Back to Semi-Normal…

Back to school! Whoo! Oh my. Some frustration. It’s hard when you’re explaining they have to work hard for three weeks and they’re already focused on the next holiday. “Wait, we only have three weeks until Winter Break? Cool!!!” Crap. And then I was supposed to be meeting with my department, but she’s driving back with a hurt puppy from far away. BUT, we did the whole meeting via text. I’m on the computer in Google Drive looking stuff up and figuring out an app that will let the students annotate PDF files, with the help of another teacher, and setting up lessons for the next three weeks as she’s texting me what to look for and whether or not we should print everything. No, she wasn’t driving, but we did meet. Impressive.

Then the girlchild is texting me about a party I’m supposed to go to and whether I have appropriate clothing (my nephew will tell you I don’t, as he quite rudely reminded me on Thanksgiving) and shoes. She’s sending me links and I’m sending her links and finally we have partial approval, and then I have to go get shoes.

BUT, in the middle of all this, I got a harebrained idea for a holiday card photo. Actually, that was in the car on the way home. I didn’t do cards the last few years because things were hard and I find it difficult to write the annual letter and send stuff out when I feel that way, but I think I’m out of that bad place, plus I’m not sending gifts abroad this year, so a letter has to go, but I don’t have anyone to HELP with a photo this year. In the early years of my marriage, we would spend an hour or so trying to get all the animals in one place. We’d put dog treats on a chair or couch or I think it was the hope chest, and the dog would jump up, all excited, and then we’d try to get the cats to stay there too, and half the photos would have a blurry, jumping animal or a human hand holding someone, until we got one acceptable photo. And that was in the days of having to print your photos to see if they were any good.

So I think, well, I’ll need to get them all in an enclosed space. Smallest of those in my house besides a closet is the bathroom. I find the big black cat and put her in there, meanwhile calling the dog and getting her in there too. Close the door. Kitten is right there, like, Mommy, what are you doing? Grab Kitten, go in there with camera.

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Spend 30 minutes trying to get all the animals in one photo. Midnight is not going along with sitting in a sink at all and Calli keeps lying down, because this is oh so tiring Mommy. Why? Actually in that picture, she’s scratching herself. And what’s a holiday photo without toilet paper in it? I just don’t know.

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Realizing that the bathroom is in pretty bad shape. We’ve spent the last 15 years pulling 6 layers of wallpaper off, but not actually ever finishing. That’s how I roll.

OK, this isn’t working. Look around. What can I do? Oh yeah. The bathtub. Doors on it. Persuade Calli to jump in, despite the fact that all I ever do in there is give her a bath. She’s a good dog. Then toss the black cat in there, who is by now yowling slightly and scratching at the door, much to the perturbation of the dog. Kitten lets me grab her and then scratches the fuck out of me (second time this week) when I drop her in.

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Oh yeah, that stings. Then I grab the step stool and take photos from above. It gets ugly quickly, so I take what I can get, then release them.

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I have to black out some weird light spot on Midnight. Calli’s paying attention though, isn’t she? Good girl. Yes, everyone got treats afterwards. I had to put Midnight’s treats just under the bed and then guard them from the dog until she came to get them. She is talking to me this morning. Actually, while I was working last night, she sat behind my head on the couch. Neck warmer.

I needed a picture of the kids as well, but stole one from girlchild. She’s a little pissy that they don’t rate the front of the card, but I remind her that they are now adults and pets are way cuter. I would have used the photo where the boychild is flipping me off, but think some relatives might object. One of the reasons I’m rushing to get all this done is they’re having a sale plus I have a discount card, so I pay very little for all this. Then I ask each kid for a paragraph for the annual letter and get a host of complaints until I explain that I will write it for them if they don’t provide. That seems to scare them appropriately. We’ll see what I get.

After all that and the shoe purchasing and making dinner (from scratch mostly, thanks to Trader Joe’s pizza dough), I grade some tests, which is more and more depressing as the night wears on. I can’t possibly finish them, because I have to put a label on a quilt that I’m delivering today. Which I do at midnight. Well done!

Do I make art? Fuck no. No time. Tonight I must make time. Somehow. I’m not sure how. But I did get some errands off my plate, so that’s a good thing. And I’ll be at a fabric store this afternoon. That can’t be all bad, even if I can’t possibly buy it all. Honestly, I can’t buy much at all, but whatever.

Double Wallop of Wallow

You would laugh at me if you knew why I stayed up so late last night. It was a lame reason. Really. It was. Whatever. My brain was still (is!) in that weird place after finishing a major project. And since I never let it wallow after the 17-foot woman, it’s like a double wallop of wallow. Although, did I really allow the wallow? Well, fuck no. I worked my butt off yesterday…bunch of stuff for school, some writing, answered some email, did some other crap…graded papers (more of them? Always.).

And then came in here and quilted. No really. I did.

I’ve had this small commission quilt on my books since late June, so it’s really lame that I haven’t finished it before, but she did tell me they didn’t have a place to move into until I think it’s next week. So I put it off. Silly really. It’s so small, it took no time. But the other part was in my head, because she didn’t want a binding…she wants to wrap it around a canvas. So it’s a different kind of construction. She only wanted batting on the front, and I kept visualizing ways to do that in my head, and in the end, I think there was probably a better way, but I did it and it looks good.

I started by cutting batting the finished size and putting it on the back of the top, right where it should be. I should admit to using one of those crease marker things to mark the 8×10 on the front of this…

Only because I couldn’t find a marking pencil in here to save my life. Seriously. I know I have at least 5. Where the fuck are they? Probably in with the hand embroidery stuff…

Then I pinbasted the thing together…

Midnight moved slightly away from the machine…she’s afraid I’ll sew her tail into a quilt (could happen)…

And I quilted it. Which took less than an hour. Because this thing is tiny.

The thread broke a few times. Suspect I should pull that needle out. It just did 21 hours plus of quilting, plus all the binding afterwards. You can’t really see, but the piece really barely has a background…just above and below the hand on the left. I did quilt that.

The hands turned out nice. This is from the Mammogram quilt, the one that will be at Visions in a couple weeks. She wanted just the breast, so I moved one hand over to make it fit the space a little better. This is the drawing’s original size, so a bit on the tiny-little-pieces side. So I think it’s done. I might finish the edges or I might not, depending on what she tells me. That was easy.

Now I need to find the cats…a pile of Wonder Under and drawings somewhere in the house, I’m sure. And I need to look at the sketchbook. In the end, I ran out of time on that last night. I say all this and I know I’m getting a copyediting job tonight, so really, I should work my butt off on that, so I don’t have to do it all this weekend in big 6-hour chunks right before grades are due. Oh yeah. Because grades are due next Tuesday.

Did I clean? Do I hear you asking that? No. I did not. I did pack up the boychild’s jacket that he couldn’t fit in his luggage (plus some food, cuz I’m his mom) so I can ship that. In fact, I might put a label on that this morning. I have time. I washed some stuff. I tried to come up with a title for the big quilt. I’m up to four possible titles. I tentatively picked one, but I’m just not sure. I’m sure a relaxing, non-stressful day at school will help me decide. I have been a very good girl and have not gone off on someone via email about a really snarly bit that happened on Friday. I put it to the back of my head and made it stay there in timeout all weekend. It’s still muttering and festering and really pissed off, though, so apparently I just need to let it go at some point.

But probably it’s a better use of my time to look at my sketchbook and figure out what’s next up on the big quilt table.

Make What I Love

So first of all, I’m done quilting the beast. It’s a bit of a miracle, 21 hours plus of a miracle honestly. Longer than I thought it would take, and I made sure I wasn’t doing a tiny background scribble. I’ve got it laid out on the ironing board right now…

I didn’t even remember to take pictures while I was quilting, I was so determined to finish (and yes, it was late when I did…feeling it today). Of course, I walked the dog (3 miles), graded for an hour or two, and ate leftovers for dinner before I even started quilting, because I didn’t think it would take long…and it didn’t. Tonight hopefully I’ll trim it and get a binding on it, so I can start the handsewing. It will need ink as well, but that will maybe take an hour. I’m loving that I timed this so well. Gave myself some buffer in case I got the flu in the middle…or like this morning, with a dead and leaking garbage disposal. Cuz I have time to deal with that right now.

Anyway. Big quilt. Brain already reaching out, trying to pick the next one. Letting it think about that before I make any decisions. I have some small stuff to do first and a copyediting job and some writing. And the small things are already in process, so they won’t take a huge amount of time…enough time to let my brain look at the two deadlines I’m considering and make a decision. It is true that last Fall I managed two decent-sized quilts between mid-September and the end of December. It was a little crazy, but I did it. I think the size restrictions on one of them actually work in my favor on that. My tendencies to work huge and complicated don’t work for me on the other one though. I have so many of my newer pieces in shows…not a bad thing…that I don’t have a lot that I can enter in some shows. I’m still irritated that some of what I consider my strongest pieces don’t ever get into shows. I guess I will be hanging those at the Grossmont show in January. At least they’ll get out of the house.

It does make you wonder though. Make more pretty art that doesn’t get in people’s faces? Eh. Or make what I love. Yeah. Always been an easy choice for me.

And I really want to draw too. Missed that.

One Done, Nine to Go…or Ten?

So I finished another quilt last night, actually this morning in the early dewy moments when you know you should be asleep, but you’re waiting for the girlchild to get home from a performance, so you can’t go to sleep anyway, so you might as well finish the binding, even though you’re tired of working on it. Yeah. It was one of those. Sometimes my brain just fights finishing (because it knows what’s next and it’s afraid, very very afraid).

OK, really just apprehensive because I’m not sure how the next step will work out and there’s a lot of other things hanging over me right now that I am trying REALLY hard to ignore. Really.

So I trimmed the quilt.

I really hate having to make quilts to a specific size. It gives me the heeby jeebies. I’m sure I’m going to fuck it up. I check the size in the paperwork or online over and over, obsessively, and then trimming it just freaks me out. I’m sure it would be OK if it were a half inch larger, but I just don’t like it.

I had gone to the fabric store before and gotten the binding (plus some others wanted to come home with me…all those pretty pastel colors and then SKULLS)…

I tried for a dark blue and it just didn’t work…couldn’t get the right shade and dark enough. And then I thought about turquoise, but I don’t know if it’s just my store (which is huge), but I haven’t seen any good turquoises for months. Something to keep in mind. I put it in the wash before I went to my quilt meeting and it was ready when I finally got done with all that and dinnermaking and cleaning the kitchen. Yes, I started after 9 PM, I’m sure…

But this really is a small quilt, so this went relatively quickly…

Binding on, two sleeves, bottom and top…and then the handsewing…

While waiting for the girlchild to get home. It’s done. Emailing the photographer this morning to do this one and the Bathtub.

I also worked on some smaller quilts for sale yesterday, because it’s an easier project to lug around outside the house…I traced all the Wonder Under for 7 projects…

Having done two of them last Friday and then not touching them all week. Here they are, all ready for trimming…

I decided to try cats this year instead of birds. But then I digressed. Because I do. But starting with the cats, here’s 1 and 2…

Both drawn from real life. Then 3 and 4…

Three is the curled-up one and that was real life, but it’s also much more complicated. Julie is shaking her head at me right now, because complicated means more time.

And Cat 5…

whose expression is my favorite. That’s Kitten’s face.

Cat 6? Well, let’s just say I can’t always be normal. I really wanted to make this one and it kept talking to me, and I realize no one will probably want to buy it because it’s weird, AND it has over a hundred pieces (Julie throws her arms up in the air and stomps away), but I like it. So there.

So that’s 6 cats…then I liked the heart in hands that I did for the FFAC donation, so I had drawn one version that was way too complicated and one simple one…

So the one on the left will inevitably be cheaper than the one on the right. Whatever. I don’t even know if these will sell, but it’s worth a try.

And then I did another owl…

I actually pulled this from one of the bathtub drawings. There’s another owl I want to draw, but I really need to stop and get these started at least, because I need to draw this giant thing this weekend and start working on it, because there’s really only 4 weeks until I have to start really thinking about school (besides all the texts and emails all over the place that have been annoying me all week). And that’s not much time. And I have to finish that commission piece too. I’m kind of freaked out about the next step with that…will have to just suck it up and DO it instead of thinking so hard about it. Like that’s possible.

But I’m really pleased that I’ve stuck with my schedule so far…in fact, I’m about a week ahead. Of course, I might be screwed later today if the job I bid on comes in…screwed timewise, but able to earn August’s mortgage payment. That would be a plus. Trade-offs…one of the things I teach in 7th-grade science. Clinical trials for medications, cancer treatments, how to get money to go to the movies…all trade-offs. Yes, I can be an artist, but I am going to be behind on everything else and sometimes my schedule will go crazy, even though it’s summer and I should be relaxing. It is relaxing to be tracing Wonder Under or picking fabrics…it’s a different kind of relaxation. The sort-of workaholic kind. Oh well. It’s obviously in my genes. I will take some time off this evening and relax a bit, and then go crazy again.

Speaking of relaxing, when I’m done sewing bindings but the girlchild isn’t actually home yet so I still have to be awake, or when I’m in a Barnes and Noble Starbucks with my stitching friends and I don’t have anything portable to work on, I do these…

This is Sue Spargo’s Bird Crazy, started three years ago? Maybe 2 1/2 years ago. I have 21 birds completely embroidered and 9 to go…here’s the 6 I’m currently working on…

They all have feet. The bottom half have all their background embroidery done. I’m working on that task on the top three. When these are done, there are only 3 left…then I can sew it together…and start on another one. Because I do need something to work on when I’m on a plane or in a waiting room or wherever, and these are easy and relaxing and don’t require a lot of thought, but the embroidery is fun to do. So yeah, I have those to work on.

OK, so I need to deal with that giant drawing now. Or breakfast. Whichever seems less traumatic…

Late-Night Title Number 17

I just can’t come up with a title. Sorry. Left all my brainpower elsewhere. It’s late.

So I finished quilting tonight…

About 5 hours and 21 minutes to quilt it all. Told you it was small. Small and quick. That was the goal. I’m ahead of schedule right this second. That could change at any second. So in a little bit, after writing this, I’ll calculate the binding and see if I have enough of something appropriate in house to do that…which would be nice, because I don’t want to lose time tomorrow morning with going out and buying it and having to wash it before I put it on. Why? I mean, if I’m ahead of schedule, why am I panicking? Well I had one copyediting job that I thought might start yesterday, but then that fell through (or extended out until October, hard to say), and then I had another request for bid tonight, so hopefully…maybe…I’ll have work for the next week. But THAT means I won’t have time (or as much time) to quilt. And the next one is a big one. A time-sucker. A giant-ass beast of a quilt. Well, at least I think it will be, because (don’t laugh) the drawing isn’t done. So that’s one issue. Plus I’m letting a ton of stuff just fall by the wayside at the moment. Because? I just can’t deal with all of it is all. There aren’t enough hours.

But I do make choices about certain things…yesterday, I chose to go to this concert…

Vokab Company (eh) with their crazy painter accompaniment…painting John Travolta as he danced to the music…

I’m fairly sure he had a shitload of paint in his hair this morning.

And then what we really came for, Dopapod…

Great light show and fun music…

More fun without all the drunk white boys, but what can you say…cheap tickets and apparently easy to buy beer (funny that they have more money than I do to spend on beer). Concerts haven’t changed much since I was 16…I still dance, even just to keep my feet from going dead, and I refrained from offering the excessively drunk tiny girls in the bathroom a ride home dearies. Seriously, I really wanted to mom them…briefly.

Anyway, that and a variety of other things waylaid my responsibility cart yesterday, plus the panic about a possible job starting (silly, since it didn’t). I was much better today…got some stuff done and bid on another job and got my focus closer to where it needed to be. I have a plan for tomorrow that will be better once I finish writing this and looking at bindings.

Boychild deconstructed the ancient play structure yesterday…

Quite happily…and trotted most of it off the lawn today. He is doing a bit every day on the list I gave him. Girlchild has signed up for her first college classes. They will all be gone in six weeks…leaving me in a very quiet house where the only dishes are mine. That will be interesting. And lonely. Sigh. Pros and cons.

This is why I try to hike with them now. But I’m not caving into guilt trips about whether I should be making art or not. This is who I am, what I am. If they haven’t figured that out yet, they will. Soon enough.

After I finished quilting, I inked shadows…

Funny…looking at this picture, I just saw something I needed to fix! No, I’m not telling you what.

I like this one. It’s so small. Trim and bind…that’s it. Then call the photographer and get my butt in gear on the big one. I have a plan. It’s all laid out in my head. There’s other shit that keeps piling in on top of it, but I’m trying to keep the big goals in my head, keep them straight and prioritized. Because in the long run, I don’t care whether that box gets emptied out and put away. I do care if my art gets made and shown. I do care if my kids grow up to be responsible. I care if my sanity survives the next 6+ weeks. I care if I can pay the bills and still feel like I have time to do what I need to do. So that…that’s my goal.

OK, measuring for binding now.

Relaxation…the Workaholic Way…

So relaxation does not come easy to me. If it’s “vacation,” I tend to be doing just as much if not more than I do during the work year. I’m a workaholic. I do vacation the same way. With the foot injury and recovering from pneumonia way way back in February, I’ve really been trying to get back on track with my exercise plan, which has included trying to hike with the kids once a week and get back into going back to the gym. I’m also continuing to try to make art every day, which is a LOT easier if you don’t have to grade papers every night.

So I managed yesterday morning to clean a floor (kick the dogs out!) and then lay out a quilt on it and pinbaste the beast…

It’s actually quite small for me, supposed to finish at 18×40″. Teensy. I managed the pinbasting before the dogs broke through the screen door to get back in the house, and more importantly, lie all over the floor and detach their hair upon it.

I also stitched down the handy boob from last night…need to figure out what next on it.

Then the boychild and I set out upon a hike…It was supposed to be about 6 miles, but I think the boychild added a mile and a half onto it. The first part was what I expected…this is Hollenbeck Canyon Trail out near Jamul…

Although I’d never seen these flowers before…

There was still a little water left in the canyon…

And the only geocache I can keep in my memory banks was still there…

But then we had a divergence of opinion (I was right). Boychild wanted to take this path, which is not actually the trail that’s on the official map. OK. I’ve done this trail before. I remember the bitchy hill at the end of it.

Here’s the beginning of it. No matter what on this trail, there is a bitchy hill…

You can choose this one or the other one. This path is longer, but I don’t think the hill is worse.

Notice he’s way ahead of me. Mom gets tired on the hills. Can’t breathe. So I stop and look back and take photos of the looming thunder clouds (no rain for us).

And he waits for me at the top. I actually picked this trail because there wasn’t a lot of having to wait for mom. So normally, we would now take THIS trail…down. Into the back end of the hike. But no…

He wants to take that one. Hell. That’s not on the map at all, dear heart. It’s not.

But I’m a good sport and he seems to think he’s done this before (he has).

But instead of heading north and then west to catch up with the other trail, it seems to be heading northeast. Like away. Hmnn. There’s a bird nest up in there.

Probably hawk or turkey vulture. So below, way far in the distance, is the trail we should be on. I just printed the map and I think we did an extra two miles on that section…

He’s going to argue it was less. Oh well. Eventually, after traipsing through poison oak and shady groves, we met up with the normal trail, a lovely walk through oak groves.

And this. Fenced off…marked with signs that it’s a wildlife special place (I’m sure there were more official words than that)…

And I’m betting this is a motion-sensor camera (which recorded me and the boychild making faces at it)…planted right in front of the water.

Very strange. More walking, as we consider when the sun will go down and whether boychild allotted time for his mother’s tiredness and short legs (he did it in 3 hours with a few walkbacks)…

Bug analysis…

Lots and lots of ants and their holes…I’m sure I killed hundreds of them by walking on them.

Long vistas with the marine layer coming in (a sign that night is near)…

These funky dead flowers…

And vistas worthy of a little home on a prairie apparently…

It was beautiful, and this little old lady did it (whatever IT is, 7 miles? 8?) in 2 hours and 40 minutes. With an ankle brace. Suck THAT.

Yeah. I know. I have issues.

So then I came home and actually was able to quilt after that…

No, I don’t know how. I just did. I didn’t do a whole lot, but I got started on the quilting, on the outlining. I think I’m up to the torso at this point. I might have part of a leg to do. Honestly, I got tired. Plus, I knew I needed to get up in the morning for THIS…

Oh yeah baby. Wet butt, probably sore neck and shoulders later tonight…kayaking on Mission Bay. A real joy. Mostly calm (some speedboats teaching kids how to ski), a seal ahead of us. I really enjoyed it. Not so long that I was in pain, although I’m tired right now…but totally long enough to know I did a mental and physical workout.

I need to do some more quilting now, because it looks like I might have an editing job coming in tomorrow. AACK! It really gets crazy now, doesn’t it? How many different ways can I have to earn money at once? As many as it takes. So quilting, editing, the odd writing job might pop up, a commission, some small art quilts. The boychild’s financial aid came in finally, and it was better than last year, but not as good as I wanted it to be, so I’m short money…I knew I would be. Just not how much. So I take deep breaths and figure out how to get it all done.

But apparently the relaxing part means running around outside in the natural world…which is the best thing for us hermits to be doing anyway. Tomorrow? I might just go to the gym instead. Just for a change.

Disappointed…

I spend a lot of my life dealing with organizations that are sometimes heavy-handed with their behavior. I don’t ever quit a group because I think the leadership is making bad choices. In the past, I’ve found the best way to deal with that is to become part of the leadership or to find a way into the change process, whether it’s becoming a union rep, being a reliable person ready to help the leadership, or just speaking out when necessary. It means I’m not always popular, but that’s never been a worry to me. Incompetence in leadership disturbs me. Ignoring the membership, the peons, the lower echelons of the group…that annoys me. Don’t ask for my opinion and then ignore it. Excuses are the worst: I can’t expect professional behavior from a group because they are all volunteers? I don’t get paid for the vast majority of volunteer work I do for two art groups, and I am glad to do it. It helps both groups run better and I am involved in some of the decisionmaking processes because I do that. As a teacher union rep, I don’t get paid for the hours I spend at meetings, but we are supposed to have an adjunct duty and that is mine (some people’s adjunct duties are much less time-consuming…in fact, I’m not even sure what a few people are doing except not showing up to the meetings they’re assigned). I’m a union rep because in my first year in the district, I had an issue that was a direct result of another rep not doing their job and then claiming that I never did what I was supposed to do (not true). Faced with incompetence, I ran in that year’s election, hoping to oust the incompetent (oh no…still there…because no one wants this job). I’m still there, and I hope the people I serve appreciate my work. I think they do. I do it anyway.

Another art group I’m in recently behaved badly…the people in charge. I don’t agree with what happened, not to say getting rid of someone at the top might be necessary, but it seemed that there was no attempt to remedy the problem beforehand. As a teacher, if there’s a problem with a kid in class, I have a list of interventions I have to go through in order to deal with that kid, and it’s extremely difficult to actually get a kid out of our school permanently (as it should be; we are a public school), so we learn how to work with kids and parents and admin and the district as needed to get where we need to go, ideally what’s best for the kid and all other kids in the class. In the other groups I work in, if there are personality conflicts or problems, we do try to work through them, and sometimes that means ignoring the behavior of one participant (or even anticipating it and heading it off at the pass to make sure it doesn’t happen) because there really is no change that can happen. But we would always try to mediate before kicking someone out (and I have to be honest, no one has been kicked out).

As a woman, I have noticed that we are particularly bad about this sometimes, this facing the problem head on and speaking it to the person in question. We complain and gossip to each other, behind their backs, and then we tolerate the issue until it’s almost at an explosion (we’re there at school right now, both as a whole and as a team, unfortunately). Sometimes that inertia is just a lack of energy or time, like now, at the end of the year, and sometimes it’s just easier NOT to have that conversation. But if you’re an international organization that depends on volunteer hours and you aren’t listening to your membership, and worse…volunteers can be kicked out without any attempt to mediate the situation, then those of us who tend to speak up, to dissent even, hey…we’re not likely to volunteer. Why would we? You aren’t encouraging diversity in that case, despite what’s said. You certainly aren’t working to mend the divide or figure out why there was a divide in the first place. You reward competence with firing. Granted, I don’t have all the facts…but I’m not happy with how it was handled no matter what.

Am I going to quit the group? No. That would be stupid. They have provided me with support and exhibits and opportunities. I think a large number of the people at the top have mostly my best interests at heart (and the others…well, whatever.). I don’t believe in voting with my checkbook and leaving. I believe in change from within. I wish I had the time to volunteer, because they’d probably kick me out pretty quickly too. Unfortunately. And I’m significantly disappointed.

I’m looking forward to the end of school because two of the school issues will go away for at least a little while. The art group issue? It colors my view of the leadership. But I have art to make and that has to be my focus right now. But I’m not looking at them in the same way.

Speaking of which…I quilted last night (in utter exhaustion, post-bowling)…

I only had energy for about an hour and a half; got about halfway around the outside edge. So at least another 2 hours I think (isn’t that what I said last night? Dammit). Nine hours total so far.

Ugh. Two days of school left. A heavy heart about the art group. Tired. Girlchild graduates from high school tonight (after I finish school)…It’s going to be a very long day. Hoping I have the energy at the end to keep quilting. If not? It will get done eventually.

Hiking It Off…

Ah. Grades are done. For the year. No more grades for at least 2 1/2 months. No more lesson planning for…um…a while (teachers work unpaid over the summer, in case you didn’t know that). I just have to survive a field trip to a bowling alley, one day of “teaching” (who thinks that’s a good plan?), and trying to entertain my kids during graduation because they’re not allowed out of my classroom for two hours.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? But grades are done. That is a relief.

I planned a hike with my kids last night because one said he’d never been up Iron Mountain and because I want to test my foot out and make sure the pain isn’t coming back before my podiatry appointment. Plus I’m totally out of shape, so it makes sense to kick my physical ass when it’s 80 degrees out (I survived…tomorrow, I will be significantly sore, but I will survive). We did Iron Mountain, which claims to be 7 miles (I swear I thought it was only 5)…

I was uber-smart and made dinner the night before and put it in the fridge. I always forget how long this takes, and doing it after work is exhausting sometimes. I had a good long conversation with the boychild though…

I pissed off the girlchild (again) on the drive there, so she took off…

Whatevs. She got back in the car with us at the end, so I guess she hasn’t disowned us yet.

It was a little warm (OK, a lot warm) at the beginning, but a nice temperature by the end. And it was a relief to do it. I had two muscles cramping, and my knee is fussy, but the foot didn’t hurt. I’m planning more for next week too.

This week is more of a survival thing (I keep saying that…because it is). That said, I managed to finally get off the couch after 10 PM and head into the office…

Oh wait. That’s not an office picture. Oh well. I did quilt…

And whoever the dingbat is who thought I could do the background quickly? She forgot that I needed to go in and around all those branches and leaves of the tree. Which took me over an hour last night. Argh. I’m at 7 hours and 40 minutes. I might get some time tonight, but Wednesday night is the girlchild’s graduation and Thursday night is something else. So I’d like to be done, but it’s highly possible I won’t be. And I might run out of thread (I should deal with that, shouldn’t I? Have a plan? I always have a plan. I put the color number in my phone. There’s the plan. I put a reminder in my calendar for after school)

How is it possible that the neighborhood mockingbird never sleeps? I hear it again now and I heard it when I went to bed. I hate that thing.

Anyway, I suspect there’s another couple of hours of quilting in this (at least)…so I underestimated the time. Oh well. It’s not like I can finish it sooner just because I want to. And I will get it done.

Quilting Peace

I got lost in the quilting place last night for about 2 1/2 hours, making up for the lameness of the night before. It’s not a bad place to hang out, as long as you keep an eye on the clock and remember you have to go to work the next day. At some point, I looked up and thought, “Holy crap, it’s after 11 PM. When did that happen?” That’s not entirely a bad thing. Thursday nights the kids aren’t here, so I don’t have their constant noise and verbal reminders to stop and look around or even get up. The cats hang out in here with me, and my bladder makes me stand up occasionally, but mostly I’m attached to the machine and only changing position when I need to replace an empty bobbin. It’s very meditative and calming. I should probably always plan to be quilting around the last two weeks of the school year to get that benefit.

It probably helps that I had counseling last night too…where we admitted that I might be in counseling for the rest of my life. Nice. Oh well. I also read a couple articles linking artistic creativity to mental illness, though the link is still a skinny thread and not a damning rope. What came first, the illness or the art? Or are they so intricately linked as to be unseparable? (Why does WordPress not like the spelling of unseparable? It’s a word, you asshole. I mean, there’s plenty of times when I use nonexistent words on here, but this isn’t one of those times. Don’t you love that WordPress annoys me? Yeah, it’s the end of the year.)

So this is where I am, making a shitload of art, trying to balance work with that, hoping to figure out the rest of my life at some point DURING the rest of my life. I did miss a bunch of counseling appointments recently, her fault and mine, so maybe that was part of the balance issue. We admitted that my life currently feels CALAMITOUS. Great word by the way. Actually, by yesterday, I had accepted calamitous and moved on to some internal acceptance that I was living day-to-day until after June 18. That’s not that far away. Don’t notice all the calendar items piling up on June 19. I’m cleaning up my entire life on that day. Ha! Like that’s possible.

So I quilted. I mentioned that. I had made it about 2/3 of the way around the bathtub on Tuesday night, so I kept going around, stitching around things when I ran into them, like this wire soapdish…

I keep drawing some version of these, which is funny, because we don’t own one. Our bathtub sucks, honestly. I dream of a nice big deep bathtub with a wire soapdish. Strange, I know.

Once I got all the way around, I started on the smaller figure…

I got her completely outlined…

And started doing other body parts and the water down the one side of the tub, picking up some of the hair and face until I realized it was well after midnight.

Whoops. Do need to work today. And this weekend is not clean and easy. And grades are due Tuesday. I think. Maybe Monday? I should probably figure that shit out.

I have 5 1/2 hours into the quilting. I’m still outlining. I’ve been sewing pretty slowly, I guess. I am more than halfway done with the outlining, and because of the image taking up most of the background, there’s not much quilting outside of the outlining. I am going to use white thread in the bathtub area to deal with the shadowed areas, but otherwise I’m leaving the big areas alone. I am outlining the shapes in the water, but it’s pretty subtle I think.

A friend’s mom died yesterday, finally done with feeding tubes and all the other detritus of two strokes. She was my second mom in middle and high school, good friends with my family, so when my mom and I weren’t seeing eye to eye (which was often), I could hide there and Sandi would just let me be, because she had four daughters and knew what that dynamic looks like, which is why I don’t get jealous over my daughter hanging with her friend’s mom. It’s a safe place and away from DNA-related drama. I got a bunch of Sandi’s fabrics a few weeks back when they cleaned out her sewing area in the mountains, where we had Thanksgiving dinners, comingling our families for years. Some of those fabrics are in this quilt, and it seems right that I am working on it this week, as I keep losing control of the tears for a woman who accepted my crazy without question, while remaining friends with my mom. She was a good person. Hope she’s OK with my appropriating her stash.

Yeah. She is. Peace out, Sandi.

That Place to Stop

Stayed up too late. Ugh. But the quilting! And I was almost done! And it won’t take much longer…just this little bit…don’t look at the clock, just finish. Not the best decision in the world. Oh well.

I had about a third of the outline quilting left to do when I abandoned this a week or so ago.

I pull out my trusty phone that has my trusty app on it where I keep track of my art time…oh holy crap. It’s been two weeks since I touched this. I wonder why? Just didn’t feel like quilting, I guess. What have I been doing? Sewing bindings…drawing. That’s about it, right? Not a whole lot, really.

This is not a huge quilt, so I figured I could make a serious dent in the quilting last night. I wasn’t starting as late as the night before, so that had to be a good thing. When I finished the outlining, I had to make a decision about the background, which has 70 trillion colors in it and goes from dark to light all over the place. So I picked a variegated thread that goes from orange through green through purple…

Which is kinda crazy if you think about it. My background does have purple, but more of a blue purple than this one. It has browns that verge on orange. There’s like no green at all.

I usually pick a thread that fades into the background color. I don’t like the background to compete with the image, but this one already does, so by using an allover stipple with a variegated thread, I was hoping to tone that down a bit…

Up close, it’s still a little crazy.

But I like it. And from a distance, it’s not obvious…just tones down the lights a bit…

I think it works. I’m really happy with this.

I finished all the quilting last night. I shouldn’t have. I really should have stopped somewhere on the right side of the quilt, given up on finishing it last night, and gone to bed. Deceptively not small quilt. I quilted for almost 4 hours last night. I’m officially crazy. And tired this morning. I know I survived on much less sleep than this last year, but I don’t know how I did it. Proof that there was something really truly wrong, I guess.

Tonight, I’ll (SLEEP!!!) um yeah that AND trim this and bind it hopefully. I probably should do some grades too, because progress report grades are due next Tuesday. Eh.

I do not know how I am going to choose a binding color for this thing. At my fiber art meeting on Sunday, I presented new work and so did another woman who used to quilt, but now makes things that hang on the walls that could be quilts, but she’s trying to move away from that to art (I did not take offense at that…mine are obviously both, and I don’t mind using all the trappings of quilting to make my art). She doesn’t use a batting, doesn’t quilt, and doesn’t bind the edges, but her work is abstract and rooted in traditional quilting in some ways, more contemporary calm and focused on simple shapes and movement across the piece. I like the binding on mine as a frame to the piece, especially when it’s hanging on the wall. It gives the eye a place to rest, points it back inside the piece. Like stop here, and bounce back into the image. So I will need a binding. And I’m going to have to rummage through my stash for all those binding pieces Mariah gave me and see if some of them work. I don’t think it would be strange to piece a binding for this quilt from multiple fabrics. But I still want that finished edge, that place to stop.

Maybe I will finish this one in April too.

No, I didn’t draw last night. Still working the legs out in my head.

All right. Need to take my exhausted self to work, where the kids are all flabbergasted that I have a Facebook page. Oh kids, kids…I’ve been on Facebook since before you started SCHOOL. Really? The world is such a strange place when you deal with middle school all day. My current students were born after 9/11. They don’t know a world without cable TV and cell phones and tablets, and yet they barely know how to use all that.

Shit. Another drawing popped into my head. Bloody hell. The drawing part of my brain is on a roll…BALANCE! Can’t get there.