She Be Done

I finished it.

Last night. Actually early this morning. After midnight. Almost 90 hours since the end of January. But it’s done almost a month earlier than I was hoping. I need to finish the other little one so I can call the photographer. Because y’all probably want to see nice pictures of it, instead of all I can get, which is this…

Because it’s kinda big and I don’t have anywhere I can lay it out right now, without cleaning a floor, and I really don’t feel like cleaning fucking anything at the moment.

How do I feel about this quilt? It’s nice. It’s pretty. Sigh. And people like it. Maybe that’s all I have to know. I hope it gets into the show for which I made it, because that would be really annoying if it didn’t. I only have one quilt I can enter in that one, because of the silly restrictions. The reality is I might need to make more of these pretty quilts, although probably much smaller if I want them to sell, because this thing ain’t cheap…you can’t put 90 hours into something and sell it for a couple hundred dollars. I mean, you CAN, but it’s fucking stupid.

But I’m telling you, the next three quilts all have fucking uteri in them, so I will feel much better about them. You have to understand that I am currently being ruled by my uterus. It hurts, it bleeds, it is a crazy mess, and all the hormones it and my ovaries are producing so haphazardly are running my emotions all over the map, fucking with my sleep, my brain, everything. Really, I should do…oh shit, I just had some amazing ideas for uterus quilts. Huh.

Crap. I have so much stuff to do right now, and about 25 ideas for drawings just popped into my head. Which makes me want to cry, because my job…the one that pays the bills…it’s really sucking up some major time at the moment and I’m trying not to think about what that might look like next year. Because I’m trying not to assume the worst. I’m trying to just step back and say, yeah whatever. Just tell me what you want me to teach. I’ll come to school every day and maybe I’ll just suck at it. Because I don’t want to spend another 10 hours a week working at a job that really just would take everything if it could. I want those extra hours for art. I might need those extra hours for another job. And it needs to be a job that I don’t take home with me, because I can’t take on anything else at the moment. The emotional crap with having both kids gone and being alone here in this house is bad enough without letting me make art in that time. I need that time in my head for peace. I really do. As I get older, it seems to get worse. I think I spent so many years pushing all that away and doing mom stuff and job stuff and managing everything that after the Big Depression of 2013 (that is still going on some level), I really can’t go back to that. I can’t be that person any more. And honestly? I have a 19-year-old and an almost 18-year-old. I shouldn’t have to be mom at that level any more. And I have enough years into teaching that I shouldn’t have to be working like a first-year teacher. Ha! As we add technology, which I am doing like a crazy person, and change standards. OK. So there is still a major learning curve. But I don’t get excited when you ask me what else do I want to be teaching…I DON’T want to be teaching anything else.

Fuck. I’m a mess. Maybe I should just blow everything off and draw.

Sigh. No, one of those things is financial aid for the boychild. Need that. Another is food and meds for the animals. I need to take care of them. They take care of me. And food for the week. Can’t really blow that off.

Fucking responsible adult brain. I wonder about Picasso. Did he blow off everything else? Probably.

Last night…

I’m watching DS9 on the righthand computer, the cat is sitting on my lap demanding pets, the school laptop is behind her, where I’m grading assignments on Google Classroom, and three teenaged girls are eating all the pizza in the world in the living room. I don’t even use that TV any more…let alone the VCR. If I ever remodel this room…probably there will be another computer monitor up there. I did get one assignment completely graded though. I’m getting better at doing these. It’s hard in the classroom though, because often the free time I have is when kids are responding to something on my computer, so I can’t grade at the same time…and the app for tablets fucking sucks at the moment. The tablet the school gave me won’t even respond at all, and the iPad, if you click on a student, nothing happens. Same with the phone (not shocking, probably the same app). So I just stand there, trying to figure out what to do with my “free” time. I mean, really, it’s about 10 minutes per period, but yes, I’m that fucking efficient. I can grade 6 or 7 warmups in that time period. I can get through 5 assignments on Classroom. Every 5 counts. So I’ve been bringing my school computer home every weekend instead and trying to make sure I get through an assignment a weekend. SUCKS.

I saw this fabric online somewhere and it poked at me for about three days before I decided I couldn’t live without it.

Apr 25 15 001 small

Plus I want to draw some more stuff like that, right? Tula Pink. Interesting. So then I tried to find it and found it on sale, and that’s when this happened…

I can’t really explain it. But there’s Adventure Time and Walking Dead and wooden rulers? I don’t know. Don’t ask. It’ll end up somewhere. I cannot explain my fabric stash. They were all on sale.

By the way, Earth Stories (or most of it) just opened on Thursday at the Kennedy Museum of Art, University of Ohio, Athens. It will be there through early September. So if you want to see my piece and you’re at Quilt National (where my work will NOT be…can I get a high 5?), then head over there in a free moment.

Because not only do you get a uterus, but it has a fetal skelly in it. That sucker was a bitch to make.

OK. I’m getting some shit crossed off my to-do list right now.

Make Art. Make a Lot of It.

The first week back after a break from school challenges your voice…lost mine yesterday during 7th period to a coughing fit (the kids are so funny about that…they get worried). It’s back now…sort of…but you go from barely talking to anyone for 16 days to nonstop talking and generally fairly loud for huge portions of time…of course your voice has issues. Tiredness is the next thing that hits you. Even if you try to get the right amount of sleep, if you don’t fall asleep right away or something wakes you up in the middle of the night, then you’re short for the next day and it snowballs by the end of the week. By Friday of the first week back, I’m usually close to collapse when I get home. Plop down in a chair or on the couch and I’m not moving for an hour, except to heat up my tea. That’s what I was like yesterday…taught all day, then did tutorial, then raced the cat to the vet. Got home around 5:30. Collapsed. Eventually I came back to life, but it took a while. And this morning? This morning I feel like a lump of tired. And I slept last night! Seriously, I did. So that’s good, but I think I need a whole ‘nother 8 hours. I won’t catch up again until the end of June.

I worked on this again last night…

This is the larger version…I did the electrical lines correctly this time because I did the basic outline in pencil first, so the lines would overlap correctly. So I’m happy about that. And there’s a uterus now, because I moved the hand lower.

I usually draw everything in pen without a pencil sketch at all. Sometimes I outline something in pencil because I want to make sure a hand ends up in the right place, or it’s something I’ve never drawn before, like those elephants…I think I used pencil on their general outlines and then went in with pen and did the final drawing. I use whiteout on my drawings when needed, because the drawing is not the final product, so it doesn’t matter if there are corrections on it.

So I think I’m going to go copy this (enlarge it) after school today, because I looked up the guidelines for this show, and the quilt needs to be smaller than I thought. So I don’t think I can draw the second figure on another sheet and try to combine them…it will be too big. I think I will have to enlarge this one and draw the other one directly on the enlargement. Which means I will draw tiny details that will not be enlarged (must remember NOT to do that). Plus I’m going to enlarge two of the bathtub drawings and do eeny meeny miny mo to decide which one gets to come into existence first. I might copy the third one (which is actually the first one) as well and give the poor woman a head. Just for fun.

I don’t want any down time between projects…I was talking to a couple of people who said their muse was absent, that they didn’t have things to work on, no inspiration, too tired, too stressed, and my brain is like WHAATTT??? What IS that? I have too much. Too many deadlines. Too many ideas. Too much stuff just dancing around in there that wants to be made.

I’m not complaining. It’s a good problem to have. But it reminds me of my professor in the UK in college who told me that my method of creating work was faulty, that I would Run Out of Ideas if I kept working like that. Oh yeah? Suck my…cause I haven’t (sounds like a personal problem dude). What’s funny is that he was maybe in his late 20s at the time, and I thought he was an old fuddy duddy. Interesting, because the guy in charge of the whole art program there was much older, and I didn’t have any issues with him.

So ideas? Not a problem. Time? Always a problem.

Before I drew, I did a little quilting…

It’s hard to quilt when you’re tired. It’s physical…although this one is so small, it’s not really a problem. I’m just doing outlining right now. I have ideas bouncing around my head about how to do the background, and they have not solidified into a plan, so there’s really no point in getting done with the quilting right now. I also have 18 miles of binding to sew down and a bunch of grading to do. I bribed myself last night…you will grade for one episode of this show, and then you can stop and do something artistic. It works. I get a little grading done, but I also get to do what I want. And that is the perennial discussion for teachers…how do I do less work (because you can work nonstop in this job and still never be done) and have a life balance that makes me feel OK about my job and occasionally recharged and even happy? I’m not sure teachers ever really figure it out. We have to keep reminding ourselves how to do it. Walk away sometimes. Say no sometimes, maybe even a lot. Pet a cat or a dog. Hug someone, not a student. I mean, you can hug students too (in an appropriate manner), but there should be other people in your life, people who aren’t teachers even. People who have nothing to do with schools…

In my case, make art. And make a lot of it. All the time.

It’s Over

Spring Break, that is. Every year, the end comes with a depressing wail of remembrance of the last X weeks of school, with a realization that you got almost nothing done that was on your list, and that sleep will elude you for months now. Seriously, even though I went in to my classroom yesterday to make sure everything was OK (it wasn’t…and not by my own fault), and I know I have everything copied and planned pretty much for the next four weeks, I still woke up early, completely wired, stressed out, sure I’d forgotten something.

And the fact is, I probably have. So what. I got this.

I’m ahead of the game on the two quilts I wanted to work on over break. I have three assignments I still need to grade. So I’ll do that this week. Somehow. I’m doing OK. The world isn’t going to end because I’m back in school. Hopefully.

So I went shopping Saturday morning for binding fabric for the Ventura quilt. I laid it out on the floor of the quilt shop, which I could do with gay abandon, because there’s no politics, nudity, or violence in this quilt, per Ventura’s guidelines. Y’all realize this is for a juried show that I might not even get juried into, whatever, I did it anyway and someone will show it. Because it’s pretty and has no nudity or violence or politics. Unlike most of my stuff.

When a quilter has to buy “just one piece of fabric,” y’all know how that goes. In fact the binding was the most mellow of all the fabrics I bought…

On the left, you can see the back of the quilt that needs the binding. At the top, you can see the one I need to stitch down sometime this week.

I spent a couple of hours cutting and sewing on the binding by machine and then pinning it all down…

It’s about 29 feet of binding and sleeves that I now need to sew down by hand. It’s OK. I’ve got plenty to watch on Tivo. And it’s kind of relaxing to do that anyway. Except for all the pins sticking you. Here’s where 17 people pop in and tell me I should sew my bindings completely by machine (I don’t like how it looks…I’ve done it) or fuse them (same deal) or leave them off altogether (eh). I still follow the rules for some parts of the quilting process (that should stymie my counselor some…she’s convinced my sole purpose in life is to break the rules, and yet, I break so few of them). Anyway. She’ll be done this month easily. The quilt…not my counselor. She’s got tons of work left to do.

That’s a lot of pins. And sleeves. I put sleeves on the top and bottom on big quilts…the weight of a slat or dowel in the bottom sleeve helps it hang better. I’ve finally got myself trained to do that automatically. It took a year, I think, to get to that point.

Good Kathy.

Then I looked at the clock and ran through the things that were next on my list. I need a couple of drawings to get done, both for possible juried shows. I have a lot of binding to do (obviously) and that other quilt needs to be stitched down, which I didn’t feel like doing last night. So I cut out a piece of paper for one of the drawings (it has to be a specific size). And then I left it in the other room, because trying to draw straight lines to make a box in which to draw sounded like hard work (it was after 10 PM at that point…give me a break). So I had a small drawing that needed to be made into a larger, more complicated drawing, one of two for a show I’d like to be in (jury!), so I sat down with the smaller drawing out and ready, and started making it bigger…

Obviously, I still have some work to do (and actually, I ran off the bottom of the page, which will be an issue at some point). There will be two figures in this piece, so I have to draw the other one as well, and then copy them and try to fit them together correctly. Sounds like a project for this week (wait a minute…I will probably be brain dead most of this week…maybe not the best choice). I also have two other drawings that I might enlarge and start numbering/tracing. I have deadlines all over the summer…usually they don’t come until late August/early September. Not so this year. It’s not like I was going anywhere anyway. Hiking maybe. Camping maybe. An opening in LA. That’s about it.

One of the (many) things I didn’t get done over break was dying fabric (and socks)…

It’s all sitting here waiting for me. Plus a box from Dharma is in the living room. I could pull this off on a Saturday morning sometime, but National Cup soccer starts this weekend, so it could be a while. Oh well. I got to hang out with my Belgian sister, I did two hikes, I finished (pretty much) one quilt and got significantly into the next one. College decisions happened (mostly…because nothing is ever set in stone here), I made it through the boychild’s taxes and his FAFSA (one more financial aid application to go). I listened to music and watched movies and read books and got a tiny bit of the yardwork and cleaning done that was supposed to happen. Same with the grading…a small portion was completed. I wouldn’t be Kathy if I were caught up on grading after a vacation.

The rest will come. I’ll figure it out. Back to reality. (More caffeine please. Brain still not online.)

Having More Faith in My Brain…

I’m waiting to get enough tea into me to be able to get out of here and buy binding fabric. I trimmed the big quilt yesterday afternoon…laid it out on the floor (which was already dirty again)…

I really tried not to quilt too much extra this time…got it centered well and paid attention to whether the fabric was all the way under the top. It’s a waste of thread and time otherwise, and I hate wasting either.

Trimming this was really REALLY easy.

This never happens, but I got the measurements right, got it totally square the FIRST TIME. No adjustments, no straightening of a side. Just cut it. Measure it. Revel in it.

It’s about 55×64″. Not small. Now I need binding. I thought that last night as I looked at the time (crap) and then starting googling the two local shops where I could have gone. One closed in 4 minutes, the other in 34. Nope. Can’t do it. So I folded it up and decided to do it this morning. I mean, I’m sitting around waiting for the girlchild and her dad to get back from Boston anyway. I SHOULD go to school and set up for Monday’s lab (ugh. don’t make me.). I stopped by school yesterday to show my Belgian sister where I work and ran into another teacher, who is now ready for Monday. The thing is, I’m not MENTALLY ready to get ready for Monday, if that makes sense. Then I would have to admit Spring Break is almost over. I mean, technically it IS over, because I never count the weekends. So yeah. How many more weeks until summer? Ten weeks. Ugh. Major ugh.

Sometimes this job really sucks it out of you. I know what my to-do list looks like for next week, and I want to crawl back into bed.

But NO! I went over to my parents for dinner again and came back tired again. But I’m trained now, after over 20 months of teaching myself to make art almost every single day, I can’t possibly lie around and do nothing.

By the way, I read this…

And loved it. Read it in less than 36 hours. Interesting science. Good story. So that was part of Thursday and Friday. It’s been a while since I’ve read something that engaged my brain so well.

So I have this second recycled quilt I need to do…it’s been sitting around in pieces in a box for a few weeks…

So I started ironing it around 9:45 PM last night…like you do. Yes, when you are considering sleep, I am considering more work.

It’s only 160 pieces, so it won’t take long, right? And I don’t have to finish it tonight. Or do I?

I got this far and thought, I’m tired. I could stop. Nah. Can’t. Stop.

These fabrics are all from Mariah’s outcasts.

So I had to consider what I had, because mostly it was long strips of fabric. And it wasn’t always easy to find enough of what I wanted. But it turned out OK. I think I pieced one arm. Not that you could tell.

Then I pulled out the background.

All pieced from her leftovers. This is at least three different quilts I think. Maybe. And everyone is telling me it’s not going to work, that the background is too strong. But so I talked to Mariah about this. Part of where my brain is going is that Mariah herself currently has a life like that background, with a 2-year-old, an 11-week-old, recently left work, trying to make all of her life parts work, financially, socially, not going nuts being stuck at home with small children who can drive you freakin’ bonkers (I remember that feeling, distinctly). So it almost feels like your life is going to swallow you up, that all you are is mom and cleaner and food source and there is no time to be you (I’m fairly sure she’s not quilting at the moment!) or to even just have a quiet moment without someone fussing or screaming or throwing things.

And you manage it. It might feel like it’s going to take you over, but you manage it. Sometimes by the skin of your teeth. Sometimes with tears pouring out of your eyes. But you manage it.

And honestly, she’s not really fading into the background. I moved her around a bit to get the hands on darker sections instead of really light sections. But I think with the quilting that it will be exactly what I wanted it to be. Is it different? Well yeah. It has to be. It’s Mariah’s bits and pieces subjected to Kathy’s mind…Kathy who went through all that 17-plus years ago.

Anyway. Stitch down next, then sandwich and quilt. Then we’ll see where we are, because I will do something overall on the background anyway, quilting of some sort. But I think it’s exactly what I imagined. Despite the moments when I thought “what the fuck are you thinking here? This will never work.” Kinda like my life over the last 17 years. Probably what Mariah thinks in the middle of the day sometimes.

I guess I should have more faith in my own brain.

The Two Sides of Kathy

OK. Let’s not joke about this. There aren’t just two sides. I’m a dodecahedron…at least. But titling my post “Kathy: a Dodecahedron” would probably just overemphasize my geekdom. Geekness. Geekosity.

Yeah.

Yesterday I quilted for many hours, then went to the beach and jumped through a bunch of waves at the beach, then showed up at my appointment in a towel and bathing suit (eliciting much amusement to those in the waiting room, and even a bit of applause after I emerged from the bathroom fully dressed), then to dinner at my parents, and then I went back to quilting, this time tiny fussy bits of blue that showed through between elephant legs and bird wings.

In the morning, I had the whole left side of the quilt and a bit of the top to do, so I just sat down and quilted until I wanted to scream and tear my hear out, I was so sick of blue and stippling and did I mention blue?

I kept hoping and praying the phone would ring and I would be able to leave to go to the beach, but they spent more time than they thought they would at the Midway, and it wasn’t until late that I got the call, and by then, I was done with the main part of the background and was in the apple tree branches, still wanted to tear my hair out and scream and rant and rave about stupid crap and filling in fucking tiny spaces and gaargh.

The beach was fun, jumping in the waves and getting salty water in my eyes, just like in high school and college.

After all that and dinner with my Belgian sister and her kids and my parents, I came back, tired, exhausted, up since holy crap in the morning to take the girlchild and her dad to the airport to go visit college, the one where she might actually go, but I wanted to be DONE DONE DONE.

I even did the clouds…

They needed something.

And then, after 19 hours and 34 minutes of quilting this week, starting Sunday, I was done.

Done. It’s done. OK, I still need to trim it and bind it, so another 6 hours or so, because it is a big beast of a quilt…but done. Almost.

OK. I’m still trying to get my head around that. I mean yes, that was my goal over break, and yes, I blew off a ton of other things (grading, cleaning, yardwork) to get it done, but it’s done. A month and a half early. Whoop! I can work on something else. OK, yes I have to finish that other recycled quilt, but it won’t take long. And yes, I have two that I need to do early in summer, or maybe one is later, can’t remember. Time to sit down with the schedule again.

Then this morning, my exchange sister Claire and I went on a hike. Much as we went our separate ways after the year she lived in our house, my senior year of high school, our lives are not that different. She hikes in Europe and I hike here. We both try to figure out how to eat healthily when kids are there and then gone to their dad’s houses. We both try to figure out what happy looks like from here on out. And we both know part of it has to be outside.

We hiked Iron Mountain, which I’ve done before, but never in full daylight…always night hikes. It’s the big mountain in the picture.

It’s a local favorite, but less crowded than Cowles Mountain, because it’s longer.

The weather was nice today… mostly cloudy when we started and not too hot…

The views were a little hazy, but still nice long views to all the compass points…

The yucca have started to bloom…

It’s a dry hike, but there were lots of wildflowers by the side of the path…

And as the sun burned away some of the cloud cover, you could see all the way to the ocean…

And south to the Mexican border…

(Yo Julie…what is it?) Julie says it’s called a Silver Puff…what a dorky name. It’s quite soft…not as spiky as it looks.

A rare sighting, a California horned toad (aka lizard). Sweet little one…

And more beautiful views…

California poppies…

And Claire staring off into the landscape…

And here’s the panorama that shot came from…

Beautiful day, great time with a long-time-no-see sister…two sides: quilt on my not-so-fat butt because I get outside and do that hiking thang. They often conflict with each other, as the need to do one fights with the need to do the other, and the need to fit it all into a single day or weekend is some sort of Clash of Kathy Brain. It’s kind of a miracle I get as much done as I do…but it was all good, all worth it. So one of my 12 facets is NOT about housecleaning or yardwork. I’m OK with that. Now I’m going to go read a book (oops, another facet) until they call me with the next event.

Quilting for MILES…

Do you know how many episodes of Star Trek Deep Space Nine I’ve watched while making this quilt…like ALL OF THEM. OK, not really, but it’s getting close. This entire quilt has Major Kira and Commander Dax quilted right into it. And a little Ferengi as well.

I have been quilting for MILES. Seriously. I’m on spool number 3. I’ve been quilting for hours, days…OK, only since Sunday. It just SEEMS like for-freakin-ever. I’m in the dark blue badlands of the quilt. I purposely started on the right side because there was this vast expanse of emptiness that needed quilting and I knew it would be a challenge…one of those things where I keep wanting to get up and go find something else to do, whether it’s eat lunch or read a book or holy crap, I’d probably clean something before I’d work on that. True story. So I’ve bullied through that whole side, in between all the other crap that keeps popping up on my list. I couldn’t focus on it yesterday at all, but at some point, I managed to do 4 1/2 hours total…most of it after 10 PM. Which is why I’m sitting here before 6 AM, getting ready to take the girlchild and her dad to the airport, barely awake…because I quilted until well past midnight.

Here’s part of that vast expanse of dark blue scribbling.

I’m 15 hours in. I thought maybe 17 hours? Maybe 20? It’ll be somewhere in between. I’m hoping to finish today, but maybe not. I have a trip to the beach and counseling and dinner with the Belgians and I’m only half awake on the third cup of tea. So you never know. But when I finish this post, I’m going to quilt for a while. I started somewhere above the sun on her head, which is on the left side of the top bordering area…I finished ALL the quilting on the right side (1800 miles of it, seriously), and last night, I finished the whole bottom section. So I only have the left side, which does have a vast expanse of blue, but not quite so vast as on the right side.

Ugh.

Here was about midnight last night…on the bottom section.

This cat just whines at me at night. I petted her, I scratched her, I combed her because she has giant knots of winter fur trying to fall out but failing, and so she scratched me back and drew blood. Again. She does not like the combing of knots.

She likes to sleep behind the sewing machine in the afternoon, after she’s spent all morning sleeping in the sun in the living room. I’m OK with that, except when she cries constantly. She wants to sit on my lap, and I can’t quilt with her there. I have too much to do to sit quietly as a cat couch.

Anyway. The girlchild is hopefully on a plane with her dad by now and they will land in Boston sometime this afternoon. Hopefully it will be a useful trip. I’m sad to be missing it, just because I think it’s easier to visualize your kid away at college if you’ve actually traversed the campus with them…maybe I will have to try to figure out how to do that this year…skip the third day of school for me? Huh. It could happen.

At this point I’m just procrastinating. That blue thread is whispering to me, promising it won’t fray or break or knot. Lying bastard. Siren song of scribbled stitching. I’m tired enough that it almost makes sense.

That Crazed Look in My Eyes…

I’m currently walking my son through filing his taxes 3000 miles away. Actually, I wonder how many miles away he really is. Only 2680 miles. It would cost about $315 in gas to drive there. Girlchild, if she ends up in Boston (a distinct possibility at the moment), will be 3001 miles away. ANYWAY. Taxes suck. Even suck more when they are more complicated than they need to be. Presumably, the government would like to punish you for being smart enough to put money away for your kids’ college futures. Whatever. It’s done. Well…it’s not done, because he’s still texting me and the damn state, which is the only part that wants money from the kid for going to college, has questions. Or TurboTax has questions. Sigh. I have taxes (not mine), the FAFSA, and multiple financial aid forms and all their usernames and passwords glaring at me at the moment, hanging over my head, giving me ulcers.

It’s no wonder I hide in my office/studio, quilting like a maniac, eh? Seriously, everything else is hurting my head. Is it too early to hang out at a wine bar with my sketchbook (yes. it is.).

I quilted yesterday. Which is something I’m not really getting done today. Dear taxman. You suck. College financial aid departments too. You also suck. Go the fuck away.

I quilted for almost four hours yesterday, which is pretty good, considering I had to go buy thread and pick up cat meds, plus I hiked a mountain…

You know, just for fun. It wasn’t a big one. I’m still outlining. I honestly thought I would finish the outlining last night, and I would have, if I hadn’t hiked. The hiking made it impossible for me to get off the couch for about two hours. Seriously bad. Ugh. But eventually I did and came in here…

I’m over 7 hours in. I have just a bit of the head area left to quilt and then I can start on the background…

I’m never really sure which is more time-consuming, the outlining or the background quilting. I guess it depends on how much background is showing. There’s a big chunk of it on the right side. I should start over there. But I had hoped to be quilting all day today, and I think I have lost that…for a good reason, though. My Belgian exchange sister (AFS) from high school is visiting for part of this week with two of her kids, so that will take up some of my free time, which is why I’m pushing to get the tax and financial aid crap done this morning so I don’t have to think about it. I’m also trying not to think about yardwork, housework, or schoolwork. It’s not really working. I’m a giant ball of stress. Plus there’s an opening tonight, so I’m already nervous about that. Although I’m sure it will be fine. That whole standing in public with my art thang. I like to send in stand-ins. Like my kids. Neither of whom are available. Whoops!

I’m still spacing out a bit while I quilt…sewed the cord to the extra light on my machine right into the quilt…

I’m sure it will come in useful that way. Huh. No, I fixed it. Ugh.

That’s where I quit. I think I just have the left side of her hair and the big cloud over there to outline.

Not much. Then background stuff. It’s hard, because the hike was totally worth it, felt great to get out there and see that I could still climb a mountain and I didn’t feel too bad (breathing was an issue for a bit), but I kicked butt and I’m sore today, but not overly sore. So yeah. Can’t stop doing that stuff in between all the other stuff and maybe the yardwork isn’t really that important, even when my ex and my dad come over and cluck about how little I’ve gotten done. I remind myself that they do not have two jobs and I do. And obviously yardwork is not that important to me. The boychild is home in 5 weeks…maybe he will do some of that until he gets a real job. Maybe that will motivate him to get a real job. It sure would motivate me.

OK, I seriously need a lot more caffeine and to start quilting, even if it’s just for a few hours today. I’d like to quilt the whole afternoon until the opening. It would put me in the right frame of mind. I’m always a little spacey after quilting all day…but calm, incredibly calm. As long as I can stay in that quilting mental space, it will all be good.

The opening tonight, by the way, is at Grossmont College here in San Diego from 5-7 PM. Late notice…sorry. The exhibit is Women at War…

And my piece in the show is Absolutely Nothing…

I’ll be there tonight…come say hi. You should be able to tell how much quilting I got done by the crazed look in my eyes.

Quilting. It’s Happening…

Saturday ended up kicking my butt in many ways. The stress of picking colleges and trying to figure out how to make that decision reverberates out into surrounding people. But the girlchild is much closer to a decision, and I will not be the one taking her on this college visit. I’m OK with that. I did the last one. And I have a ton of work to do, both for school and art (and honestly, around the house as well). So that was a bit of a relief. Paris is out, because NYU wouldn’t offer enough money to even make it a realistic possibility. A year there is more than my annual income. I guess they think I have a basement full of cash somewhere.

Anyway. With all that off my back (mostly) by 1:30 PM on Saturday, I had really wanted to be pinbasted by then (ha! Life kicks my ass yet again.). I did have the floor cleaned by then…which was shortlived…someone threw up on it last night (a cat). Anyway, I got the backing pieced and everything ironed on Saturday afternoon and then took a well-deserved break from my life (really a hot tub should be involved on a weekly basis) and started again yesterday. Once I was back from the grocery store (Easter dinner had to be purchased, even for us heathens), I laid the backing and batting out…

Walked away and came back to a cat kneading it all into submission (no photos of my yelling at her and chasing her off). And then I put the top on…

And pinbasted it. I have lots of people who ask why I don’t spray-baste. I’m not a fan of chemical overspray, and this thing is large. I don’t have anywhere flat to baste something this big except in the entryway. I might try it someday with something small, but then I forget and I don’t actually own any of the spray and it’s just way easier to pin it anyway.

It took less than an hour. And then I realized that I hadn’t bought thread for this. I usually have a bunch of dark blue threads rolling around, because I use them the most, but I remembered on the last big quilt making a huge effort to use up all the bits and pieces on spools and emptying like 5 of them. I found one partial spool of a color that would work, and of course, my thread store was not open on Easter (sigh), so I knew I would only be able to quilt until I ran out of thread.

And then I would have to WAIT. Until today. Horrors.

I was only going to quilt for an hour or so, but the bug got me and I did over three hours…

There’s still a bit of thread on the spool, and in a few minutes, I will head on out to get more.

I stupidly sewed the quilt to itself at some point (whoops)…

Because the girlchild was in here, bogarting my computer and distracting me with all her prom-dress shopping trauma. We finally found the dress she likes, but only if she’s a size 2. Which no one is, c’mon now. OK, some people are, but they won’t be forever.

Anyway. I was also getting tired. This is how I store it so the cat can’t lie on it (or throw up on it, honestly)…

I’ve finished the whole bottom third of the torso and started up the fox arm. The elephants were a challenge…go see my Instagram (knida) if you want to check out their crazy detail. If I didn’t have 17 other things to do today, I could get significantly done…and I might still do that. That’s the problem. Art brain gets closer to done and won’t let me do anything else but make art. Which explains a lot about me, I guess…how I have to force myself sometimes to leave the house for work or social events. Anyway. (Hiking tonight, by the way)

Quilting. It’s happening. Don’t got much to say about it. Just gotta do it. I figure 20 hours or so…so 17 to go.

A Relatively Healthy Balance

I think I did an OK job this weekend of getting schoolwork done, but also feeding the art brain. There are only so many hours in the day, and stupid things like grocery shopping and laundry have to get done, but the remaining hours, they don’t all have to be about your job. I negotiated in my head…if I grade for the length of this TV show, then I will be able to work on art afterwards. That was Sunday. Saturday? Saturday I tried to grade, but got pissed off by some kid trying to cheat his way into a passing grade (because I’m an idiot and won’t catch him?), so I just stopped. I piled all the school stuff up, dumped my grading pens on top of it, and walked the fuck away from it. Because when you get to the point that you’re angry about it, it doesn’t help anyone to be grading kids’ papers. And yeah, I’ll get a bunch of kids FREAKING out this morning because I didn’t update their grade (because they handed everything in late?), but I will just fix my laser glare upon them and they will instantly stop their whining.

Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?

So I made art. And it looks like I did a lot, but really, it was only about 4 1/2 hours over the whole weekend (that’s not really a lot for me).

I pinbasted the upholstered woman (wait, that’s a better title than what I’ve been using so far)…

And then I panicked about actually quilting it. I bought some heavier thread for it, because I thought my regular quilting thread would sink into the upholstery too much, but I was worried about how my machine would handle it…so logically, I turned to something I knew I could do…the cancer hands. I outlined them first…

Which was a piece of cake and took very little time, despite those psychotic, spiky little breast cancer cells…

And then I was lucky to have a thread that worked with the background…seriously, I don’t have much of a thread stash…so I started doing the backgrounds as well.

And before I knew it, they were both done and it was time to head off for my daughter’s CIF soccer game…

They were first in their division, so they didn’t have to play earlier this week. Saturday they played in the quarterfinals…it was a tense game. I stitched a lot. I can’t show you any of it though because we’re not allowed to, which I find kind of irritating, but whatever. I do want designers to make money off their work, but we live in America, Land of We Think Everything Is Free for the Taking, so designers have to protect themselves. And then we’re back to the kid who was cheating in my class, the kid I have to deal with today, the kid who is going to deny it all.

ANYWAY. I stitched. They tied at the end, and you can’t tie, so they went into 15 minutes of overtime…all the while, it was supposed to rain on us, but it held off…

And with 3 minutes and 20 seconds to go, we scored the winning goal. Pro: we’re going to the semifinals! Con: we’re going to the semifinals! More soccer. More cold bleachers. More tense game-watching (more stitching?). It started raining as soon as I got in the car (thank you for that reprieve).

Sunday, I finally took a deep breath (after grading for a proscribed amount of time) and threaded my machine with the heavy thread and went for it…and at first thought it was going to be a giant clusterfuck…

The thread required many prayers to the Goddess of Unbroken Thread, although there are some interesting nests on the back of this quilt. I cleaned them up the best I could…I managed to get all the way around this beast before going to the parentals to cook dinner (girlchild was sick). Then I came back and miraculously had the right color of thread for the background…

which was way easier to quilt, a relief honestly. No super-slow stitching to persuade the machine to go through many layers of upholstery, no swearing as the thread shredded in the needle. Here’s the back…

I didn’t finish all the background quilting, because I remembered that going to sleep on a Sunday night at a reasonable hour makes the rest of the week easier to get through. I usually forget this by Wednesday or Thursday night, unfortunately.

So I’m hoping to trim and bind the two hands, plus finish quilting this one as well this week. I’ve also got a pile of Wonder Under to cut out (and grades for Trimester 2 to finish, but I almost have that under control). Perhaps I should thank that cheating kid for throwing my brain under the bus and forcing me to make art instead of finishing the grading. It all turned out OK, right? As long as I can stay on top of the rest of the grades this week…thanks to my teacher’s aide and my refusal to take any more makeup work, I should be fine.

My constant goal of a healthy balance between all the parts of my life…the art brain always wants more than it gets. I don’t blame it…it certainly is the first to suffer when there’s an issue like illness. But I feel pretty good about what I got done this weekend, so I think I’ll just hold on to that feeling for a while…until I need to motivate myself past the next big step.

Binding Late

I have a significant callus on my middle right finger from a teeny tiny needle poking the crap out of the same spot. I don’t thimble, because I just move to a different finger if there’s a thimble there. Can’t figure the logic of that out, but if you hang out with me long enough, you’ll realize logic isn’t my strong point. I’ve got it…it just doesn’t look like yours.

I had a goal last night of finishing grading one assignment from December (ugh) and then I would be allowed to work on the two quilts that are hanging out in my office at the moment. Or is it my studio. Some days it’s hard to tell. It’s my Offudio. Or my Stoffice. My Studice. Those are awful. It’s my workspace. Anyway…I managed to grade everything during the girlchild’s game because she was sick and only played 20 minutes…so instead of sitting there and stitching (I could have worked on birds…although I haven’t been doing that much), I graded those suckers and got them done. Insert hallelujah here. Don’t get really excited yet though, because the huge project from before break is still ungraded and mocking me.

Dinner was in the crockpot, although despite an email, a verbal reminder, and a text, the boychild forgot to put it in and turn it on (sigh)…when girlchild got home, she put it in on high though, and it worked fine. So while dinner finalized (aka tater tots…the sign of a good mom), I logged grades and listened to the snuffles of the sick child who has three college apps due today that she has not done. After dinner, I started working.

I started with the outline quilting of the FFAC The 100 donation quilt…

This is not a big quilt. When the outlining was done, I went on to the background quilting…

That didn’t take long…seriously, total quilting was barely over an hour.

Trimmed it. It’s about 10×12″.

Then I trimmed the other one that’s been lying around for days and found a binding that worked for both of them…they’re kind of in the same blue tone, although the donation quilt is much brighter…and I got the binding on…

This one is bigger, about 19×18″. It needs ink too. I’m about halfway done with the binding on it. Yes, I stayed up way too late. At some point, I looked at the clock and chastised myself, realizing I COULD stay up and finish the binding, but that was fucking crazy. So I went to bed. You don’t want to know what time.

I did actually finish the binding on the little one. Ouch.

The ouch is for the hole in my finger. The quilt’s really not that lumpy…in the picture above, it’s all pinned and it distorted it. I’ll photograph it for real this afternoon. It’s nice and flat and square corners. Really. It still needs a label. I couldn’t name it last night…but this morning while resizing the photos, it came to me: Fly, Be Free. I say it all the time. So there’s my third finish of 2015. If you like it, you have a 1 in 100 chance to get it through the FFAC The 100 donation drive on February 4.

It’s funny. I want to make another big quilt before Spring Break. I really do. And I have no shortage of drawings that could become a large quilt. But then it’s so easy to make these little ones…it’s tempting to just do one every couple of weeks instead. I have enough smaller drawings…I could totally do that. And there’s the greater possibility that small pieces will sell. There are two small ones I’m doing after this, the hand/cancer cell pieces. The big ones are the better pieces for shows though, so I need to work on that (so I can get more rejections! Now there’s attitude for you.). Realistically, I can only make 5 or 6 big quilts a year, and that would be starting now. I’ll have to decide soon. Because I have this art drive that does not freakin’ stop. No down time, I guess. I should not complain…no artist’s block for me. Knock on wood.

Soccer…yeah…even sick, she played well…

Although this was a moon ball.

Back to work. The school type of work…another day of trying to explain how the brain works. I probably shouldn’t be talking…