Sorted

First of all, some crazy fairy has left all the black pens in the world in my office. In front of my keyboard. Right where my arms should go. I know that’s not really what’s happened, that every time I walked in here to do something worklike, I brought a black pen with me and left it here, and soon all of them will be here and then I will come in here to find them, and they will migrate back out into the rest of the house…but for now, they gather here, some sort of black pen reunion. There’s another batch of them in my purse…maybe I should reunite them. Got a pen? Yeah, I’ve got 12. All different.

There are 29 days of school left. This is somewhat relieving and yet also panicky, because of how much has to be done. That’s why I came home yesterday and graded another assignment…after a science meeting where we discussed my minor freakout about what I’ll be teaching next year. It’ll be FINE. I just need to figure out what an atom is. (shh) I was standing in Staples, trying desperately to remember why I was even in there (lab materials, but oooh! Pens!), and the principal called me (why did I give him my number?) and I tried to answer his questions best I could, wondering how on EARTH all these teachers are gonna learn all the stuff they need to well enough to teach it. My co-teacher handed me a pile of books, but my brain is completely shut down right now in terms of trying to learn anything. Talk to me in July. In July, I’ll be able to handle reading about materials and chemical reactions and protons and electrons and Strontium. Maybe. Not now. Now is a day at a time. Darwin today. Beaks next week. Survival next week (really, not just mine, but teaching about it). The fastest Natural Selection unit ever. In fact, only the strong will survive (topic for today), after inputting the last assignment in the gradebook. Progress reports go home today. Please please, argue with me that a D is a good grade and I shouldn’t add any comments to your report about how your work is always half done and late.

I didn’t start until late, as always. And honestly, I didn’t get much done.

I sorted the pieces for the new quilt.

It was nice to only have to deal with 4 boxes instead of 12 or so.

It took me a whopping 20 minutes…and that was it. I was done. I wanted to try drawing, but it was not to be. Too tired to think about how things fit in spaces and how I might draw them. Too tired to go quilt. Too tired to pick a binding for the orange quilt. Just too damn tired.

Your artist for the day is Paula Collins, a ceramics artist from Fallbrook. You can see her work here. The ceramic pieces range from pretty small to quite large, but they all have a quirky finish to them. I quite like the birdhouses and the larger busts. The facial expressions are great. This is where I wish I had never-ending cash so I could buy art I like, but alas, I will just have to stare from afar.

As far as tonight goes, I’m not anticipating getting much, if anything done. I do need to cut some dowels and slats and dehair a larger quilt for delivery tomorrow, so that will have to happen, unless I want to get up early tomorrow. And I don’t! Who knows…maybe I’ll come back from gaming tonight and have wide-awake energy and get a bunch of drawing done (probability calculations not good). You never know though. How I feel now is not how I’ll feel later. Hopefully!

An Everyday Habit

‘Twas a long day, full of testing children and 78 trips to the bathroom, none of them mine. Full of kids who went to bed at 2 AM and wondered why they were tired. Kids that were done after an hour and had to entertain themselves silently for two more. Teachers who hadn’t eaten or peed for longer than normal. Then once we let the kids go, we had to settle down to a large chunk of time to collaborate…despite our brains being equally fuzzy from long hours of trying to keep kids focused AND quiet. It mostly worked. That was Day 1. Day 2 is today.

I had stuff to do after school, plus got stuck in traffic. Stupid drivers during rush hour, cutting people off, not signaling, being assholes. It’s not good for me to be in that. I finally made it home around 6, tired, cranky, with a pile of work to do. So I did it. And then realized it was late. This is where living alone sucks…you’re too tired to cook, money is tight so you aren’t going out, but you need to eat. Leftovers are gone because you ate them for lunch. So I cooked. But it was late. Really I should have worked some more, but I was tired of it. I get like that. This job has so many hours of my life. I feel like after 9, that should be mine. We work to earn money to survive, yes, but at some point, it should also be so that we can spend time doing the things we love…hiking, art, reading. I want more of that this week.

So I didn’t keep working. I didn’t start grading the next assignment. I didn’t read yet another Teacher Appreciation Week email and wonder…hell…who is appreciating my being a teacher right now? Probably not the kid I harassed into sitting up and not falling asleep on the desk yesterday (thanks, parents, for letting him stay up late). It’s OK. I don’t teach for that. Our parents don’t send flowers or notes. They don’t cover our doors with big grateful signs. They don’t do anything, honestly. It’s enough that they are surviving.

I finished cutting out all the pieces for the new quilt last night…

It’s not a huge quilt. The pile of trimmed scraps looks bigger than the pile of trimmed pieces. I spent 3 relaxing hours doing this last night. I needed that. I stayed up a bit too late to do it, but at that point, I just wanted it to be done. That’s a motivator in itself, that desire to move on to the next step, to not leave a few pieces sitting in the box until tomorrow. To FINISH. I feel like I need to achieve something tangible each day, something that will take me to bed and murmur sweet nothings of achievement. Then the next morning, when I sit down to write this post, I can feel like I did something worthwhile…for me, anyway. I’m sure some people would say I should spend more time cleaning (and certainly, if boychild could see his room right now, I’d probably be in a bit of trouble…but I have 20 days until he gets home) or maintaining the house or yard, and sure, I could. But I wouldn’t be happy that night, curled up in bed, and the next morning, I’d have that empty feeling I get in my chest when I don’t make any art.

This really is an everyday habit.

Here’s today’s Artwalk artist: Victoria Alexander Marquez, also mostly a paper artist. Her work is delicate and beautiful, especially the larger landscape pieces.

I Labeled Stuff

My internet is strolling through the park this morning with a dog on a leash who wants to smell every leaf. It will be a miracle if I get this posted before I have to leave. I have no interesting pictures of progress from last night…it’s not that I didn’t do anything. It’s just that all I did was iron two quilts flat and then put labels on them and sew them down. It was very exciting (not) and took more time than I thought it should. Plus I didn’t get much sleep the night before (damn bird, silly dogs, crazy cat), so I actually went to bed before midnight…barely. I don’t get much done when I’m asleep, unfortunately…at least nothing tangible. But the labels needed doing, and now I’m ready to deliver the two quilts on Saturday…well, once I dehair them and cut a dowel or two. Nothing is quick and easy.

But I labeled stuff.

I had to grade stuff first…same with every day, I guess. I just blow it off some nights. Or it’s just too exhausting to look at it again. I’m always behind. Until the last day of school. Even then sometimes. I’m realizing I don’t have a good handle on some of the stuff I have to teach next year. I’m a life-science teacher…have been for years. I didn’t take much science in college, but I worked in scientific publishing and I read a lot, so I made it through the teacher tests. But I had a teacher in high school who seemed to do everything in his power to make sure I didn’t understand anything, so some things are just mush in my head. I feel like I need to read a good college textbook, but they’re hella boring. Maybe two…maybe chemistry and physics. For old people. With pictures. Seriously, I’m a visual learner. All about molecules and nuclear fission. Maybe a short stint on atoms. OK. Maybe a longer stint on atoms. Something to think about for summer I guess.

So no artmaking for real last night…but hopefully tonight. I was even going to put up some of the Artwalk artists here today, but I can’t get them to pop up, so either my internet needs to fix itself while I’m gone, or I’ll need to restart some routers and crap when I get home. Wish that stuff really could fix itself. Or at least tell me what it needs.

I do have a piece that will be in Sandy, Utah, this weekend at the Sew Original Quilt & Creative Expo show. This is Part-Time Oasis, part of the Oasis show put on by SAQA and traveling around…

I made it last summer and it’s been wandering around, getting lost at one point.

Ah, the internet returneth, prodigal son and all.

One of the Artwalk artists was Sue Britt…from a distance, when I was walking up to her booth, I was sure I was looking at quilts, at fabric, but her work is paper…and sculptural.

Here’s a video of her inspiration about one of her pieces and her work.

It’s short, but you can see how she makes her work. She’s local and has a studio at Spanish Village in Balboa Park.

I don’t have time for any more, but I’ll get back to them. And for me? The goal is art tonight. Stuff I can photograph and write about, instead of boring old labels.

Thank You for Continuing to Hold

Apparently I never finished this in the morning. So here it is now…I guess you really had to hold, if you’re used to reading me in the morning…

So I finished hand sewing that 17 miles of sleeve on last night. Tonight I’ll put labels on the two quilts. I didn’t grade anything, because I’m lame. I did walk two dogs (OK, I got help about halfway through, but odds are I would have survived it). While I was sewing, I had an idea for filling more of the torso, so I headed over to the drawing. I’m really close to done, so my brain is sort of in overtime. I’m writing this right now while I’m on hold with financial aid because, and this is really stupid but true, TurboTax rounds W2 numbers so the line on the 1040 is not exactly the same, and Cornell’s financial aid cannot handle that, so I have to call and explain it to them so they’ll stop sending emails that they don’t match. Because they don’t. By 49 cents. I’m willing to concede that 49 cents, but Cornell is not. So I’m on hold with the same shitty music as last year. Getting a crick in my neck…wait, put it on speaker phone.

Thank you for continuing to hold.

So I thought of an owl and fit it into the space below the ribcage…

It’s not particularly big. Then I added violets around the owl and raccoon, daisies in the rib space above the owl, and some bits and pieces around the rest of it to balance everything out…some landscaping behind the giraffe, another grape leaf, another tree.

Julie’s asking for a piece count, but I already know this one will be a bitch. I’m not expecting it to be easy or fast, so I’m OK with that. So all I have left is the torso above the hand. I have a few more ideas of what to draw up there, but nothing’s beating me around the head and shoulders. I guess I have to sit and wait for that. No rush…I’m still trying to finish up the other quilt/art stuff for now. At some point, I’ll think it’s a rush, but not yet. As the end of school rushes towards me. Aaargh.

Nothing else cool is going on but this stuff…and I’m finally off hold and talking to a human. HOO MAHN.

Bits and Pieces

I’m still plodding along on this drawing…it’s getting there. Last night, I was on a roll…I started by drawing grapes (because there aren’t enough tiny freakin’ pieces in this thing). Then I added the gecko above the hand and another tree by the giraffe to fill that empty space.

Then I added the raccoon. Meanwhile, despite the late hour here and in Boston (AM hour really), girlchild and I had a discussion about whether raccoons are evil or not. They’re not. She says they are. Something about one that runs out in front of the van she drives for school.

But it’s not often you see one in the same drawing as an ovary.

So I’m filling up the space, slowly. I need more ideas…

My brain usually obliges. Give it time. It took about an hour last night to do what I did.

Before that, I had quilt class, so I started cutting out pieces for the smaller quilt I’m doing…

On the left, that’s about 2 hours’ work. Doesn’t look like much, does it? It never does until it’s all ironed together. I’m kinda looking forward to that part…but I’m really tired right now, and I haven’t even started school. I’m not expecting a burst of energy tonight. We have an outdoors assembly today, so I need to remember sunscreen. Last weekend, I sat out in the late afternoon sun for about 20 minutes and got sunburnt. Me paleface. It didn’t even cross my mind that I might need sunscreen. I need skin that changes color with the sun, like those glasses do. So yeah, an hour in the sun for an assembly might kill me.

Anyway, looking forward to some Vitamin D. And cutting stuff out. And working on the drawing. She’s got 10 1/2 hours into her so far. Impressive. Lots of staring time though. I joked earlier this year about finishing a quilt every month in 2016, but then I blew it with the March finish by deciding three days later that it needed ink…on the 1st of April. So there was technically no March finish. Well there won’t be a late-April finish either. No way. But there should be a May finish. I guess that’s something to aim for. If I do this big one next, no way will it be done in June. I’ll aim for early July. Planning it out. Getting bits and pieces done each day.

Why Now?

Yesterday was interesting. I gave a test. I’ve given a few tests this year. I always give the kids a study guide (required) with all the test questions and then they can use an index card on the test, with anything they need on the card. I’ve had so much apathy this year, from kids and parents, that it’s truly been one of the most frustrating years for me ever. I’ve questioned everything I’ve done all year, and finally sort of gave up on them. I couldn’t persuade them to turn work in, to prepare for a test, to give a shit. Until today. And I swear, I did nothing different, but today, almost every single kid turned in a study guide, most of them complete. Almost every single kid had a card. It’s like lightning hit them and their brains lit up with “OH YEAH! That’s how you STUDENT!” I was boggled. I didn’t know whether to be ecstatic that they finally figured that shit out, or annoyed that it took them so long, or just fucking confused because WHY NOW? Why not all the other times? What was different?

I think I just input those grades and hope to heaven the test grades improved as well, and never think an entire year is a failure…know that it might happen in the 10th month of the year that they finally figure it out. This is the stuff that bugs the crap out of me when people talk about making teachers accountable. I did nothing different in the first few months of the year, then started noticing the failing trend, the inability to turn work in…and I tried to figure out how to make things work better, worked MY ass off, honestly, worried myself, stressed out, blamed myself, had a really hard year. I’m not sure anything I did made a difference. Or they just reacted to all my work so slowly that I couldn’t see it happening.

I’m boggled. Still. I hope their test scores match up with the work they did…because then they’ll see the connection.

I was exhausted when I got home though. I walked the room while they tested…you don’t think about walking all day, how tiring it is, until you get home and sit down. There were things I wanted to do, and I was just too tired. I finished up some grades on an assignment, input all the stuff from today, and then made dinner. Then I did seating charts, because it’s time to move them around again to try to deal with some behavior issues.

Next step in the artmaking process? Trimming fabric pieces or finishing the big drawing. I know I’m going to quilt class tonight, which is a good place to trim stuff, so I decided to try to fit a giraffe on the drawing instead, because it had been in my head since last week sometime.

I found a picture that worked in the space and made the decision to have her standing in front of the rib she crosses over. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the others…maybe it will be a rib-by-rib decision.

Then I had this small blankish area to the left of the giraffe, under the uterus. Tulips! Of course. I can’t really explain how things pop into my head as I’m staring at these blank spaces, but they do.

This is actually a pretty large space to fill…even with the ribs drawn in.

It was after midnight by then, so I stopped. I’m not sure what to draw next. I have notes about bees and lizards and cactus, although I already put a prickly pear in. I already put in a cat…there’s always a cat. I always have birds too…I think the crane counts for that, although there might be more later. I’m debating a raccoon, after watching Guardians of the Galaxy while grading last night and staring at Rory from Furiously Happy for so many days. Probably putting a furiously happy raccoon in there won’t fit, but a real one might. I’ll think about it.

Turns out my Celebrating Silver quilt Awakening the Crone will be traveling to China, once again having a way better vacation than I ever do. The whole show will be at the 2016 8^th Asia Quilt Festival in Shanghai, China, from September 21-23, 2016.

I keep waiting for the organizers to email me and say all of them are going except mine, but that hasn’t happened yet. Cool beans.

Willy Nilly

So the good news is that I finished ironing all the pieces down onto fabric on the newest quilt. It’s not a huge piece, maybe 18×26″ or so. It’s from one of my smaller sketchbooks. It’s not FOR anything, no show, no deadline. Although it technically has no nudity in it, so that’s a plus for those weird little shows that want small pieces but can’t show boobies. After the last few demanding pieces, I wanted to do something just for me, something mellow, something easy, something that didn’t have a million hours attached to it. So it took about 5 hours and 45 minutes to pick out fabrics. Next I’ll start trimming them, probably at my quilt class on Thursday. I might work on the drawing tonight, try to get it done, since it’s probably the next one I’ll work on. That perennial debate between working on what I want to work on, and trying to make work that will get into shows. Everything has a theme and this one doesn’t fit many of them. That’s why I’m doing it though. Just a break from the artistic rat race.

So I had all these cactus spikes lined up in order for ironing…

I had misnumbered some of them (I do this all the time), so there’s double numbers with letters to tell them apart, but in the long run, it’s cactus spikes. It doesn’t matter much. I actually used three different colors of spikes. Kinda crazy there.

Here’s the fabrics I used. Shit. I usually count them.

64 fabrics for a piece that has about 400 pieces. I needed lots of variety in the greens because she has lots of different types of plants covering her, from cactus to vines to sunflowers.

Here’s the pile, ready to be cut out…

It’s not a very big pile. I figure cutting them out will take less than 4 hours. I do remember that I’m missing part of her eyeballs. I had the Wonder Under pieces and then they disappeared. Probably on a fluffy cat butt somewhere.

I have two other smallish drawings like this that I copied and numbered. I thought I would work on them next, but I think looking at the time available (and yes, I am already thinking about summer projects…), I need to start on the big one next. I like to have at least one big project planned for summer, since I have more free time for long bouts of standing at an ironing board without having to work the whole day before I do that. I have a job that requires a lot of standing and walking. I hardly ever sit down. So walking all day and then standing all night is pretty tiring.

Last year I did it a little differently though. I had a piece I wanted to work on that I started in May or so and finished in late June…there was a show I wanted to enter. Ironically, it didn’t get in, but another piece did. Then I wanted to enter another show at the end of July, so I finished a smallish piece for that. It’s been gone since September, I think. Some of that was a shipping issue (not mine), but it won’t come back until late October this year, I think. Then I finally worked on the big monster piece for the summer, not starting until the end of July, which honestly, is right before school starts. This year, we have to go back August 15 (oh god, way too early). So the summer is really July. I didn’t finish that big piece until right before it was due, the end of October I think. Or was it September? Can’t remember. End of September. And I forgot the other giant Earth Mother I did last year, which I finished in April. It’s strange for me to finish a big piece during the Spring. It’s so crazy at school this time of year. But I had a deadline for that one as well.

So there’s the question. Do I work better with deadlines? Yeah probably. More efficiently anyway. So I guess I have to accept their existence. If I sucked at it, I might be able to ignore them and wander willy nilly through my artmaking process, but I’m deadline-oriented and it makes me get work done. So there we are. Try to pick deadlines that make sense with my work and not just make it for the theme. Make the stuff I would make anyway.

But instead of making right now (and I would like to be, trust me…know that I leave for work most days with art screeching at me to STAY STAY!), I need to work to pay the bills. Like most of us do…

Apparently I Have to Sleep at Night

A relief this morning…finding out all the financial aid documents have been processed. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems that will come up down the road, like last year, but at least we got past that hurdle. It’s a fucking miracle. A massive relief as well. Now we wait.

It’s Reach Higher Day today, Michelle Obama’s program to encourage kids to go to college. At our school, if you ask them right now if they want to go to college, what they want to do, a lot of them say yes, and they want to be doctors and lawyers and other educated professions…and some of them make it, some of them get full scholarships for sports or academics. We get little blips of info from them as they become seniors in high school. But most of them get bogged down by life, grades, the lack of support…no one knows how to fill out these damn forms (they take persistence and a little crazy, honestly). So today we are supposed to wear a t-shirt from our college (oops. I don’t own one…but I have my kids’ shirts) to help kids realize that almost every adult around them at school is walking around with a college degree…or in my case, like three of them. There’s so little parent support for this year’s kids…and there are plenty that would do well in college and should go. I hope they figure it out.

I walked the dog yesterday…I love the post-work 3-miler we do. It’s incredibly relaxing, although then it’s hard to get up and make dinner. I have to plan so that gym and hiking nights have food already prepped for afterwards. Smart move, when I can pull it off.

I had grading to do as well…never-ending pile (except mostly it’s online, so it’s a virtual pile…harder to hold sway over you if you can’t physically see it). But I was in here ironing at about 9-something. I wanted to be done…but…apparently I have to sleep at night.

When Midnight does this (and she is always in the green drawer for some reason), I can’t get to about half of my green fabrics.

The drawer she’s in and the drawer directly above her…if I were smart, I’d move the drawers around occasionally so I wasn’t always pulling out of the top drawer. Or yeah, I could chase her out.

Kitten is more well-behaved and picks the chair…when she’s not trying to climb up the window screen to get at the lizards that keep climbing all my windows.

I ironed for a couple of hours…forgot to take any photos while ironing…but these are all the pieces I have left to do…not many.

I think there’s some cactus and a sunflower or two in there. And then I’m done. Again, a small quilt for me.

I ironed for about 2 hours last night. There’s probably less than an half hour left in there. Here’s the pile of stuff ready to be trimmed.

I have quilt class on Thursday, so now I have something I can work on there. That was part of my motivation to get in here instead of out there with the big drawing.

Here’s the growing pile of fabrics I used, completely disorganized.

It was late and I didn’t feel like making it all nice. Sometimes sleep is a goal.

I forgot…I am still working on going through the pile of crap I pulled out of the studio and piled up in the boychild’s room. I know it doesn’t look better, but I threw out another pile of stuff and recycled some more.

So it’s getting there. I’m a little afraid of that red box on the left…it’s chock full of I don’t know what. I emptied the yellow bin. I have lots of piles of stuff based on where it should be going. It was a little sad going through the school stuff, because I found out Friday for sure that most of what I have taught over the last 14 years is going away. So I have samples of stuff…and you just don’t know if you’ll ever teach that again, so in some ways, it would be a good time to just toss a lot of stuff, which I did when I went most digital anyway, but we do some stuff on paper still when it makes sense. So I was filing assignments I will probably never use again. Teaching body systems and cells and genetics has been what I love…and I will have to find a way to love the next batch of stuff.

OK. I’m running late…as always. But art tonight…finish ironing that batch and maybe go back to the drawing. We’ll see.

You Get What I Mean…

Whoa Nelly, this feels like Monday. Teachers get Sunday panic, and then we don’t sleep Sunday nights, and then Mondays are rough. Then again, I’m just not a morning person. Don’t talk to me until I have one full cup of tea inside me, whether it’s a 6:30-AM wakeup alarm or an 8:30 version (when I’m not in school). Something woke me up around 6 AM and I thought, Holy Crap, it can’t possibly be morning. I just fell asleep. You always know that’s a good start to a work day. Don’t feel like I slept last night. I even went to bed a bit early. Well. 15 minutes. And then I couldn’t fall asleep. Brain in a twizzle.

Twizzle is probably a bad word somewhere. Then again, everything is a bad word somewhere. Nope. It’s a move in ice dancing. A twizzle is a multirotational one-foot turn in figure skating. The twizzle is most commonly seen in ice dancing, where it appears in a number of compulsory dances and is a required element of step sequences in the short dance, original dance, and free dance. Ah there we are…also a word for a form of crystal meth. Then again, probably every weird-sounding word is a form of crystal meth somewhere.

I’m working my butt off every weekend, it seems…trying to get school stuff done, getting through art stuff, not even catching up with anything. We must be getting near the end of the school year. I thought I had 43 days of school left, but it turns out we’ve been back after break for three weeks, not two, so there are only 38 days left. That’s good. I was thinking 43 sounded long. But I also lost a whole week in there somewhere. That’s gotta be a problem.

I had a meeting with one of my art groups yesterday, so I had to finish a bunch of stuff Saturday to make sure I had food in the house and my school stuff was ready. It was a good meeting…long drive, but good news about upcoming shows. In fact, membership is coming up in October, so if you live in the Los Angeles/San Diego area and you’re a fiber artist, and you can commit to 4 Sundays a year, then joining California Fibers might be a good thing for you. I’ve picked up some great shows with this group; plus they bring a wide range of talents and information. There’s membership info on the website here. I’ve been in the group for a few years and enjoy it.

We have a presentation of sorts every meeting, and this time, two of the members had been to Guatemala to look at the textile collectives there, and they brought back some samples. If you’re on Facebook with me, you probably saw the detail of this…

This is the bottom of a strip of fabric that would become one leg of men’s pants. Which is boggling in itself. This is machine-embroidered by a Guatemalan man who does it all freehand. Amazing stuff. He works out of books, looking at the pictures for ideas. There were other things, beautiful soft scarves and beading, but this thing blew me away.

Anyway. So that was yesterday. I was so efficient that when I got home, I realized I had a chunk of time, almost free time. Because it’s never really free, is it? I really should be grading stuff at all hours, never-ending. I needed to straighten up the studio a bit, put fabrics from the last quilt away before I started a new one. So I did that.

And then I started laying out Wonder Under pieces and I hung up my original drawing with all the numbers all over it.

And I started picking fabrics. This is her hair. Blue is in.

I was trying to figure out why all of a sudden, after two weeks, now I feel like doing this.

Here’s the flesh…really not much in this quilt. She’s sorta covered in stuff that’s not flesh.

At the end of the night, I cover up the Wonder Under that’s still laid out so I don’t come back to it all over the place, some stuck to cat butts. The bin at the bottom is everything I’ve ironed so far, which is in the low 200s, I think. I believe the box to the right is all the 300s.

It’s a small quilt. There’s not a lot of pieces in it. I spent about 2 hours and 40 minutes ironing and I’ve probably got another 2 to go and then I’m done.

Here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far. There will be more color once I get into the bits on top of the flesh.

So what got me going? Well I have all these shows coming up now with no work that will fit. Four of them have themes, although the themes are not necessarily limiting, and two of the shows have the same theme. I didn’t like the theme though, until I let my brain play with it and I think I got there, but for two different shows, and at least one being juried, I might need more than one related piece. And then I need a smaller piece for another show. Waiting to hear on nudity or not for that one. All these deadlines are in the next year, but it’s potentially about making 4 large quilts and 1 smaller one.

Although I had a few hours of whiny crap in my head where I just wanted to make whatever I want, damn all the themes. It passed, though, because I’m fairly sure I can still make what I want, but force it to work for these shows. But I can’t sit around waiting any more, because there’s work to be done! Beyond just staring at that drawing every night.

So I’d better get my butt in gear. Because I want to make the Earth Mother one too, and does she fit with any of the themes? One…barely…by the skin of her teeth. Wait. Dammit. She doesn’t have teeth. You get what I mean.

My Work Travels More Than I Do

I always forget where my work is when it’s traveling…especially those that travel for years. It’s possible you saw two of my pieces if you were in Paducah this weekend for the AQS show. The SAQA People and Portraits exhibit has been touring for so long, I forget it’s still out there…but two of my pieces didn’t forget…I Was Not Wearing a Life Jacket…

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I often say from dreams (I don’t clarify that sometimes those are daydreams, not nightdreams or nightmares), and that sometimes things just wander in my brain for a while until they collide into a drawing. I drew the figure on the left and the one giving birth in my smaller sketchbook and then the Gulf oil spill happened and it ended up in this thing, along with a bunch of other weird shit. Let me tell you, this is where I wonder how Dali got into my dreams and why they haven’t packed me away in a nuthouse yet.

But yeah. That was a dream. The owl has an iPhone screen and is plugged in. Those are sisters by the way. And there’s about a thousand details. Along with an oil spill. The title? I was listening to the radio and someone said it. And that was the title.

I don’t always channel crazy when I draw. Honestly. Sometimes there’s other shit going on. This one, Fully Medicated…

I’m diabetic and have other health issues. Had them for a long time. I take a bunch of meds. Actually, I think I take more vitamins and supplements at the moment than meds, but that is always in flux. I worry about my liver and kidneys. They bear the brunt of that crap. Anyway. This is a really old piece. They both are. But they were both at Paducah this last weekend.

I have never been to Paducah. I’m not likely to go soon.

Where can you see my work in the future? Well go to the Current Shows tab above for one, but also…

There will be a piece at the Home Machine Quilting & Sewing Show, Salt Lake City, UT, May 5-7, 2016. I’m thinking it might scare some people, but whatever. This is part of the SAQA Oasis show, which was supposed to be at the Mancuso show in Palm Springs last October and then at Santa Clara PIQF…well, it will be there this year instead. So if you went looking for it last year, look again.

There will be another piece at the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts, Oberlin, OH, opening May 15.

Two pieces will be at Gallery D, Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA, part of Feminism Now, opening May 14. By the way, there will be a catalog available for this show…bring $20!

One piece will be part of California Fibers: Eclectic Threads, Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA, opening June 25.

Earth Stories has two pieces, at the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV, Jun 25-Oct 2, 2016.

I actually talked about the issue that is the focus of this piece, saving the Earth by providing free birth control to any woman who wants it, no matter where they live, what religion they practice. If They Want It, they can have it. It was Earth Day Friday and I made my students write about how to save the Earth, and mostly they’re gonna recycle. Um. Well that ain’t gonna do it. It’s a step in the right direction, sure, but what will make a bigger difference? Population control by choice…I do teach human reproduction, so this is not far off what I teach. It made some of them think, start to ask questions…like how do we get more natural resources? They don’t think about how lucky most of them are. They have clean water and a roof over their head (most of them) and junk food whenever they want it. Some of my refugee students understand more. You can see it in their eyes. But many of them also come from a culture that does not allow birth control. I like to pop these little worms into their brains, make them think outside the box.

Celebrating Silver has one piece, at the America Quilts Expo, Des Moines, IA, May 26-28, 2016.

And that’s just the next few months. You can see why I forget where they all are. I’m curious how they do at these smaller quilt and home sewing shows. I suspect it’s eye-opening for a few people. I’m applying to a new art group that has regular exhibitions, and as I was putting the application materials together, I realized that my work is not necessarily pretty and low-key. It’s kinda in your face and challenging. I’m OK with that, and I guess I accept that it might mean there will be a violent anti-sentiment in any group to which I apply. I appreciate the groups I’m in for only giving me a modicum of shit about that. Really, it’s kind of a joke because I often don’t have work available for smaller-sized shows and/or those that restrict nudity (worded as “family friendly”).

Wait. I’m not family friendly? Because we don’t want kids or families to know about what’s inside the body? Or because we don’t want them to know that women sometimes get sad or pissed off about stuff?

It’s OK. I get it. I don’t even get particularly irritated about it. I do absolutely feel like there should be a prominent place for art that’s not pretty, for art that makes you stop and think. For art that slaps you around a bit sometimes. I guess that’s my role. To make that.