Unfunded…

I’m at that stage of the school year where every morning is exhaustion. Friday was fun with microscopes, but a lot of running around and then trying to get kids focused, then some adult drama that I could do without. This week has some ups and downs for what we’re teaching…today and tomorrow will be a bit of a slog, no matter what I do to prepare them (and me). But I did everything I could this weekend to be ready for it.

I also did a lot of art, which was nice. I even took a class in something I never would have done if my guild weren’t doing it. So that was good. It’s always good to stretch a little to see if something new will work.

So the current quilt…Friday night, so close to done (not really…there are a lot of pieces left in there…they’re just small)…

Saturday night we went to an art opening and got freaked out by small space, lots of people, but then came home and watched a movie and I cut out the rest…

That’s 21 hours and 21 minutes of cutting. Very precise. You want to know how I price my quilts? By my time.

It wasn’t too late yet, so I sorted them too…

So many tiny pieces. You can see the 400s box has most of the big sky pieces in it. Everything else is small as fuck. I know, I know…I designed the thing. I’m the one who is also hoping it’s done in time, but who the hell knows.

And then last night, I started ironing it together…

Somehow I lost a bunch of tree parts already. They could be in the couch, they could never have been cut out (I found one in the pile of trash I save for just these reasons). Who the fuck knows. I don’t. Kept ironing though…

I’m 150 pieces (approximately) in. My goal this week is to get it ironed. Of course, my schedule and exhaustion levels might not help with that. Plus that grading thing. Whatever. Those tiny animals though…they are a time-consuming thing. I have a tortoise and an owl to do tonight. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all looks though…I never see it in full color until it’s ironed, except in my head.

The class I took was on Zoom with David Owen Hastings…Inspired by Architecture. I borrowed pictures from the girlchild’s travels, although she’ll be hard-pressed to tell what photo I used.

I could make all of those, but I probably won’t. I cut out the pieces for another one…not one of these…it’s somewhere else. In a pile.

David was a great teacher, lots of info, nicely timed, feel good about the process, although it is incredibly outside of my wheelhouse.

I couldn’t help but put some hand-stitching in there. I’m not sure modern is my thing, but it was an interesting class. Certainly this was faster than my normal process.

I was hoping an art reset would help with this week. Maybe it will. I know I came home Friday night incredibly stressed and overwhelmed. I finished grading one thing that might help with the mindset…although there are other things coming to take its place. One of the issues was my septic. The pumpout this year went fine, but my tank is old and there were some issues…the issues started at being around $1200, and now are a partial rebuild…so 5 times that.

I guess it’s a good thing I sold two quilts…I can pay for this and probably my taxes and maybe my property taxes, maybe? But the summer is now unfunded. That’s really how teachers look at summer sometimes…unfunded.

So there’s a bit of panic in my head. I’ll get through. Just unexpected.

Part of trying to reset my mind was cleaning my studio up for yesterday’s class. I had pieced three of these, so I did the other three.

This is from the Molli Sparkles Cut It Up Quilt-Along. I’m way behind, but that’s OK, because it’s just a fun thing I’m doing. When you make the corner pieces, there are leftover triangles. I hate to waste, so I pieced them all…

I’ll trim them up and put them in the quilt somewhere. You can see that mostly I was doing complementary colors: blue/orange, red/green, purple/yellow. Guess that art degree paid off.

Ah yes, well school starts soon. Back to the chaos. And it’s a hot week, so hopefully they can finally get my A/C really running, instead of ignoring actual class temperatures and going on after school is out. Somewhat frustrating. Three more weeks until Spring Break. It also means I think I only have three weeks to finish this quilt. That could be problematic. Ah well…if I don’t finish for one deadline, it will go to another show, won’t it? Yeah. It will. I am frustrated by my inability to get art done this year (and last year…see the pattern?). My day job is taking too much time. More than usual. Sigh. OK. Well. Tonight I dedicate time for art. Hopefully.

Sustaining the Unsustainable…

OK, I obviously made it back from Phoenix and QuiltCon, and there are more quilt pictures, but I don’t have time to mentally (or digitally) process them yet. I came home and went right into school/house mode, which is why I wanted to leave in the first place. We had a good time hanging out, which is nice. It’s been a long couple of years without much of that, and we definitely need more of it. Spring Break! Yeah that’s 44 days away. So is seeing my daughter again! Woo hoo! And hopefully some quilt stuff…then camping and hiking with the man. I think I planned all but two days of my Spring Break, so nothing else will get done…at all. Not a bad plan until I get there and the grading is not done.

Which is part of what I’m panicking about now (again)…grading and an upcoming field trip. Once we get there, everything will be fine, but right now, it’s just crazy.

So what’s been going on? Well here’s my QuiltCon guild in front of that same donation quilt…

A few were photoshopped in…I made it to Phoenix just in time for this photo, but some did not.

The man drove for a bit on the way back, so I got to work on those damn flowers.

Apparently a year ago I was cutting them out of wool, so that’s a year working on this. I am not fast.

That said, I am almost done with the 4th type of flower…then just 2 more types to go.

I’m also still doing Molli Sparkles’ Cut-It-Up quiltalong. This is block 4, can’t remember what it is…hang on…

X Plus…well that bottom one sure is busy. I like it. I cut out 6. They’re not hard to piece, just don’t have a lot of time at the moment.

They’ve already posted Block 5, so shockingly, I am behind. It’s OK. I will survive. As my copyeditor is emailing me about the next readthrough and school is imploding into a mushroom cloud of to-dos. Yeah.

I did come back to my own quilt, which has a deadline, that honestly, I may not meet. I took a picture of these fabrics to remind me what I used for this plant, because there’s another one that’s more complicated further up the body, and I didn’t want to find those pieces now.

I often reuse fabrics in a quilt for continuity. That’s why I keep them all together until the quilt is finished.

I also started working on the sky, which has a sunset in it. Or a sunrise. Nah, it’s a sunset.

Because why keep it simple?

Sunday night’s progress…

And Monday night’s…

I got all of the sky done except for those two and the things zooming around the sky…which I finished last night…

Well, almost. I need to do the actual meteor and the rocket. I did the clouds and flames behind them. Then I get to start on the body and all the plants.

Kitten has taken to climbing the mountain of batting to survey me from up above. She’s trying to get up into the shelves (I’m not sure why)…

She usually hangs out behind that crazy pile. I need to remodel this room: new carpet, pull out the wallpaper, get rid of the popcorn ceiling, new lighting, maybe new slider doors and a bigger, nicer window, plus STORAGE. It’s on my list. Lots of things are on my list, but apparently my septic system needs a new baffle wall, which is probably expensive and will mean I don’t remodel anything.

School is all labs this week. Exhausting but good for the kids. Not as good for us…

But if they are paying attention, this helps them learn.

This is true.

Hey! My owl box has an actual OWL…a Barn Owl. We were going to pull it down to see if it needed cleaning, but then an owl swooped out. I’m hoping it has babies. And the bunnies in our yard are annoying me by eating all the new green leaves so they will have to run fast. Sigh. Predator/prey relationships disturb me, but I also recognize their necessity. It does make me worry about trimming the trees though. It’s not like I can afford to do that right now anyway…not until the baffle wall is solved.

Anyway, the owl part is exciting. School today is an exhausting mess of move this, clean this, move that, listen to instructions (them, not me), then a meeting I really didn’t want but let myself get bullied into. Fun stuff! Do everything for your students! And then more! Yeah, it’s not sustainable…we keep saying that and then we keep on sustaining it. But more ironing tonight (after grading)…that’s a good thing.

Lost in the Weeds…

I spent about 5 hours yesterday afternoon dealing with the day job. I posted things, filled in pandemic contracts, calculated percentages on finished contracts, graded things, organized some calendar stuff, graded some more things, input some grades, and created one assignment. Unpaid hours, yes, but my prep period today is a whopping 45 minutes, so you can guess how much of that I would have gotten done today. Today I’m sure there are about 4 contracts that will close, so they will need percentages, plus who thinks I graded everything?! Anyone? Anyone? Yeah. That. I got lost in the weeds on the assignment I was doing. I had this issue last year with this assignment. I need to write down what I expect to get and save it somewhere so I can read it next year before I start.

I’m also rocking a stuffed-up nose, but have tested negative multiple times. My team says “take a day off,” and science would be OK (they wouldn’t finish the assignment, but whatever), but art would be a clusterfuck. And the next three days are labs and demos, so no guest teacher can do that. I’d have to either have them watch the video of it from last year’s Zoom or make up some completely different lame filler assignment. So I keep testing and stay masked and take meds for the cloggage.

Sleep has been problematic the last few nights as well, so I’m not feeling it. The whole get up and go. Nope. Drinking tea now to counteract the nope.

I did trace a lot of Wonder Under this weekend, more on Saturday than Sunday, due to my plan to never do the day job on Saturdays. Also, I was listening to the Surface Design Association conference stuff on Saturday morning, so I pieced the next block in Molli Sparkles QAL…

Piecing is not my forte. Directional stuff too…although I’m OK with both those things.

Here they are with the other parts…

Quilt of Chaos! I’m not even trying to make things match…just using lots of black and white prints. Things I can control. Sort of. Because piecing.

There was still another SDA thing, so I pulled the pieces I had cut for the scarf I didn’t start in last year’s QuiltCon…I watched the videos and took notes and bought the materials, but never started. So I pinned them down in a gradient of sorts…

Basted them all down half-assed and started stitching.

Well that’s fun. My official ‘listening to meetings on Zoom again’ scarf.

After SDA was done, we headed to Visions Art Museum to see A Better World, with my quilt Bill! Bill! Bill!.

It’s a nice exhibit to see in person, and looks great on museum walls…

The exhibit is up through early April…check it out!

I did some stitching on Chirp…this is the second of four of the fourth type of flower, with a pain-in-the-ass stitch going around it…

I’ll be good at it by the time I get to the fourth flower of it.

I traced a little on Friday night, then about 3 hours on Saturday night (the man had a show and I didn’t go)…

And another hour last night…

I’ve got 6 different yards of giant sky pieces that I’m trying to fill in with the smaller pieces of the body and plants and all. I hate waste…

This is taking a really long time to trace. I’m at 15 1/2 hours and I’m only in the 900s. It will go over 20 hours, I think. Usually it’s about 100 pieces an hour, but those big swoopy pieces were time-consuming…some in the time to trace them and some in how to fit them best on the yard of Wonder Under. I should finish some time this week though…

Great sentiment.

So survival day. Just get through it. Come home and nap? Not sure. Staff meeting about suicide today…annual notification of what suicidal kids look like. Yeah. We know, unfortunately. Let’s talk, though, about banning books that might help some of these kids, but not banning guns. Oh…you don’t want to talk about that? I’m shocked. Sigh. This country is so fucked up sometimes. With that, I’m going to go teach the next generation to think…maybe.

Checks Good. Bills Bad.

Y’all, never apologize for mailing me a check. Seriously. Someone just did. Actually, she apologized for not TELLING me she mailed a check. I’m still good. There’s a check coming. Thank you…you may have made my day. Continue on! Mail me more! Checks good. Bills bad. That’s how it works.

Meanwhile, ugh, I am tired. Yes. I know I keep saying that. I woke up this morning groaning. I have a neck/shoulder thing that started the first week back after break and keeps coming and going. I was supposed to have massage/chiropractor today after school, but the masseuse has COVID. Fuck me. Well good luck to the chiropractor on moving things. Laughs hysterically. I know, first-world problem. Also PAIN. Also I think I slept so hard last night that I didn’t move for hours and I was on that shoulder…not the best choice, tired sleeping body.

It took me a while to fall asleep, though. Not because of school (common) or life in general (also common), but because I’d taken about 10 minutes last night to cut out pieces for the next Molli Sparkles Cut It Up challenge block, so I could sew it together (actually sew THEM together, because I’m making two because I couldn’t just pick one), and I’m lying there post-meditation with a cat on one knee (awkward) and another cat under my armpit (see shoulder pain above) and all I can think about is that I didn’t cut the corner squares and I wonder if they’re the same size as the other squares, like I don’t have the fucking instructions pulled up on my computer. Actually considered getting out of bed (no no no) to just cut them out at midnight instead of falling asleep like a normal person.

It’s the things you can control, right now. And I can carefully cut out squares and sew them together and it distracts my brain from the other crap that I can’t control. Like how I’m going to fit 3 hours of work into a 51-minute prep period today AND get tested for COVID.

Last night was nice otherwise…spent time with stitching friends and stitched a really annoying stitch (Pekinese) which is taking for-freakin’ ever. Then cut out these blocks (not enough of them though) and then traced. Most importantly, figured out how to add PBS Passport to the TV so I can watch All Creatures Great and Small (when the TV is not bogarted by people watching political angst) while tracing.

I haven’t been taking enough pictures of tracing, because it all looks the same. I did finish the FUCKING SKY last night though. I’m on piece 495 and it’s body parts. Finally.

I have to admit that this photo is from Wednesday night, when I had not actually finished, because I was so tired last night that I didn’t photograph the pile of Wonder Under. I think I have 5 yards of Wonder Under in process at the moment…with big swoopy pieces on them and lots of spaces in between that will hopefully get filled with plant and body parts. I’m 9 hours and 40 minutes in. LOOOOng baby.

So this is our science prep room fridge. We’ve been making too many or too few copies…no happy medium. So this is our new number. Plus an inspirational message.

Because we’re only halfway through the school year and I want to pull all my hair out and crawl into a pillow fort.

I’m reading Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence. I love Erdrich. I don’t love that this book is set in Minneapolis during 2020, with COVID and poor George Floyd and all that, but I do love this.

Because I have that too. It’s weird. I’m never sure where it comes from. Like there’s another person inside me and this is them. If you haven’t seen my quilt Swallow Me Whole, it’s in Virginia right now for the Excellence in Quilts exhibit that opens February 15…some of that is in there. I guess I could put it here too.

Yeah. That.

These were sort of fascinating.

The repeating of shapes but not. Plus the pops of brown.

Wednesday’s sunset was glorious…

Stand in the parking lot gorgeous.

The girlchild is in Paris…

I’m a little jealous.

Oh yeah. The QAL from the beginning of this post. I need more squares of the stuff on the left.

Not hard. I can do that. Of course, I picked directional fabrics because I’m crazy.

OK. Going to school. Gonna do everything I can. So is my chiropractor. Then I can come home and collapse? Or keep tracing. Yeah that one.

New Bird…

There’s a new bird in my yard. I haven’t seen it; just heard it. Sounds like a violin being played by a half-competent child. I’ve never heard it before…every morning, I sit in here or at the table and it screeches happily for a while. Is it Spring? Is that why we have a new bird? I don’t know. I wish I knew more about the birds who live here. We focus on the big beautiful owls and hawks, and I truly despise the mockingbird, but all the little gray brown birds…I don’t know what they all are. My neighbor above has added a bird feeder I can see from this window, and there are tons of birds hanging out around there. It makes me wonder why we never did that. Oh wait. We did. It was hard to remember to refill it and eventually it got gross and the metal corroded and we may have thrown it out. Yeah. I have too many things to do already. When the man leaves on his hike again, I have to remember the hummingbird feeders…at least they tell you. They buzz around your head angrily to remind you to fill them.

So that’s in my head this morning. The birds.

Monday night, I decided to leave the belly area and work on the sky. I did a few versions of “where do I put the sun” or “is there a sun?” or whatever, and then filled in the rest.

So the belly area is still undone…I still can’t remember what I was supposed to do in there. Last night, I went to the gym (to finish a book that really pissed me off about halfway through, but also to exercise), so I was late back, late for dinner, and then we watched a bizarre movie and I was stitching through it, nothing complicated, just the Sue Spargo Chirp quilt from a couple years ago, and I couldn’t get inspired to draw the belly.

Every flower is so freakin’ complicated. And there are four of each type. And I may never finish. Very positive thoughts about this quilt right now. So I got to here, looked at the clock, and it was bedtime. Aargh. OK. Well. Tonight is book club, so maybe I’ll finish the drawing? I don’t know. I still don’t know what’s going in that space.

I finished the flying geese…

Although I say that, and I just randomly laid these out, and obviously, I need one more? Except who knows what else will be added to this and I don’t need to decide anything right now.

I also went through the next drawer of black fabrics and made donation piles and then cut pieces for the boro-type scarf I’m making.

Sorted them a little. I’ll go through the white fabrics for the other half of the spectrum too.

Meditating last night with the little beast.

Have to focus on my breathing and not her butt cleaning. Difficult task.

OK, I have two meetings this morning. Sent notes to one. Can’t do both. Plus I teach 4 things today…advisory, science block 1, art, science block 2. I graded all the art projects yesterday. There are a lot of Fs because this group just doesn’t turn work in. Unfortunate. But I’m not waiting for them any more. We’re starting the next project. Onward! Hopefully my brain will figure out the drawing by the time I get to 9 PM, yeah? It would be nice. The new bird has gone quiet…must be naptime.

As I Was Falling Asleep…

Proof I wasn’t ready to go back to school? What am I talking about? We’re always braindead on the weekends. I spent Friday night doing almost nothing but reading; Saturday, we hiked and I drew; Sunday, I panicked a little about school and did some grading and recorded a video, but I still have to post everything and check the calendar and finish up contracts for this week. I tested negative on Friday, but we’re pretty sure we had a positive case in the classroom on Thursday. They don’t even tell us anymore. Just assume? I’m hoping the omicron thing peaks soon so we can go back to whatever version of normal we were on in this iteration. Here’s one crazy thing in my head…don’t get tested in the morning on a lab day, because if they pull you out for testing positive, who the hell is gonna cover your labs? Some poor resource teacher who doesn’t have a clue? The superintendent? Yeah. Well, they are sending people out from the district office to cover our classes. Doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing.

Anyway, stay healthy, stay sane. And for MLK, let’s work on voting rights and white people.

The drawing is progressing, although I had to take a break last night, because I couldn’t figure out what to do with the next section, and I know I had an idea right as I was falling asleep, but I don’t remember what it was. It’s OK. It will come back. It’s in my brain somewhere.

On Saturday night, I managed all this…

Inked the rest of the arms and added a few creatures, then penciled in some animals below…and then moved half of them again and redrew most of the others because it was just kind of random placement and size and didn’t work at all, which is how I end up with freakishly tiny pieces.

Ah well. So yeah, moved and shrunk the tortoise, moved the bunny to the other side, redrew the bobcat because it was too fluffy and too diagonal.

The bunny was too big too. It’s still too big really, but I’m not sure I could go smaller. It will work.

The center part is the section I’m flailing on…

It’s OK. Whatever my brain had going will come back by tonight. So there’s just this bit and the sky to do, and that’s it. Then numbering all those pieces and into the tracing. Sounds lovely.

Nova is not sure about all that.

So I’m also doing the Molli Sparkles Cut It Up challenge, which is just some piecing stuff, cutting into fabrics that need love and that might be hard to cut into. I don’t usually have a problem cutting into fabrics, but I do have some that never get used because their details make them hard to use in an art quilt like the ones I make. So I’m trying to use those. So far, most of the fabrics I’ve cut into have never been used. Success! I did this block a few weeks ago…

And then the directions of the curves were bugging me. I thought if I pulled two of them off and switched them, then it wouldn’t look like each side was going the same way? I don’t know if you can even see that. My brain can’t UNSEE it. Anyway, I took one triangle off and tried holding it up to the other sides and there is no way to make this work with the triangles I have. I even did some fancy drawing to check…

Yup. That’s technological wizardry there. Anyway, I could recut triangles, or I could just accept this, because it will be in a quilt full of wildness and it won’t even matter. It’s a good thing I came to this conclusion, because the next step was making a bunch of flying geese, which I don’t think I’ve ever made before, but I didn’t work very hard at directional fabrics and I’m OK with what I have so far.

Oh honey, those aren’t very directional…

THERE we go. I have three more of these to make and I’m totally OK with how it’s going. Why do I do silly piecing and strange challenges when I have so much else going on? The very left brain activity of piecing helps my right brain relax a little and then I can focus on the other stuff, like what to draw in the belly space. Plus it’s something I can control. Well, obviously, not completely, because I can’t figure the directional stuff out, but let it the fuck go. I’m good. We’ll see how far I go with it.

I took my sewing stuff to school to fix a kid’s stuffed animal.

He didn’t seem as appreciative as I would have thought? Ah well. Whatever. Weird skills for a weird job.

Saturday’s hike included an exploratory bit where we tried to find another loop in this park…

But the little section to get down to the other road is apparently private. In the middle of nowhere. So we turned back.

More noticing of the things. It’s not spring yet.

Hey guys. What’s up?

Always being watched.

Saturday dinner drawing…

Not sure what was happening with the hands.

OK, so there’s a to-do list, like always. Some of it’s art-related, a lot is work-related, and there’s a bit of Go-for-a-Walk-related. So I’ll start with packing a quilt to be shipped and work out from there. Hopefully the missing idea from falling asleep will come back and maybe I’ll finish the drawing tonight. We’ll see. It’s nice to have the day off, either way. It’s also nice that the neighbors are quiet (for now).