The Day After

Well I guess it’s the day AFTER the day after the opening. The opening was great. I loved seeing so many friends and talking to people about how crazy I am…because I think that’s what it all comes down to sometimes. You are crazy for making work like this, so much of it, never stopping, so many details, so many pieces.

But here’s the core thing to understand. I’m only a LITTLE crazy when I make art all the time. When I don’t make art, I’m a LOT crazy. Unhappy, stressed, irritated (OK, that happens now, but it’s a deadly mix of teaching 12-year-olds and perimenopausal hormones), sometimes even angry. When I’m making every night…it’s hella better. And yes, I think that’s gotten worse over the years, in that in the old days, when the kids were little, I’d go weeks not touching a sketchbook or fabric or whatever, until I could carve out some time. And now they’re grown, so that helps. And yeah, I’m a hermit with very little social life, which isn’t exactly healthy, but honestly, I would rather be here cutting out 3000 tiny pieces of fabric than out somewhere. I do go out…this week is a bitch, actually, with something every night. I’m an introvert. That’s way too much human contact.

Although that’s not true either. Because I came home last night after my feminist art group meeting, with huge probably impossible ideas for one of the shows, and panic about the other one (it’s too soon! I sometimes wish I were a painter and could spend just a few hours to make something nice and full of impact, but it takes longer than that in fabric)…so that’s not a bad thing. And as I walked up the stairs to a house that’s not empty, to a Golden Retriever who really just wanted to lie on the couch with her head in my lap and two cats who wanted scratching and attention…it’s not EMPTY…but it feels empty because honestly, straight up, I don’t want to be living alone. I don’t have a choice at the moment…and girlchild at least will be home in about 3 months (oh god, that sounds like forever this week), but I don’t have to like it.

Whatever. These last two weeks have been an emotional mess. Can’t live with a functioning endocrine system…can’t live without it.

I did take little pieces with me to the meeting last night, because I knew I only had about an hour left of cutting and I wanted to be able to come home and sort them, because that’s a heinous job with so many tiny pieces. It took 10 hours total to cut them all out…not bad. I’m past the halfway mark but about a week late on my original schedule. I do have two 3-day weekends though. I might be able to pull this off.

I sorted them last night, tired and headachy and sad and annoyed by the tinyness of their existence…the box on top is all the ones that still need sorting. I do the big easy ones first and then all that’s left is Bin ‘o Tiny.

So it took an hour to sort them all. There really aren’t a lot of big pieces in this quilt.

It’s all kinds of crazy. But I can hopefully start ironing tonight. After my meeting. I actually went to bed early last night because I haven’t been sleeping well and my eyes were so tired after sorting all those tiny pieces that I couldn’t focus. Not good. Bed called. Good choice. I must be getting old…it was before midnight.

Anyway, I’m guessing it’ll be over 10 hours to iron this together…maybe 12? So by the end of the weekend definitely, I’m hoping to be stitching it down. It’s going to be tight getting it done, that’s for sure, but I do have a chance. Try not to think about everything else that needs doing. Prioritize. Balance. All that same shit.

“The Only Thing Soft about Your Work Is the Fabric…”

Best quote of the night, I think. The opening of my 2-person show at Grossmont College was last night. I was being introduced around as the artist who did the stuff on the walls and James Watts as the sculptor, and I pointed to him and said “hard” and to me and said “soft” and the college president, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh, said something along those lines…found it amusing, but probably true. One of the art history teachers mentioned that she’d brought her students in and they were talking about the bright colors and how nice everything looked, and then she made them read the titles. Oh. Wait. That’s about a tsunami.

Anyway. The opening happened. I really truly appreciate all the friends and family who showed up to support me (like a bra, one friend said)…making art is such a solitary thing most of the time. And even though I send a lot of my work out there, I’m not at most of the openings, so I often miss the kudos and commentary, so that was appreciated as well. It’s open through March 3, Mon-Thurs, 10-6PM, so stop by if you didn’t make it last night. I’m probably going to need to go back and photograph again…maybe.

Here’s me and James Watts, surrounded by his very cool sculptures, my quilts behind.

And part of my stitching group…we’ve been meeting once a month since I was pregnant with the girlchild, who is now 18.

I do have some installation shots…

Our work blends well together…lots of color and tiny pieces…

That’s going in my living room finally once it gets out of here.

My number 1 fans. They fight for that position…who’s more number 1? But they have always been there for me…and Susan, on the right, is the woman who taught me to quilt, so you can blame her for everything.

Another installation shot.

And again…

Anyway. Awesome opening, great show. It feels good to have a chunk of work out there from a pretty wide range of years and have it all hold together. It’s not my life’s work, because I’ve got a good 40 years to go, hopefully, but it is representative of 25 years of working in fabric. Not a small achievement.

With that, I’ll have to go back to the current quilt…it’s almost cut out. Maybe tonight? Hope so. Ready to be ironing.

Not Going to Stop…

I don’t know how to explain to my students that even though I took all their tests home last night and was planning on grading them, the staff meeting that took up an hour an a half of my life and was mostly full of whiny adults sent me home with a school headache and forced me to go to the gym, and then when I got back and made dinner and my daughter called me and then I ate (really late, by the way), I didn’t have the mental energy to grade anything. Nor did I care about the grading at all, because the meeting was that irritating. And it wasn’t irritating because the thing we were discussing was so onerous…it was just because people are whiners and think if they whine loud enough and hard enough and demand shit that they will in fact get their way. Although it was the commentary on All I Have to Do Is Expect Work from my students and it will magically happen that kind of set me off as well. Because duh. I do that. And I chunk it. And I say, if you have done this, then I need you to do this. And still, there is a brainfart that happens between start-the-work and turn-it-in that I don’t understand. True that I’m not 12, but apparently parents allow the brainfart, because they think tutorial will help. Tutorial doesn’t help kids turn work in…most of them. And even with 10 kids in there, I can’t possibly help all 10 at the level they need, which sometimes means standing over them and saying “Keep working. Stop talking. Stop distracting yourself. Finish the work. Turn it in.” I usually leave tutorial with a monstrously bad mood, and that’s every Tuesday, which fucking sucks. Last year, at some point, we quit doing tutorial. Just plain quit. Because it was driving us nuts.

Let me be clear. I do not get paid to do tutorial. I do it out of a sense of duty to my students. So if I choose NOT to do it, I still don’t get paid. I’m a little irritated though that counselors and admin kind of expect us to do tutorial without pay. And detention. I don’t get paid for that time either. And it kinda punishes me too.

So that’s where my brain was when I got home and even after going to the gym, where there are still too many wannabes on the treadmills walking slower than I do going uphill on a hot day. Get off my machines people. I adjusted my workout. I listened to music and read my book. I came home and made dinner and talked to the girl. Miss her. Miss the boy. Miss all the things.

And then I sat down and did this instead of grading all those tests.

You know, those tests didn’t deserve the time of day. At least, they don’t deserve my free time at home after 10 PM. I’ll work on them today. I have my prep. I don’t have a lot of hands-on teaching today. And I still have a ton of grading to do. It doesn’t seem to go away.

I cut stuff out for about 2 hours. I’m 8 hours in. I figured out as I was cutting things that there are 5 sets of arms, so 10 arms total, so 10 hands, and each hand has 4 fingers and a thumb, so 40 fingers that have these tiny little stripes on them where the wrinkles are, and each finger has two of those wrinkles, so that’s 80 wrinkles I cut out yesterday. And then the 10 hands have 5 fingernails (including the thumb) each, plus two feet each with 5 toenails, so I cut out most of 60 nails yesterday as well. Some were really small so I left them ironed and uncut until I actually need them so I don’t lose them.

I’m down to I think the last two or three of the flesh fabrics, so mostly larger pieces of arms and breast and knee. So nearing the end. I had thought 9 hours…will be closer to 10 I think. I might finish tonight, but it is my opening and I’m hoping that’s successful. We’ll see. That’s a nerve-wracking thing in itself. But whatever. My art’s been out there long enough that I don’t need people’s approval to DO it, but it is nice to be in a 2-person show and hope that it gets positive press. I’m not going to stop making work if it doesn’t though.

Sleep Is Not My Superpower

I have a sleep app on my phone that tells me how long I slept (notionally…because I can be pretty still when I’m not sleeping) and how well…more movement meaning I wasn’t sleeping deeply. It also has an alarm on it, which is useful. I started using it years ago to try to figure out why I was so tired in the morning…and here’s where all the people who know me personally start cracking up, because they think I don’t sleep. I DO sleep. For about 6 hours a night…I don’t go to sleep early because I can’t fall asleep early, and there is no damn point in lying in bed, flopping around, praying for sleep. In fact, the insomnia specialists advise against it. Go to bed when you’re tired. So I do. Well, sometimes I go to bed earlier than tired because I know it will get ugly the next day. I think I had a whole year there of 4-hour nights, but that’s depression for you. But now I’m back to 6-hour nights, which works OK for me. And yes, I do exactly what I’m NOT supposed to do on the weekends…I sleep in. I like that lie in. I look forward to it, especially after 13+ years of soccer games early on Saturday or Sunday mornings, or sometimes both days. I like waking up slowly that morning, hearing the world around me but not getting up yet, reading a bit, or rolling around with a kitten cleaning herself by my head. Well, as long as it’s not at 6 AM. Sometimes she starts then, and that is not a good thing.

My sleep app last night, on a night where I went to bed early (for me…before midnight) and had a chance for a lie-in…says I slept at 50% efficiency. Now I’m normally a pretty efficient sleeper. I spend the right amount of time in light and REM sleeps. But last night was a flopping clusterfuck. And I’m glad the app backs me up on that. I am sick. That doesn’t help. But I’m not THAT sick. I wasn’t coughing or moaning or anything. So what the hell? Weirdness. I don’t usually have that bad a night ever. Oh well. Moving on. I’m used to functioning somewhat like the walking dead. No change there.

But really, even when I was a kid, I wasn’t a great sleeper. I read under my blanket with a flashlight until well after midnight when I was in elementary school. My boy is the same way. But we both know as adults that we have to sleep at some point. So we do.

I worked last night. I’m incredibly behind on grading. I finished two assignments. I figured that was enough for one night. Then I cut out little pieces of fabric…

I’ve got about 5 hours in. I’m probably not going to finish today. I have too much else to do. Because there’s probably another 4 hours in there. And I need to do other stuff.

I folded fabric and reunited the binding fabric (now clean, no chemical sizings) with the quilt. That’s on my plate for today…put the binding on.

I also have a pile of work to get through…school and other job. I got an email yesterday from a company I applied with back in early November. They apologized for the amount of time that had passed, but had me upload info on their database. I honestly don’t know if that means they’ll use me or what, but I did it. It’s science education materials…so I’m highly qualified. But I think a million other people probably are too. I don’t need a lot of extra work…there are only so many hours in the days…but I do need some. I’m short a good chunk of money for the kids’ college in the next three months. More than a month’s salary short. It is what it is. I will figure it out. Somehow.

Someone said yesterday that I’d be done with my tasks (ironing or cutting or whatever) if I didn’t write this blog. Except this blog is what keeps me doing everything at the pace I’ve adopted. It’s motivating knowing that every day I’ll be telling myself (and apparently you, but know that I rarely think about you when I write) what I got done and reviewing how that made me feel. I felt pretty good last night. I was bloody efficient and I was able to check a bunch of things off the list. I needed to be able to do that this week. The writing also clears my brain…I can dump all the shit I don’t want to think about here and then walk away from it. Also, you have to understand that I write really fast. And I don’t think very hard about it. It was painful to watch a former boyfriend edit his Facebook status over and over again, torturing himself with whether that one sentence was the best possible combination of words, editing it over and over…I don’t roll that way. There’s no time for that constipated verbal shit. It’s here in my head and I vomit it out on the screen. There. Done. Now I can move on.

I will do some art thing today. I know I’m at a show tonight for quite a long time, and my sketchbook will be my trusty companion. So expect drawings posted in the next few days. I LOVE to draw. I’m looking forward to it. I’m hoping I feel better by then too, but if not, there’s cold meds for that.

Obtain Fastidious Knowhow

I love reading spam sometimes just for the crazy phraseology that pops up. I’m good at making up words. I had a student tell me she was going to use “legitimous” from here on out, not realizing that “legit” was short for “legitimate.” I made her look it up. But legitimous is kind of a cool word. I’m sure “knowhow” should be hyphenated, but I really think hyphens are lame most of the time. Must be my German genes…just SQUISH all those words together into one! Anyway, the title is from spam. They came to my blog to get the fastidious knowhow and I know how to provide it. Fastidiously. Legitimously. Uh huh.

Still trying to lift the mood. Ugh. I think I’m getting sick too, which figures. Whatever. I had someone contact me today about a job I applied for in early November. I need the money. I have other work that I’m doing tonight that should turn into some money at some point. So that’s good.

Last night, I just wanted to finish the ironing part…sometimes everything just takes too freaking long. Anyway, it took about another hour…longer than I thought it would. Ten hours and 45 minutes total. I think I estimated 10 hours, though, so that’s not too bad. All the fussy little bits took longer than I thought they would. Here’s the 89 fabrics that went into this quilt…

Not much blue or yellow, only one orange in the whole thing. Lots of flesh in reality. All the other colors are used in relatively small pieces.

I started trimming last Sunday at my fiber group meeting…and then I went to quilt class last night (people! socializing! not being a hermit!) and cut things out for another two hours…

And I cut for another half an hour after this, so there’s more done than that, but not a lot. Based on the last big quilt, it will take me about 9 hours to get through it all, and that means I won’t be done until after the weekend, I think. I have boatloads of grading to do on top of the work. I have not been super efficient this week. So I make myself look at the calendar and try to visualize finishing this quilt. Is this the halfway point? Not based on other quilts. If it were fully trimmed, that’s about halfway. And I only have 4 weeks left, and that’s if the photographer can do it the weekend before.

Nah. I don’t know if I can finish it in time. Oh well. OK. So I have lots to do and I don’t feel well. Moving on with my fastidious knowhow. Like I do.

Slow…

I’m definitely plodding along…not getting a shitload of anything done, not ever getting to the end of any project, whether grading or quilting, not finishing anything. Not accomplishing much. Except I did. Everything’s just slow. I’m slow. My brain is slow. My mood is dank. All I really wanted to do last night was draw, but I didn’t know what I wanted to draw. Just wanted to lose myself in it. No such luck. Too many things I want done and I’m not getting any of them done. Not motivated. Tired. Moody as hell.

I did iron. I thought I might finish. I might have finished if it had been any other night where I felt motivated and awake and competent. But in the end, the last few pieces (OK, there are probably 50 pieces left) just kicked my butt. I’m 9 1/2 hours in and there’s probably 30 minutes left. I really could have done that last night. Well, last night I didn’t think I could, so there we are.

Here’s everything that’s been ironed so far…

But I’m looking at that dark piece on top and thinking it might not show up on the background…I’ll have to figure that out. Maybe. Maybe not right this second. But when I’m ironing it together, you better bet I’ll be thinking…shit…I wish I’d dealt with that already.

Here’s everything I’ve used so far…lots of bits and pieces really, since the flesh is the main part of the quilt.

I should finish it tonight, but that depends on so many factors. I can’t predict the mood or how the other shit I need to do will fall out. Last night I had some technology stuff to do and the computer was just a bitch. So was my iPad and my school computer kept crashing apps, so it was altogether a frustrating day in the world of computers. Although I suspect that the latter are because they need to be replaced. My iPad mini is a first generation and it regularly tells me it is full and I delete stuff but now it’s getting cranky and slow too. I don’t know what to do about that. There’s no money to replace that. The school computer is older and was old when they bought them, honestly…I don’t know how much more time it has, or even if its problems are its age or the age of all the infrastructure around it and on it…fairly sure we need to update some of the apps we use beyond regular releases…like you know, pay some money out…things schools don’t do.

I did two things for myself yesterday, trying to improve my mood. The first was go to the gym. I liked that. Should do more of it. The second was go fabric shopping…notionally, I needed that pink there for the binding of the baby quilt (which I did not sew on last night because I did not feel like it, but will hopefully come home and do tonight because I am a good girl)…and I bought two possible backgrounds for the quilt I’m working on now…

But there’s something relaxing about walking through the fabrics, letting your eye wander, and waiting for something new to catch your eye.

And I realized I don’t know what I’ll be working on next. I need more work for shows, because I don’t have enough for all the shows I want to enter at the moment. Too many things are traveling for too long. I’m regretting one of them…because it could be in better shows than the ones I agreed to as replacement to the ones where the shipment didn’t get there. And another sold, which is not a bad problem to have, but it was only in one show before it sold and it was one of the big time-consuming pieces from last year, so that’s made me short quilts as well. I saw a drawing I did last year for a smaller quilt and think I might do that before committing to the next big one, but then again, Spring Break is coming and that’s a good time to make a big quilt. So we’ll see. I haven’t even drawn the next big one…I have the idea, but it’s nowhere near being on paper. And with the current mood, it’s hard to know if I’ll be able to draw it. Right now, I think it would be sad and angry drawings, which isn’t a bad thing…it’s just not what I saw for that quilt.

Sigh. This mood sucks. I’m doing the shit I’m supposed to do to kick it. So kick, asshole.

A Lot of Philosophy for a Wednesday Morning

Sigh. All the feels. Hormones abound. Frustration at work. I do well when I’m distracted from all that, when I can push all the detritus from work and life and house and taxes and work, did I mention work? Push it all into a pile of unfolded laundry in the dark dank corner of my brain where it deserves to live. I’ll fold it later. I’ll handle each piece later, pull it out, dust it off, fold it up, put it in the cupboard where it belongs. Apparently my version of mindfulness equates to doing the laundry. It’s not a bad metaphor. Clean it, wash it, dry it, put it away. Takes a while to do it properly, but the clothes are warm at the end and you don’t mind handling them as much as when they were smelly and dirty.

That’s a lot of philosophy for a Wednesday morning. But if my brain is going to force me to remake my existence every time the kids come home and leave again, every time there’s shit at school (thanks for the observation yesterday, dear principal…hope you understand Punnett squares now), every time my personal life isn’t going the way I want it to, well then…I’m going to have to control it somehow…and maybe visualizing laundry is the best way for now. It’s something we do all the time…every week, things need washing. It’s a lifetime of laundry. Sometimes it’s only your laundry and sometimes you’re doing everyone else’s while you’re in there.

Yeah. I know. Rambling on. But my brain is a mess and I don’t know if it’s all the emotional stuff or perimenopausal brain. I knew I had bought more cheese last night and I was ransacking the fridge for it, blaming the boychild, maybe he ate it all (it was a lot of cheese…seems unlikely), maybe he took it to his dad’s, maybe I never bought it, maybe I threw it out. I was tossing shit out of the fridge because it was all the stuff from when the kids were here and it hadn’t been fully cleaned out and I was getting really frustrated and had found a cheese alternative (just another kind of cheese, nothing drastic) and then I looked in the fridge and there it was. Big. Orange. Just sitting there. Right in full sight. Like what the fuck is that matter with my brain that it couldn’t see that? I know I looked right there about 10 times. What the fuck?

It’s really…what’s the right word? Not annoying, more than that. Not frightening, well, maybe a little, because where is my brain? Disheartening? Depressing? I don’t know. I need my brain to work well. And it’s not.

So that’s where I was last night when I started ironing. Not necessarily in a particularly good place, but knowing that spending some time ironing would make me feel better. Because it always does. And that’s why I do it. I don’t need meds…I need to commune with fabric.

I worked for about an hour…got the heart and all the arteries done, did a tree with some stuff on it, teeth! I did teeth! Little bits and pieces of stuff. All the detritus (there’s that word again) of the body and the stuff in the air around her. A cloud. Some thunderbolts. A yin/yang sign. Nipples. Just one little piece at a time. Stare at it, figure out what it is, what color it should be. Put Netflix on to calm the part of my brain that’s still trying to figure out how the cheese disappeared and reappeared right before my eyes without my noticing.

Here’s the pile of fabric now. It’s a bit messy.

I didn’t feel like straightening it up. Here’s what’s left to iron…not much. Hair, some lungs, an iPhone. The normal shit.

And the pile that needs to be cut out. Hopefully by Saturday.

I can lose myself in all that and be OK. At least there’s that. The rest will come.

All the Things…

Aaargh. Grades are (almost) done. They will be done after I go to school, deal with a parent meeting, go on duty (I should get a pass…I’m the only teacher who showed up in my section yesterday morning), deal with a fire drill in my homeroom, take attendance, and prep for the rest of the day. THEN I can finish grades. And maybe pee. Fuck you, world.

Boychild apparently made it to school, although he forgot to tell his mom he’d actually arrived, so of course, in true momma fashion, I worried. Woke up at 5 AM and texted him again. Doofus.

I’m in a mood. Hopefully I’ll fall out of it. I barely ironed anything last night…like maybe 20 pieces…

I was tired. It was 11:30 by then and I was just doing it because I wanted to say I’d done some of it. Tonight I can do more. I wrote two tests last night and I finished grades and I don’t even remember…oh yeah I do! The dog. So the dog has been on her normal travel schedule with the kids home, but yesterday, my ex had said he didn’t think she could escape where he did all the work, so I should leave her in the yard. And I worried about her getting out all day, which was legit, because I got home, and a muddy, tangled, matted Golden Retriever was lying in front of the garage, waiting for me.

So I bathed her last night. The water was dark brown the first run through. It was loads of fun. I don’t recommend it. So then I had to partially clean the bathroom. And do laundry. Like 6 towels.

I also finished quilting this and trimmed it. She goes out on leave today and I wanted it done so she could take it, but then I looked at the binding fabric I’d picked…

And it doesn’t work. I then went searching through my stash, and I didn’t have enough of anything that would work, so I need binding fabric. I don’t suppose I could persuade her to stay one more day? Yeah. I didn’t think so. It’s OK. It’s not like she’s going anywhere.

Shitty day. Shitty mood. More art tonight. Less work. Less bullshit. Less worry. Less moodiness. All the things.

Probably Not Today…

Well the boychild finally made it out of here…knock on wood, because his plane hasn’t left yet. I’m gonna miss him and his sister. But they both made Dean’s List…so I’m proud of them. And I will figure my shit out and find a mental balance with them gone. Probably not today though. Today, honestly, I’m just gonna hold it together long enough to get through the school day. Which I am officially NOT doing right now. Holding it together that is. I do have a job that distracts me from emotional crap, so that should help.

Saturday…it was a challenge. But I finished grading the assignment from hell…and have a post-it reminding me never ever to assign that again. It’s not worth my sanity and the kids don’t take it seriously. So I’m kind of in this Fuck ‘Em mode…which may be the most healthy thing I’ve thought about school for the last two months. Grades are due tomorrow. I haven’t even started them. It’s OK. It won’t take long.

When I finished grading, I ran a million errands, and then walked in here…

This is where I wanted to be all day long. Notice it’s dark. Yeah. It was like 6 PM. I was pretty crankballs by then. Yeah. It’s a mess. I might clean it up when I finish this quilt. Depends.

I knew with the figure being most of this quilt, and with 10 arms that sit behind each other, I was going to need a larger range than normal. So I sat on the ground with the pink bins and my phone flashlight (it’s dark down there…need to install fairy lights or something) and picked a run of 13…plus lip colors off to the right and finger- and toenail color above.

I didn’t use all of them in the end. I used 11. And I added two purples. So it took me 2 hours and 40 minutes just to find each flesh piece and decide what fabric it was supposed to be. And I tried to match pairs of arms on each side, but I don’t know if I was successful.

The flesh pieces ranged from the 0-100 box to the 900 box. So I went through all of them. As I did that, I set aside the non-flesh pieces…the heart, veins, lungs, rocket ship, hair, eyebrows, etc. Two uteri even. Lots of eyeballs. So this below is what I still have left to do.

Then I started ironing all those pieces down to the fabric I’d chosen…here’s number 5 in the range.

Yup. That’s a lot of pieces. Some arms, some fingers and toes, and ribcage parts. That funny bone that sticks out on your foot that probably has a name. I went and looked it up. It’s complicated. You can Google it yourself.

Ironing it all took my Saturday art time to 4 hours plus. Ahhhh. You could hear my brain sigh from there, couldn’t you? Because I was in a dark and angry place over school. And art saved the day. Put my brain back in a decent place.

Here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far.

And I tried to get them to fit in the box once I’d ironed them, but the flesh pieces were too big to fold into there.

I have no idea how many pieces are left. I think I’ve got 6 1/2 hours in, so maybe another 3 or 4? Just a guess really.

I was at a meeting yesterday and started cutting stuff out. It’s only an hour so far.

But it’s a start. And it’s something to do this week…less than 5 weeks to finish this quilt. Finish ironing pieces by tomorrow night? I have a baby quilt to finish tonight if I can pull it off, plus grades. I tried to finish the baby quilt last night and got everything quilted except the border. I started that and the thread kept getting caught on the spool and doing stupid things, so I quit. I’ll try again tonight. Maybe it will behave better. And if I can be a good girl and get a bunch of the grades done at school today, then I’ll be ironing later? Maybe. Maybe not. Then trim them all by the weekend? It would be nice if I could start ironing it together Saturday, because I actually have time.

Shit. I might actually finish it in time. Don’t hold your breath though.

Post-It Note

Well hello there Saturday. You’re finally here. Yesterday I determined there was a full moon coming, which might have explained my students’ behavior. Or not. It was a rough week at school. Too much administrative crap. And grades are due Tuesday. And I’m not done. Or ready. Today I am working all day on school and fabric. Seriously, I have about 2 errands to run and I have to cook/prep some stuff for tomorrow, but otherwise, I’m just working until my brain shuts down. It’ll be OK. I’ll feel better afterwards because I can cross some shit off the lists that are taking over my brain. Just in the last 24 hours, I’ve crossed off a million things, like rescheduling the boychild’s flight to school because of Snowzilla or whatever they’re calling the blizzard back East. Now he’s flying Monday. Better than Thursday, which was the other offer (school starts Wednesday). I managed about 17 online issues last night and this morning, but the post-it note for this weekend still has 7 things on it. I’m really liking this method of writing it so I can see it (don’t think about the fact that last weekend’s post-it still has stuff on it that you haven’t crossed off). OK. I put two things from last week’s post-it onto today’s. Even though they won’t happen. Not sure that’s logical, but I did it anyway. I am nothing if not logical. By that I mean I’m not logical at all.

I did not do art last night. I barely did it the night before. Last night turned into a giant mess because of the flights and the girlchild’s phone and a bunch of other stuff, so after dinner, I tried to get caught up on grading and I ended up not getting it all done and just getting frustrated and then I was too tired to do anything else, so I went to bed. Sometimes that’s all you can do. I expect more today though.

I did recently put some new stuff on Etsy, if by NEW I mean stuff that hasn’t been there before, because it’s journal quilts from 2005 I think. I was part of the Journal Quilt Project that traveled to International Quilt Festival that year, and I still have the little quilts. Although there’s one I can’t find, so I haven’t put it up yet. Wait. I just found it. Dammit. Have to write something else on the post-it note.

Because honestly, I don’t remember to do stuff except go to work and make art unless my phone calendar tells me or it’s written on a post-it note. Sad but true.

So these are about 8 1/2″ w x 11″ h and I did one every other month for the year 2005. This one normally hangs on my wall…

This one is a little strange. Couldn’t tell you what I was dealing with…postdivorce?

Another one. The relationship I was in was all phone-based due to distance and it was difficult.

Another bird from last year that never sold…one of the few.

And this one! Ha. I’m not putting this on Etsy. And it has a big sister that’s never been quilted…for those who flipped out over the vulva in One Paycheck, this would give them paroxysms.

Eh. Whatever. There’s another one of the journal quilts, but it’s not up yet. My Etsy site is easy…it’s just my name. Or the link is over there to the right on the sidebar. I don’t know if my stuff belongs on Etsy or not, but I figured it was a good place to stash the less artsy quilts, the smaller ones, in case someone wanted a bird or a cat. I will probably put the birds up there as custom orders at some point. It does take time to post stuff, and I don’t have any of that at the moment. In fact, I’m done here as well. Gonna go grade (torture myself) for a while and then do fabric I think. I might have to grocery shop first. But there’s a plan to make art today, and that’s all I care about. It will motivate me to speed through the rest of it. Damn post-it note.