Hey. Friday. Hey, I’m glad to see you. I’m not sure where you’ve been hiding. The other days just haven’t been as friendly as you. Thursday tries really hard but it’s not the same. Although my workload won’t be any less. I still have a pile of stuff to grade and plan that is beyond overwhelming, but I’m doing a little at a time and I may actually feel like I’ve conquered some of it after the weekend. Maybe. Or it’ll be Monday and y’all know what they’re like. Too much, y’all, too much.

So I had hoped to be done ironing last night, and I would have been, except Art Brain objected to the background behind the justices, so I had to scramble a bit. It’s OK…the scramble took 36 minutes so far. When I tell people I keep track of my time to make these, I’m not sure what they think. I have a tracker. I turn it on when I start and off when I finish. I track each task, which is really useful when I need to figure out WHEN THE FUCK I can move on to the next step. Seriously. I’m at almost 29 hours on the ironing and there’s probably another hour. I guessed 30. That’s pretty good.

Anyway, on Wednesday night, I finished ironing all the bits I thought I’d be ironing…

Cool! I thought. I just need to iron it to the background. But a friend had suggested the drapes in the Supreme Court might be burgundy (they’re not, but that’s another thing). I had originally thought to put just a lighter blue behind them, but the idea of the drapes coming down from the goddess’ arms really appealed to me.

I pulled the image off the teflon sheets (a task unto itself, let me tell you)…

And laid it on the chosen background fabric…

I have changed the background fabric on other quilts, but not often. The difficulty here is if I go lighter for all of it, there are issues with other parts of the quilt. But that blue is too close to the justice’s robes.

So I started looking for drapery fabric for behind them…

And this seemed to work.

So last night, during my stitching Zoom, I pieced the background and laid the image on top of it, and ironed the bottom half down…

And I’m thinking, I’ll just freehand cut a piece to go behind the heads. But what about the feet? Shouldn’t the drapes go all the way down to their feet? This is getting complicated. Plus it needs to be fused. It’s too big to NOT fuse it. Huh.

So I grabbed the drawing and drew the drapes, and then traced them on Wonder Under, trimmed them, and ironed them to fabric…

Which you can see in that video. Tonight, I’ll trim those pieces, slide them behind the other pieces, and iron the rest of it down. Then I can start stitching…which I’m estimating at 8-10 hours. So hopefully I’ll be pinbasting next weekend. This weekend has meetings. Next weekend now has meetings. Grades are coming up again (when are they ever not?). My life is not my own.

Here’s the part that’s not ironed down yet…

And a cat. And here’s the background pieces…

Although my process looks like chaos, it is actually very controlled. Parts of it anyway. The fabric choosing is a crazy thing that happens in my head.

So this pile is (a) pieces that stand on their own and will need to be ironed down tonight and (b) random pieces that never made it into the quilt because (i) I lost them and already recut them or (ii) I don’t really know where they go.

Not that big green piece. I think that’s from the previous quilt. I think it was the wrong color. I have a hard time throwing away the orphaned pieces. They’re useless. Those two skinny red pieces, those were the wrong color. Somehow when I ironed them to fabric, they ended up red instead of white. So I recut those. The money all has a home.

So yeah. That’s where the quilt is at. It looks awesome. I know you can’t really tell from the photos, but hopefully tonight, there will be a whole quilt top photo. Definitely worth the time.

Meanwhile, the Man keeps thinking he’s hearing/seeing a cat on the roof, for over a year now. He’s out on the deck at night and hears it and calls to it and it won’t come down. He gets fleeting views, nothing definitive. I’ve asked, are you sure it’s a cat? Oh yeah. Totally. Last night, after I went to bed (I did hear the banging around for this), he heard the cat (let’s just do this…’cat’) and put some food in a bowl and shook it around and called for the kitty to come down. He put the food down and…well…watch this.

Um. Three. Three Not Cats. Nope. Those aren’t cats. Not surprising. We’ve had raccoons before. They are cute, but not feeding any more of them. Probably explains the ‘cat poop’ in the backyard that the dog is totally interested in too. And I think that’s the dog’s bowl, so that should be interesting when the dog comes back. Hmmm.

Anyway. Mystery solved. Those are young ones too.

Work today…finish all the things. Do all the things. Get the kids to do all the things. Find all the things. Grade all the things. Get all the things ready for next week. ALL OF THEM. At least my observation is over. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been teaching, they stress you out. So that’s done. Just a shit-ton of grading and planning left. Art meeting tomorrow that’s a potluck…these also stress me out. I am not a good potlucker. Some people are. I’m not. Ironing tonight. Hopefully stitchdown tomorrow. Need to deal with the house, clean floors, get a quilt to another stitcher (but I need to get thread for that too). Yeah. Crazy busy. But Friday.