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…

Remembering How to Sleep…

Remembering how to sleep…something I have to relearn each time we start school again. People ask me all the time if I sleep, because I do all this stuff (I do a lot of it at the same time? Maybe?). I read at the gym. I am still writing that sci fi novel, mostly at the gym. While I’m waiting for dinner to cook in the oven, I’m in here writing or resizing photos or cutting stuff out. Drawings build in my head during quiet moments in the car or staff meetings (shhh…don’t tell). They color themselves in while I’m cutting onions or listening to a parent make excuses for their child. I grade papers at soccer games, in waiting rooms. Hardly anything in my life happens just one thing at a time. Right now, I’m eating breakfast and typing, while listing the things I need to take to work with me, accepting that I might not finish this post before I have to leave.

I do sleep. I don’t sleep much, that’s for sure, and the sleep I get isn’t great. I know that’s not good for me, but I can read any number of articles about how I should sleep more and better, and they don’t actually help me sleep. I’ve never ever been a good sleeper. I’ve always been a night owl. Nothing has changed. I’m just older. When I can sleep, I do. Last night was not one of those nights.

I didn’t start ironing until after 10:30. I was lucky and got out of school meetings early, raced to the gym (wrote my book and read my book), came home and cooked dinner, graded some papers (part of my plan to get caught up is to actually grade every day…what a concept), and then headed to the ironing board. It’s not like it would take long to iron this…

But ironically, I had missed numbering and tracing a part. That was lame. Picked a background…

Needs outlining. Nice camera strap in the photo there…late-night art photography. Did it on purpose! I would have stitched it down and pinbasted it last night if I didn’t have another quilt already under the machine. I hate changing out thread, so I decided to finish quilting this instead.

It was only another 37 minutes. Now you know how I stay up so late.

Even after that, my brain was racing, on overdrive. They talk about shutting computers off, that electronic light messes with your sleep. Hell, it wouldn’t matter. My art brain messes with my sleep. It wanted to finish both quilts last night and my adult/mom brain put the kibosh on that. Are you kidding me? You have school tomorrow. You are teaching young minds something tomorrow (shit, wish I could remember what I’m teaching…something ironically to do with the nervous system…this is why I lesson plan on Sundays, when I’m awake). You did not get enough sleep Sunday night. Now is not the time to take a stand for your art.

Anyway, so the one needs a binding and the other needs a couple hours of work. Honestly, it’s bigger and more complicated than it should be, but I’m OK with that at the moment…because it’s getting done. And the next big quilt is chomping at the bit in my head.

Twitching Eyelid, Missing Stovetop

No, this is not a single-mom’s version of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon…or is it?

So this is where my stovetop used to be…

Yeah. I had a replacement, but it was too small. We can talk later about why it was too small. Let’s just say it was too small. Meanwhile, the nice installation guy had to cut the wires to get the old one out…it was half-functioning, which is still a lot more functional than this hole is. So when we realized it was too small, my day kind of slapped me upside the face.

It’s OK. I got my car back. I’m just going to drive it until whatever caused issues with it up on Sunrise Highway happens again and it dies again. Not much else I can do. He wouldn’t charge me anything for trying to figure it out. I offered him a turkey. The stovetop installation guy also wouldn’t charge me anything for not installing a stovetop. Turkey? No? Getting the car back meant I had time to go to Sears, return the too-small stovetop, and order one that would fit, because the girlchild now had a car to go to her soccer game. The stovetop? For January 19. OK. It’s all right. I have a mostly working oven, a toaster, an electric tea kettle, and a microwave. Oh, and a crock pot. We can eat. We can toast things. We just can’t fry things or make sauces. Or pasta. Although there’s been some contemplation if we boiled water in the tea kettle over and over again and kept pouring it over the pasta, it would cook to some extent. Insert evil eye glare here.

So there’s that. And I went into my classroom and found all the crap for Monday’s lab and organized some stuff and copied the stuff I need for Monday. So I don’t have to go back there until Monday. Which is when school starts, so I really should be there. But I can sort of ignore it for two days. My left eyelid, however, is not ignoring it. It’s still twitching like a motherfucker.

While the guy was not installing my stovetop, I started sorting all of Mariah’s hand-me-down fabrics by color…

The kids say they couldn’t possibly make the decisions I do about multi-colored pieces. Or where I draw the line between brown and orange or white and yellow. Or even green and blue. Whatever. It will probably take me months to do this.

The day kicking my ass found me in a bar (oh yeah) with my sketchbook and a glass of wine, trying to make sense of cancer donation quilts once again…first of all, breast cancer cells are alternately terrifying and beautiful in their spikiness.

But I think I need to draw something not related to cancer. I think these spiky cells will end up in something though. How can they not?

And when I came home, I figured out how to cook the previously planned dinner without a stovetop, because someone, whose name will stay unknown, kept texting me that she was hungry but couldn’t possibly handle making dinner, and then I tried to quilt, but I was really really tired…

Yeah, drinking in the early evening after a long stressful day can do that to you. So I didn’t finish her. And today I’m hiking and I don’t know what else, but it isn’t quilting and it isn’t grading papers…it’s whatever it takes to get the damn eyelid under control. Because that’s a sign of stress and it needs to wander off somewhere else.

Drawing Cancer…

Oh holy vacation we call Winter Break, as you slither from my fingers and wither away into workload from hell, I miss you already. I spent time yesterday writing homework for next week. I had to go to school to find the journals I thought I had brought home with me. I have tried to pin my brain down to decisionmaking on the lesson-planning front at least five times, and it wanders off halfway through, complaining that it would like to finish the book it’s reading, or go see a movie, or even clean the kitchen, because that is way more engaging than slogging through a lesson plan revamp. Or is there any point in the revamp? All the science standards change next year…why am I working so hard on adjustments this year, when I won’t even be teaching this content next year?

Who knows. I don’t. It was easier last year to let things like that drop. I should keep remembering that. Let It Go. Oh god, now that fucking song is in my head; make it stop.

All right. So yesterday was a giant clusterfuck of you have to be here or there or everywhere and then sit for an hour in a parking lot, and girlchild’s formal dress disaster (aka the genetics of the female body and how none of us look good in those skimpy dresses), and finally at some point, I found myself realizing that I need to get this cancer quilt done. Or at least started. It’s not going to take long, but I know what the next three weeks look like and I’m flailing.

So instead of taking the endless Christmas stocking that will never be finished (hence the endless part) to my monthly stitching meeting, I took my sketchbook and a couple of pens. I figured I would force myself to draw and even if it was crap (boundless crap), I would have a start and maybe I could come home and draw something that wasn’t crap. The night before, I started with the hand in the middle…

Totally fucked it up. Decided to keep going and drew the mouth, and then the pizza just jumped in there. Crap drawing. But drawing. And I haven’t been doing much of that, so I’m out of practice again. Remember my plan to draw every Friday night? Yeah. So do I. OK. The drawing isn’t crap. The cat is crap. The rest…I could do something with that. The hand sucks. Whatever.

So then I was staring at the paper in this Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble, and although I often draw in public, I don’t really draw with people watching me much. So I drew the hands…

Which I think are good…remember this had to be simple. But then the bird. And I hated the bird. This morning? Staring at the picture of it? I don’t hate the bird. But he’s got too many damn pieces for this one. I could do the hands again and put something else there (like an anatomically correct heart…not a uterus…I mean, I COULD put a uterus there, but…that would kind of mess with my decision that this piece should not scare the crap out of some poor donor in some state that can’t handle the existence of a uterus). So reject. For now.

Meanwhile, I’ve got Julie and Kathy talking to me about cells and cancer and infusion and ports (I purposely took the sketchbook to this group because Julie’s a survivor and Kathy’s a science person…I knew they could throw some stuff at me that would poke at the sleeping drawing brain cells and wake them the fuck up). So we were talking about more abstract representations of when the chemo goes into the body and attacks the cells, which Julie has obviously visualized (and experienced), and I’m trying to get my head around it, to make an image out of it that is still a Kathy quilt but goes where I want it to go…and I started with the side view…

Except now I have a breast in there, which breaks my rules for this quilt, and then it deteriorated into a tattoo from a photo I saw online and then there were antennae. If you are in charge of filming my retrospective, you should totally record Julie and Kathy, in a Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble, describing my drawing process. Because Kathy knew it was endoplasmic reticulum. And Julie wasn’t sure about the antennae.

Hell, I’m not sure about the antennae. But I’m getting closer. Really. I know it seems like I’m flailing all over the place, but I’m getting closer.

When I got home, I was tired…but wanted to get a start on the quilting of that other small quilt, which now has a name…

I woke up to it this morning…the name, not the quilt…

I do not take my quilts to bed with me.

I finished the outlining. It’s not really dark on that side…I just couldn’t get the camera to behave last night and I was too tired to fuss about it. Now I just need to do the background and bind it and it’s done. Except what I REALLY should be doing is lesson-planning and grading. UGH. I hate responsibilities.

Speaking of, I finished the two commissioned birds and sent them off to their owner yesterday…this is Owl 3…

And this is HeyBird 3…

The first two quilts of 2015.

I’m still watching a lot of this…

And honestly not getting a whole lot done while I watch. A tiny bit of grading, maybe some stitching, but mostly just watching and brain dead. I know it’s OK to have some down time after finishing major work, and I’m trying to let my brain have that, but there’s definitely a push in my head for getting the next thing done…today being the last real day of vacation before going back, I’m definitely kind of buried in that rushed feeling of checking stuff off the to-do list. Which sucks. And I still need to draw the cancer quilt. Damn.

Sundays? I Got This…

Sundays for teachers are hell. They are the day you get ready for the week. You do all your errands, do all the grocery shopping, get your laundry done, and also lesson plan. You do your best to keep Saturdays free, but Sundays…hell, Sundays belong to the man.

I love Sundays during breaks. I don’t have to do any of that shit. Well, I still have to grocery shop, and I’m sorta trained by now to make them work days. They feel that way anyway. I remember back in the old days, before kids, when I was married but not encumbered, when I didn’t bring my job home with me and have it looming over my head on a regular basis, Sundays were nice then. Late rising, a nice hot cup of tea, reading the paper (who gets that any more?), and watching all those fix-it shows on PBS. Hours and hours of Norm showing you the right tools…if you only had the right tools, your house would be fucking amazing. And Sundays were lazy days. You might make it to Home Depot for all the tools you needed, but you didn’t have to. That could wait until next Saturday, couldn’t it?

Well that explains a lot around here, doesn’t it?

Sigh. So I feel like I wasted many hours this morning on god-knows-what, but eventually, I got my act in gear and started getting work done. I spent an hour and a half on kid budgets…a fun thing you get to do when you’re divorced and all the expenses are split. December is always a clusterfuck for expenses, made even worse by applications to college. I sometimes just want to crawl into a hole and pretend none of that happened (three apps left).

After grocery shopping (holy crap, having the boychild home is fucking expensive) and buying textbooks (not mine; boychild again), I managed time for art…bindings on the two birds…

They’re pinned down now…waiting to be sewn down. These are the first two quilts of 2015…at some point, I’ll get that summary post done for 2014, wherein I made a shitload of bird quilts.

Sometime yesterday I got the good news that Absolutely Nothing, the Women at War quilt, will be in the show at Grossmont College in March. More about that later. But cool. Yay. Happy.

And then there was this drawing. It so wants to be a quilt. It’s too many hours for the cancer quilt, but I don’t fucking care…

It gets to be. I drew this ages ago. The Wonder Under’s been trimmed for a few weeks. I traced it back over Thanksgiving break…not sure when I trimmed the Wonder Under…my task app is not being helpful.

So I really should have started the cancer donation, but this one has been fucking screaming at me. So I listened. It only has 160 pieces.

It’s mostly flesh colors…

Two sets of flesh colors. It took about an hour and a half to iron the whole thing down to fabric.

Twenty three fabrics…

This isn’t going to be very big. It’s not going to take very long. In fact, in a little over an hour, it’s mostly cut out.

Probably another ten minutes would do it.

Why do this one first? Before the one I know has to be done? Before the bindings are done? I told you. It was yelling very very loudly. In my old age, I try to listen to the ones that yell. There’s a few more that are yelling, but I will do the cancer one next, I swear. Although I have to sew those bindings too. I also need to grade papers and do about a thousand things tomorrow.

I have one more week of break until I have to go back to school. Balance is the thing. I have to figure out how to balance all of the pieces of my life so I don’t feel like shit. It’s kind of important. I’ve got my focus on that. Don’t drop any damn balls, but don’t let the balls take over your life either. I figure once I figure the whole life/balance thing out? I’ll be dead and it won’t matter any more. No worries. I got this.

More Birds and a Birthday

Hello Friday night. How are you? My son turned 19 today. That makes me ancient, right? Not really.

We did not set any fire alarms off, but it was a close call…

He did not blow them all out in one go…girlchild’s amazing decorating attempt included car-shaped sprinkles (hey, you go with what you have in the house). I made the cake; she frosted and decorated. She always does the fun stuff.

It’s OK. I was baking it in between doing two more birds, commissions.

But first, the piece for the equality exhibit, which opens the 17th, needed a label. Apparently I need to actually deliver it so they can hang it (what a concept).

So that didn’t take long. The birds were all trimmed up and ready for ironing…

HeyBird is easy.

The owl…it’s a little fussier because of the wing tips, but still not too hard. This is the third color version of the owl…

Onto a background…

I need to remember that these take about the same amount of time the cancer donation quilt should take, and they don’t have a ton of pieces…the owl is the most time-consuming with 32 pieces, I think. So I can’t draw something complicated. It has to be simple. I was going to take a sketchbook to the boychild’s birthday dinner tonight, but I couldn’t find the small one…

Oh well. These are so freakin’ fast…

But relaxing nonetheless…

Easy to quilt…

Fast…two done in a day, basically…

By the time we went to dinner for the boychild’s birthday, I was on the background for the owl…Calli loves Grandma…

Girlchild is crankily doing yet another college app tonight…this may kill me. Look at that face…

Three more apps after that, all due the 15th. It Never Ends.

So I quilted the background after cake was eaten…

And then I picked out bindings and trimmed the quilts and got everything ready for when I have time to sew all that crap on.

Here’s some photos that were stuck on the camera while I was trying to set up the new computer…here’s sewing the binding and sleeves on while watching hours of television last Monday…yes, the backing is covered with skulls…

Calli lying right next to me on the couch…

There you can see the binding and the backing…

The pin marks a piece I missed in the sew-down AND the outlining stage…so I had to go back and fix that at the end…

And here’s a detail of some of the inking I did in the body pile.

I’m glad it’s done and out of my head. OK. Hiking tomorrow. Need to take myself to bed and be ready for snow! Seriously. There’s snow. Crazy.

It’s the New Year…

Hey. I finished a quilt. Another one. I think my photographer still likes me (I do pay him). I would love to post photos, but my computer is currently backing up files so I can move them onto the new computer. Thank god, because it was about to die. We have a new wifi access point, so I can still watch movies in my office. I have one bird trimmed and ready for ironing, and another ready to trim. I haven’t dealt with the cancer donation yet…maybe tomorrow. And I have another small one I’m shoving in there…because I fucking CAN…that’s why.

I started that yesterday. Computer stuff has been a major issue. I forgot how much time it takes to set up a new computer. I’m still trying to make a backup email file. I haven’t gotten everything installed yet on the new computer. I started this on the iPad and now I’m on a random laptop in the house. It’s seven minutes to the new year and I know I can’t get everything set up in time to post from the new computer. I’m tired. I should go to bed. Naw. Finish the fucking post. The nice Indian guy at Fry’s helped me get everything off the old drive that runs the older Mac in the house onto a new drive. He’s the same guy that helped me with my power supply back in March. He remembered me. And he picked a color-neutral external drive for me, because he was concerned we would have issues with blue or red. WTF? This has not been a cheap tech week in this house. Hopefully upgrading all this crap will last for a while.

I did finish cutting out the other bird. I need to do the cancer piece. I would show you pictures of stuff, but that would mean the other computer was set up. Totally. It’s not. I do have pictures of the new quilt. It’s done! Officially finished on the 29th. Of December. Smart people would have finished it on January 1 of the new year. I’m not smart.

I’m a little burnt out on quilts, to be honest, at the moment. Too much in too short a period of time. I can handle a few small ones, I think. I have a plan for about five small ones in the next few weeks. OK, that’s a little crazy. I also have a ton of grading to do. I haven’t looked at school stuff at all. I can’t even deal with it right now. Maybe tomorrow. I said that this morning, though. I don’t know what happened to today. Do you have lots of days like that? When you’re not sure what the fuck happened? Like why didn’t you get more done? I don’t know where the hours went today, I really don’t.

Anyway. A few small quilts in the next week or so; meanwhile, I’m evaluating what’s coming up in the future…gotta figure out the deadlines. Gotta get my art head straight.

It’s 2015 now. I made a lot of quilts in 2014…like 22 of them. Granted, quite a few of them were small, but that wasn’t so bad. When I get my computer up and running, I will make my composite of the year’s quilts. Calli wants to know why we’re all still up and watching TV. None of us are really watching though. I’m writing this post. Girlchild is writing college app essays. I don’t know what boychild is doing. Leverage is on…amusing show. Seen them all before, but they do well with a second watch. 2015 is going to be a good year, I’m thinking. I’m counting on it. First art opening is in 17 days. That can’t be a bad start.

A Strange Place

I’m tired tonight. My head is in a strange place. Kinda floaty. Probably that’s the tired talking. Or I quilted my butt off today. OK. Not my butt. But I quilted a lot. More importantly, I quilted until I was fucking done. Ayep. That’s part of the floaty head thing I think. This quilt is almost done. It didn’t exist before the middle of November in any form whatsoever, except for a vague image in my head that followed me around to school and the gym, but wouldn’t vomit itself out on paper. And now it’s almost real.

Cool. My head’s still trying to figure that out. It’s been a quick quilt.

I spent a lot of time over the last two quilting days trying to keep Babygirl away from this quilt. She really really wanted to lie on it…

In fact, that photo above is after she tried stepping onto it, sneaking really, about three times in a row. To her credit, when I said no, she stopped. And looked away. Pretending she was really doing something else. You know, like cats do.

So I figured maybe she’d be happy with lying in the sun, and that worked for a while…

Because she is an old cat and it’s been cold here lately.

But then I left the room once, and she decided to sit on my quilting chair…which leaves no room for my butt…

So I pushed her back onto the computer chair. She was not pleased. There was some hissing and batting of claws towards humans.

This is not a human house, apparently, but a cat house.

I quilted yesterday for a few hours…

And in the bright sunshine. I also quilted today, for many hours…less sunshine. And at some point, I pulled the quilt off the machine and went and bought binding fabric…

And other fabrics, because they jumped into my arms and wanted to come home with me.

But the binding, interestingly enough, is the same as the background, except obviously a different color. I tried for a darker blue, but that’s a hard race to win with most shades of already-dark-blue. There’s lots of red in this quilt, so it makes sense…

Tomorrow, after dealing with my car, the dentist (x3), and god knows what else, I will trim this down and put a binding on it. Because photography Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. So that means I must get my butt into gear and just get it done.

Really, that’s relevant for so much in my life right now. But at this very moment in time, my brain is very tired and hovering around the strange place. It made me do math earlier. It took 11 hours and 38 minutes to quilt this…well below the 17 hours it took on the last one, thank god…because if I still had 5 1/2 hours to go, I wouldn’t be done in time. So that’s good. Right? Total, I have about 74 hours into this quilt right now. It’ll end up being about 80 hours, I think. Still a lot of hours in say 6 weeks? Thirteen hours a week? Really? Is that right? Wow. I’m a bit crazy. Just in case you were wondering.

The Day After…

The day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, although a bit cold for us Southerners (high of 60?). It was warm enough for hiking, of course, and after dealing with a variety of crap in the household that never seems to loose its hold on me, I donned my hiking boots, found someone willing to traverse the wilds with me (not hard), and took off on a trail that I’ve gotten lost on twice.

You’d think no one would dare come with me with those odds, and sure enough, I took one wrong trail, but quickly found the right one and actually made it around the whole loop (about 6 miles) without any trouble…

Holey crap. Love being outside. Tired afterwards, not a bad thing.

Looks like Spring! Yes, it’s December still. And now I know how to get back without getting lost. Finally. It’s only been a year. Honestly, I shouldn’t be allowed to lead anything.

When I came back, I had to go to a soccer game, where I stitched more on birds (nothing completed) and froze to death, not so quietly. It’s funny…the temperature seems OK when you get there, and then as time goes on, you get colder and colder, yes partly because the night is slowly creeping towards 38 degrees, but also because you’re sat frozen on a metal bleacher bench, not the warmest place in the world.

After that, warming up, and feeding children, who are picky as hell about their Mexican food (food is fuel, people), I came home and tried to pick out some bird fabrics…actually, I think I did this one before the soccer game.

This is another Hey Bird, number 3 I think…requested. Oooh. A commission. He was easy to do, because I can still find the original fabrics, although I don’t know what I have for the background…I’ll find something.

But this is Owl #3, a whole ‘nother colorway. I actually went for realism…the iPad is there because it had a picture of an owl on it, a barred owl of some sort…

The background will be harder to choose for this, I think, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of fabric here.

I’m glad I got those two to the next step…moving on. I’d like to get them done next week.

Then I quilted for a while…finished all the outlining and started the background quilting…

I didn’t get super far, because I got tired…but I’m about 6 hours in. More today. I already emailed the photographer, so now I have to be done by Tuesday morning. Can you say crazy? I can. I have somewhere I need to be this afternoon, but it won’t take long, then my evening is booked, happily. So there’s this morning, all day Sunday mostly, and all day Monday. If I can get it all quilted by Sunday afternoon, I can go get binding fabric.

Probably not this…

Although I can’t wait to use this somewhere…I love that Julie looks out for crazy fabric for me. Apparently there’s more coming at the next meeting.