in some logical order, often bottom (base) to top. I try to do all the body pieces together, but it gets problematic, so sometimes I just do all the flesh pieces and then all the inside stuff, like lips and nipples and lungs and uteri.

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This quilt had some weird stuff going on with it though, so the first thing I did was go fabric shopping. I bought the background fabric first (I always do, so I can hold each fabric that touches it up to the background to see if it’s going to work). I also bought a bunch of grays, almost whites, and then a big piece of bright sky blue for…well…the bright sky.

I hang the drawing up in my office, and as you can see, this drawing took over the room. I don’t leave the ironing board there while I’m ironing…but basically, the ironing board is perpendicular to the drawing, so I can just look to the right to see what’s where.

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Here’s ironing the sky…I did that first, because I knew it would be big and I just wanted it out of the way.

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Then how do I pick the colors? Usually I have some idea of the coloring of the quilt in general, mostly the main figure against the background. Because this one was about how the Earth was being damaged, I wanted the Mother Earth figure and all the people in the main part of the quilt to be grayed out. I started with her, making her mostly shades of white to gray, and then the smaller figures in the section were a range of blue-grays, which sit on the blue background. So I really thought this one out. That said, I never sat down with colored pencils or a computer and colored in a drawing. It’s all in my head.

As I iron the pieces to fabric, they all go in a bin.

Sometimes I have to pull sections out so I can hold them up to something that will be next to them or under them.

While I’m ironing, every fabric I’ve pulled for the quilt ends up piled on the ironing board…which got kinda overcrowded on this quilt.

That way, I can reuse fabrics throughout the quilt, which gives it a bit more continuity.

These are water fabrics in the base of the quilt, early days in the ironing.

I started on April 24, 2013, and worked on it a little bit each week until I went on vacation to Oregon with the kids after school got out…and then finished it up before July 4.

Just like with the most recent one, school nights only yielded an hour or two, if I was being really good. Here are all the rocks in the river bed below the ground.

And skelly pieces…I always have skelly pieces…

These are freakin’ tiny, I might add.

In the end, I used 137 fabrics, most of them grays…

A serious number of grays…

It took almost 27 hours to iron all 2000+ pieces down to fabric.

Then I had to cut them all out…to be truthful, I overlapped these two tasks, even taking a bag of pieces to Oregon with me to cut out while playing board games in the evening. Some of the super-tiny pieces stayed on their bigger piece of fabric until they were ready to be ironed down, just to make sure I didn’t lose them…

It took almost 29 hours to cut them all out…I think part of that was because I WAS doing other stuff while cutting them out, like playing games. But there also a lot of teensy weensy pieces that were just fussy to cut out. I cut pieces out from June 11-July 8. July 8 would have been my 24th wedding anniversary if that marriage had lasted. Yes, I think that every year. I keep thinking I’ll stop, but that’s not how my brain works. It marks events. It runs itself by days when stuff happened…some good, some bad. Then some dates I can’t remember at all.

Once they’re all cut out, I sort them back into the bins by 100s so I can start ironing.

That task in itself took 2 hours and happened on July 10, when I was the person previously known as Kathy Nida. I’m a different Kathy Nida now. This poor quilt survived my going through all that trauma. This might be one of the reasons I don’t really ever want it back in my house…but maybe I’ll feel differently in a year or two, after it’s traveled.

Next step? Ironing that sucker together…ironing during a Southern California summer…not the best choice of times. But we don’t always have choices.

It’s hard to write about this quilt. I have to go back through blog posts and photos that I don’t want to see, to think about how deep in the hole I was while I was making it. I had hoped that with 10 months gone, it would be easier, and maybe it is a bit, because I am managing to sit here and hold back tears while writing this, but only just. Emotional pain is such a strange beast. It’s so deep inside you, somewhere around where the art resides, quite honestly. They are closely linked and thinking of one evokes the other. I guess that’s a good thing. Hard to say. If I weren’t an artist, would I have bounced back, recovered quicker? Or would it still be me, and I would still be dealing with the pain, just without the added layer, perhaps therapy of the art?

All that probably doesn’t matter. I really was trying to make this a simple report of what happened to create this quilt, but it has so much ironed and stitched into it that it will come out, no matter what my plan once was. A couple more posts and you’ll get to see the final version…

The Person You Wanted to Be…

I’ve been watching X-Files reruns while ironing the fabric for this quilt…I’ve seen them all, so they’re a little bit familiar. The stories are generally safe; there’s not a lot of emotional triggers in them for me, so that’s good. They don’t require a lot of brain power either, plus I’ve always liked the characters. At one point, someone is impersonating Mulder (they have striated muscle that can change the shape of the face to match anyone else), and they ask Scully about the person she wanted to be when she was in high school, if she became that person. Did she have regrets?

It’s an interesting question, especially as my son gets really close to graduating high school and going off to college, but also I sit here staring at my life and wondering what the hell and how the fuck do I fix it? It’s not that easy to try to think back to high school (a million years ago) to what I wanted. It’s changed over the years, but it’s pretty simple: someone who pays attention and can travel through life with me. The ability to continue to make art. Being outside in nature. Painting my walls something besides earth tones. Life gets hard sometimes. We don’t always do it right, and when we don’t, it would be nice to know someone could handle that. My kids have had to handle it; so have my parents. I guess I have too. I’ve floundered my way through a huge load of bullshit in the last two years, both at work and in my personal life, and it could have been so much easier, except other people were involved who didn’t know how to behave.

As I sat on the stationary bike this evening, pedaling away, while playing the addictive game 2048, which my evil daughter introduced me to (dammit! I’m so close to summer that I can so easily get hooked on a silly game like this), listening to and helping the boychild vote his very first ballot (my little boy is all grown up!), I hope I did the right job with the two of them. Girlchild has way more empathy than boychild. She also cooks better. His temper is more even-handed. His handwriting sucks. Hers is much better, but she’s a total stress-monkey when it comes to school. He’s so calm, it’s scary…except he did study for AP Physics. And he was worried about colleges. And he’s worried about getting a job this summer. His social skills are not as developed as hers. I wish I had a job he could do this summer. I should make him (ha! can’t make him do much of anything) write a letter to himself about what he wants to do in his future, about the person he wants to be, about what’s in his head…like a senior-year brain dump. Then seal it up and mail it to him in 10 years.

Hell, maybe I should do that for myself. I don’t think I had any idea what I would be doing, how I would be living, how stressful being a single mom would be, how much I really wanted a semi-normal family shape (not necessarily a normal family). I didn’t know how huge the art would become in my life, how much of me it would suck up. I didn’t know I’d be sitting here at 47, trying to remake my life yet again, for the second time, and again not by choice…and honestly not really wanting to deal with that any more than I wanted to deal with my car issues, which may have been solved today by my parents. Sigh. I do feel a bit inept at the moment. OK. More than a little bit inept. Fucking useless some days. At least I know I can pick out a piece of fabric. That’s my successful moment for the day.

So I don’t think I am the person I wanted to be when I was in high school. I think I wanted to be a more-famous artist or in a more-stable, happy life. Maybe I wanted a mohawk (I could still do that). I wish I’d written it down somewhere. My college app essays mention art and children and even teaching (how strange…I didn’t get the last bit until 12 years ago), so maybe I was a bit psychic. I’m fairly sure I didn’t want one tenth of the pain and heartache. That wasn’t on the bucket list. And I’ve had enough of it.

So I get all pensive and reflective when I near the end of each stage of making these big quilts…it’s actually kind of depressing these days. I used to feel a bit of relief, a sense of achievement when I finished a big step. Tonight I finished ironing the Wonder Under pieces down to all the fabrics…here’s that damn octopus…

It did end up being that purple after all. I had to find the blue ocean fabrics I’d used for the pieces behind it, so I could make sure they’d work. There are 131 fabrics in this quilt, seen here…

It took 22 hours and 32 minutes to iron them all down. I have put almost 62 hours into this quilt already, and a top doesn’t even exist yet.

Call me crazy.

I had already started cutting them out at a meeting last month, so I kept going on that tonight. I’m sure there will be another 10-15 days of cutting pieces out in front of the telly now.

Now I need to iron that other quilt together, plus start drawing the piece for the Equality exhibit. My goal is to finish the Mammogram quilt and this one this summer, and to have the other one significantly started, like maybe even into the quilting stage before school starts up again in August. I also apparently need to do something with no nudity or violence (damn) for another possible exhibit. That might be harder. Maybe one of those other drawings I copied will work for that.

But right now, I’m sitting here with post-ironing-fabric depression. I need to get deeply into achy-hand-cutting-the-pieces mode, so I can just be a little frustrated with how long it takes and how my hand feels. And I don’t have to wonder about the PURPOSE of what I’m doing and how it doesn’t really make me feel good any more. Dammit, when will I get that back? That’s just frustrating. What the hell am I doing wrong? I know how it should feel, I tell myself how it should feel, and somewhere deep in my brain there’s this little voice, an old and tired voice that says, “Not yet. You can’t feel that yet. You’re still broken. Come back later. We’re still at lunch. Our hours are posted.” Damn smartass brain.

There is an old-lady cat currently sitting on my shoulder. I think she’s revolting against my using the WHOLE desk chair. She’d like me to move up and let her sit in the back half (half? more like three-quarters) of the chair, like usual. Demanding old bitch, she is. So yeah, I moved. I accommodate my animals. I accommodate lots of organisms.

Besides, it’s time for me to go to bed. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll know who I want to be from here on out. Meanwhile, the cat can have the whole damn chair.

Better Moments…

Happy Mothers Day to the moms…and the moms of moms…etc. This day has always been bittersweet to me, at least a little, because I never have my kids on Sunday mornings, or at least not since they were 4 or 5 years old. I don’t think I ever had the breakfast in bed or the kids doing something special in the morning. I always had a kid-free morning. Of course, most of my friends with kids are insanely jealous, because all they’ve ever wanted is that kid-free morning, no noise, no clean up after the breakfast, no crazy activities. I get it. I really do. But every Sunday morning is kid-free for me, and it gets kinda old…and TOO quiet. It’s been over 12 hours since I talked to any human in person. I talked to two on the phone briefly, my SIL and my ex, both last night. That’s my life right now. I didn’t want to go out and do stuff. I needed to grade and I did iron last night, but the quiet starts to get to me. The being alone part…the part my SIL and friends crave…it gets old.

I spend too much time in my head as it is.

I did manage to finish the tax board appeal yesterday, except for getting it notarized. I’m waiting on approval. I also did LOTS of really painful math (this is why I had to call the ex…financial forms confuse the fuck out of me, and I needed another brain to bounce the confusing words off of, just to try to figure out what they REALLY wanted); this was for the financial aid appeal. All I do is appeal these days. That one is done and ready to be mailed. I even graded papers for a while.

Then I ironed. This was last night. I was really tired though. I hiked in the morning, long hike, I think I’m finding my limits. I went to the opening at Visions Art Museum…more about that later.

I only ironed the bird, the hawk. I actually pulled some photos of a red-tailed hawk up on my phone and used them as a reference for picking colors…

It may be the only thing in the quilt that is colored realistically…OK, maybe the humans. Sort of the wolf.

I do this sometimes, drop an almost-real animal in there with all the fantasy stuff…in Disrupted, I was watching lots of Big Cat Diary and really loved how strong and even vicious female lions are, especially when they are protecting their young…so that’s why there’s a lioness in that quilt…she’s the ultimate protecting female.

She’s the one you want around. She’ll kick anyone’s ass. A lot of the animals in my quilts are protectors. The birds aren’t and neither are the snakes. The birds are the talkers, the storytellers, or they are a sign of something, of bad or evil or death. The snakes are just evil, bad, the sign of badness in other people. They lie, they carry poison, they are inside all of us, coiled around each of us.

Some tiny birdwing pieces…

Of course, the next crazy step is to cut all those suckers out.

It’s not a small pile of pieces. I added some different browns to help make the hawk colors.

I do try to reuse colors throughout the piece, to repeat fabrics in other places so there’s a connection between all the bits. So I used some of the browns I’d already used (there’s a lot of brown in this quilt) and then added a few more.

Today…I managed to only cry a bit. I still do that, you know. Cry every day. I think it just is the new me. Part of it was feeling very alone this morning. Part of it was feeling like I missed out on something this morning. Yes, we went out to dinner for Mother’s Day and they bought me a really awesome gift (will show tomorrow), but I bought my own flowers and got into an argument with the girlchild and didn’t feel like anything good. I guess that’s the REAL mom existence, isn’t it? My SIL said something about needing a Teflon coating as a mom, so the really bad stuff, the stuff that makes you wonder if loving your kids makes any sense at all, because they are driving you so batshit crazy that you want to run away (we’ve all been there), the Teflon can just make it bounce off. And she doesn’t even have teenagers yet.

I’m back to not being allowed to talk. It’s kinda been a theme for the last two years of my life. You will not talk. You will not use this word or that word. What you say is bad, it’s evil, it should be stopped. There will be consequences for your daring to speak. You will not like them.

It’s so tiring to feel that way all the time.

So I wasn’t going to iron tonight, because I had grades to do and I’m physically tired from yesterday’s hike…but I really thought my brain needed it. I’ve been feeling depressed (for years) for days…I guess worse than before.

First, though…I picked up the last quilts from a show that recently closed, so I finally dealt with 4 boxes, a tube, and a plastic-wrapped roll of all the quilts that have come home in the last month…

I got rid of all the boxes and other stuff and put them in my bedroom to be rolled up with the others. It’s depressing to have so many come home, sure, but then I remember that they went out there in the world and hung up in front of people…that’s why they were gone…and that’s a good thing. Hopefully it will happen again (but I actually have to ENTER something for that to happen).

I cut out the dog and the giant eyeball with the skull in it.

I’m down to the last 100 or so pieces, and they’re all part of the octopus…so I just need to decide what color he wants to be…

I was going to do it tonight…was considering that purple by the scissors (I spent some time straightening up the fabrics…the mess was driving me bonkers)…but I’m just not sure. So I will let it sit overnight and see what I think. I will be done tomorrow though…that’s good. I think.

I finished this book today, Hyperion by Dan Simmons…

I had a hard time getting into it; the first 50 pages were dense with world-building and strange vocabulary, organisms from multiple planets and lots of unknowns. Eventually, though, when he settles down into the story-telling portion of the book, I was really fascinated. The book is an outer story with 6 inner stories by major characters, explaining their reasons for going on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs, where they expect to meet the Lord of Pain, aka the Shrike. My favorite story was that of the detective, Brawne Lamia. She was also the only major female character, so that’s an interesting coincidence. She’s a tough but interesting character. The Shrike character is pictured on the front of the book I was reading…that is so not how I pictured it. I didn’t really connect the figure on the front with the description in the book until I was near the end. I will definitely go on and read the next one, as soon as I finish all the library books that have recently appeared. It did take me a while to get through this one, about a week…which is a lot, considering it’s not so long (but the font was so freakin’ tiny!). Anyway. It was a good read.

I meant to post this video of hail on the hike in Julian…

I was standing by myself at this point, up against the rocks, but listening to the rain and the wind (and then the hail) going through these oak trees perched on the edge of the trail. It was a beautifully meditative moment. I seem to be pretty good at pulling those moments out of the hikes I’m on. I guess that’s a good thing.

Moving on. I still have to be a mom tomorrow, but this time with no celebration, no card, no cheesecake (she did make cheesecake…definitely good stuff). It’s harder, but you know it will all turn out OK in the long run. I probably have a lot more crying to do, but hopefully that will get balanced out with better moments. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.