Dear Self

Dear Self: thank you for ever so briefly getting your act together in December and copying everything for the next two units of school. I went in to school today and it was all there, ready, planned. Seriously. Like I had a brain at some point. It’s nice to know that someone is looking out for me sometimes. Am I done with the grading? Heck no. But I can teach for the next 6 weeks with very little planning. And honestly? I needed that. So it’s nice to know that my brain CAN kick in and behave at times.

So yeah, I went in to school this morning and learned a little bit about the silly tablet we’re supposed to be using and then signed up for computers for some of the upcoming assignments (because we won’t have access at all for some portion of the Spring, due to Common Core assessments), and I sort of dealt with my classroom and organizing and putting stuff where it belonged, and then I went home, because there’s a plumbing issue, and it should have been something small, but it’s not…it’s not difficult, but it’s expensive, because expensive is something I need at the moment. If we’re eating something besides ramen at the end of the month, it might be a miracle. Who knows what will die or need to be fixed next…I’m ducking at this point.

I did quilt for a little while…

Not as long as I wanted, but some. I always want the stressful things to stay away and leave my brain in peace, but they don’t. They keep me from getting the art stuff done, tying my brain up in knots. I finished the whole dirt area, the little black and white bird, and about half of the Mother. My goal is to get a ton of it done tomorrow afternoon and evening. We’ll see if that flies.

I’m about 3 hours in…I think. I had my stitching meeting this evening with friends and my kids…I worked on the binding for the Love (not Love) quilt. It’s STILL not done. I’m slow.

Julie brought a cool coloring book of flowers and leaves and birds…

There were lots of owls. I’m developing a fascination with owls lately…

It makes me want to draw…I really miss drawing. I used to draw more. Now I don’t find the time as easily. It’s a place thing, I think. When I was waiting, I would draw. Now I am waiting less. Plus I am incredibly overstressed about deadlines at the moment, and so I find myself either rushing around dealing with those or completely immobilized by too much. So I do very little or I read a lot or I clean a lot. That might be beneficial to the house, but it’s not beneficial to my brain. My brain needs to do a better job of clearing all that stress out.

Julie also gave us bird ornaments for our Christmas trees…but my ornaments are all put away in the garage until next December, so I will hang it on something else for a while and see if it notices that Christmas is over.

I think it will be quite happy being a Spring bird for a while.

Anyway. I’m going to bed early. I’m tired. I have an early hike in the morning. I want to read for a bit, even though it is still World War II, because the time travel has returned and the book is back to being interesting. And I want to have enough mental energy tomorrow to finish quilting, or at least get a lot of it done. I can worry about school and money and getting all the other crap done some other day. Saturdays should be for good stuff…not work and stress and sad. Yes sad. It’s there. It’s always there…lurking about and stalking me. Asshole.

Dear Self: Get rid of that sad guy. He’s a jerk.

At the End…

My mood is low. It probably isn’t particularly helpful to be reading a huge long book about World War II in London during the Blitz. I keep reading up on depression and tactics for getting the hell out of it. I know I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, mostly, except it’s funny…they recommend getting more sleep and eating right, but admit that two of the significant symptoms of depression are the inability to sleep well (either it’s too much or interrupted or too little) and digestive issues (eating too much or too little, or just differently). So I should fight the symptoms by pretending they aren’t there? And it’s depressing in itself to realize that you are doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Am I doing it wrong? Probably.

I just keep doing. It will hopefully eventually work. I’ll wake up one morning with fairy dust sprinkled everywhere and the world will be sparkling and new and everything will be pretty and happy and full of butterflies and nice smells.

Sigh. I’d settle for waking up and not thinking, “Oh God. Another day to get through.”

My ex guilt-tripped me today for not having sent out the kids’ school and soccer photos to his mom before she died. Little does he know that I already felt bad about that, that I had started a letter to her about 5 times and couldn’t manage to write anything about my life and the kids’ lives in the last 6 months. I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t send a Christmas letter this year either. Same deal. How to summarize months of depression and grief? You can’t…not without sounding really fake or whiny or pitiful or pathetic…and maybe I am all of those things, but I didn’t want to put it down on paper (says the woman who blogs about it every night…I can’t say that it makes sense). So I procrastinated. It’s not the only thing I’ve procrastinated about over the last 6 months. Things that are hard…I just can’t summon the energy or motivation to deal with them. I’m trying very hard to stay on track with the financial aid stuff for college, because I have to. Same with school, although I’ve let some things slide with that…nothing crucial. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to work, so it’s hard for me to let anything go, but I talk to myself about what really matters all the time. Just do what really matters. Let the rest go.

So I told my ex, I’ve been suffering from depression (I’m sure he knows this already) and couldn’t deal with it and many other things in the last 6 months, and I already had a mental conversation with his mom about this in my head and she was OK, she understood. I don’t know if she would have understood or not, but I can’t fix not sending the photos. It’s done. I’m carrying enough guilt at the moment. I don’t need more. And he could have sent them himself. I never seem to attach myself to the people who will DO. They just expect me to DO. And if I don’t, if I can’t, because my brain is messing with its serotonin and dopamine levels and not working properly, then they complain about it or they don’t complain about it, they just feel bad that I’m not DOING and that sucks too. So give me a break. I’m doing the best that I can. And then I handed him all of his photos. I usually put the kid’s name, grade, and date on all the photos, but I didn’t. That’s why I hadn’t finished packing them all up. It was too much like hard work to write all that. Sigh.

I still feel bad.

I got up eventually this morning. I actually got one kid up early (the other one got herself up) and then went back to sleep, because I went to sleep way too late last night. Then I took a cat to the vet…Midnight has some infection and the antibiotic pill I was supposed to be giving her, well she was being evil and spitting it out after we thought she had swallowed it, so she’s not getting better as fast as we’d like. Hopefully the shot they gave her today will help, because otherwise there might be something else going on.

Saw this sign near the vet…

Made me think of Game of Thrones.

When I got home, I started going through my stash of batting, looking for something big enough for this quilt. Sigh. NOTHING. I have lots of weird-sized offcuts, but nothing long enough or wide enough. Damn. I should have figured this out earlier this week. Now I have to waste possible quilting time going shopping for batting. I did find one piece of batting big enough actually…

But I have no idea what it is. I usually use Warm and Natural, but this was something with a scrim in it and loose layers on top…

Not sure why I have it. There is a smallish rectangle cut out of it, but I have no idea what I used it for. Sad but true. I was too paranoid to use something that I wasn’t sure of the results on, so I went and bought more, came home and washed and dried it, and ironed the top and backing while I was waiting…

I have two drawers of pieces big enough for backings and backgrounds, but most of them are old sale pieces that weren’t wide enough. I used a batik for the background, so they run wider than the normal print fabrics by about 4 inches…so I needed a batik for the back as well. I could have used the purple I originally purchased for the front, but I think it will work really well for another quilt, so I saved it…why waste it on a background? I’ve had this batik (off the sale rack) for a very very long time. It’s about time it got used.

And because I had even more time, I started cleaning up the office, putting away all the fabric from this last quilt and straightening up all the mess. There was a lot of mess. There’s still more mess, but it’s better.

By the time I got back from picking the girlchild up from school, the batting was dry and I laid the whole mess out on the entryway floor and pinbasted it. Apparently I only took one very blurry picture of this process, probably because I only had 45 minutes before girlchild would stomp through the entryway with muddy soccer cleats, and I wanted the quilt off the floor by then.

Anyway. I did all that and managed to start quilting between dropping her off amid her many complaints of the car shortage in the house (boychild has piano lessons…I offered to let her have my car and ask her dad or grandpa to take me, but apparently she recognized my plan for the guilt trip I really didn’t mean it to be and let me keep my car). She really likes being able to drive herself places.

I didn’t get far on the quilting. I didn’t have much time before her game.

I took lots of crappy blurry pictures during the game until I realized I was on some crappy blurry setting (why do cameras have settings like that?)…

and then it got too dark to photograph anything (they won 3-1), so I sewed instead.

I finished two more bird feet and about a million pink bullion knots. OK. Not a million…

Not even close. I am still revising my finishing plan for these. Going with the uber-positive, hopeful mood I’ve been in all week (cough cough), I have decided that it will take me a decade to finish three birds, and if I am any faster than that, I am an amazing stitching dynamo and should be worshiped from afar for my masterful stitching skills.

At least I know I can achieve that.

I came home, went to the gym, read about 300 pages of depressing wartime novel (sigh…for book club…even the time travel is boring, because IT’S NOT EVEN HAPPENING), ate dinner, and then quilted for a while.

I’m done with flames and smoke and am up in the rocks…

Tomorrow looks ugly, but hopefully I’ll get a few hours in. That’s my goal anyway, but I need to deal with school stuff too. Yuck. Not ready. Never ready.

I did get the postcards for the new California Fibers show, which will open on January 13 at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, California (Orange County, for those who don’t recognize the name).

I have two pieces in the show…it’s a wide variety of fiber work, from baskets to weaving to quilting to lace netting and dying and lots of cool work. Unfortunately, it’s only open Monday-Friday, so I probably won’t be able to go up until Spring Break…luckily, it’s open through May 8, so that is an option. The opening is Thursday, January 30, from 5:30-7:45, for those who live in the area. This is one of three California Fibers’ shows in the next two months. I have one piece in the show that will open at the Visions Art Museum next month, and we haven’t heard the jury results on the third show yet, which will be in Ojai, California. Anyway, it means lots of getting work ready for exhibit, but also having to finish and ship for two other major exhibits, so if I’m a little stressed out and feeling overwhelmed, that would be why. At least I have a good excuse.

Anyway, sad day. Whatever. Move on to the next one. At the end of it, I’ll have some quilts done. That’s better than most depressoids do…at least I can do that. Make art. At the end of it…reminds me, we are at the end of Winter Break as well. And I’m almost at the end of two quilts. And hopefully boychild finished the last college app tonight because it was due today…we’re at the end of that (but that signifies the beginning of a lot of scary and expensive future shit).

Resting in Uncertainty…

From last night at an awful hour: “My god, I feel like I’m drowning in tears. I went to bed early because I was so exhausted, and now I am wide awake and crying. WTF? The brain and the body are so disconnected they can’t work together for a common goal: mending me.” So tonight, I’m up late, because my brain won’t wind down. It really isn’t a healthy mix of behaviors. I did go to the gym tonight…left school as early as I could (tutorial) and left a recipe and ingredients for dinner, but said I would deal when I got home. Girlchild has lots of schoolwork this week…but she was starting to cook when I got home. She really is amazingly good at it, and she’s forced me to be a better cook too…using ingredients and trying recipes I wouldn’t have tried before. It’s so strange how creativity that runs in families actually manifests itself. Maybe the next generation will include a clothing designer or a creative architect…you never know.

I forced myself to enter a show this morning; then cried all the way to school and barely got it under control crossing the parking lot. I wanted to make sure I did something art-related after last night. It was a good thing to enter. I don’t remember what made me cry…I often don’t think it’s anything logical. A piece of music, some lyrics, a reminder of something somewhere. Whatever. Logic is not in play at the moment. It’s all about emotion.

Jake keeps going to the door, expecting to be taken back to his house…looking for his daddy. Poor guy. He’s restless. He has been behaving though…no jumping up or biting. Good boy.

My school day was ruled by technology management…iPods with dying batteries, bad cords, learning iMovie on the iPod and phone and how to move files from there to here, setting up my new school computer, trying to set up my new tablet for school…you end up having multiple Google accounts, multiple YouTube accounts, just to manage school and home lives separately. It gets confusing and overwhelming. The new Mac plugs suck, by the way…the part that attaches to the laptop itself is a pain in the ass to use. When is everything going wireless? My life would be so much easier if we could charge everything wirelessly…I spend so much time plugging things in and managing plugs and charging stuff. In other Apple news, one of their commercials made me cry tonight. Then again, I cry at the drop of a hat. No, it didn’t have any jewelry in it. Those ads just annoy me…same with the car ads and the shaver ads. Christmas this year is a little rough. I need to shop for stuff, but have no free time away from kids, due to the ex being gone and multiple events that a parent should attend. No one to help at all. I think it will be a different kind of Christmas this year…I think I will just enlist the kids’ help…I know they realize I am struggling. As the girlchild told me tonight, I’m a downer. I try. They know. They are trying to keep me up. It makes me cry just to type that. Whoops. I read this morning about why some people have repeating depressive episodes and some don’t…something to do with the brain and how it works. Does it take into account the same damn shit happening to a person? Wisdom comes from experience. I will be a very wise old woman…or a just plain old crazy one.

I spent all day at school repeating “seriousness will occur.” Sometimes I wonder what the people in charge are thinking when they say things like that…seriously. We aren’t allowed to show any movies or do any celebrating of anything this week, let alone finishing the damn performance tasks, or in my case, their Project Fred is due tomorrow. No food, no parties, nothing but serious work. We’re all a little loopy, especially the teachers. There is apparently video of me dancing on one of the iPods. Hey. Whatever gets me through at the moment. But dammit, seriousness will occur. (I don’t know when, and if it does, you can’t blame it on me…I will be the goofy one with the Santa hat)

The kids found a new timesuck: Quiz Up. This app will suck up all available time if you let it. That’s the UP in the app name. I’m beating college students, though. I feel really really good about that (no I don’t). I’m really good at walking away from these types of time sucks. The boychild is reasonably good, unless it’s role-playing games (although if he has actual schoolwork, he does prioritize well…just don’t ask about college apps, because I might scream). The girlchild? She sucks at it. Seriously. These things take her down. Brain chemistry. I guess mine is ruled by the artistic bent…hers by procrastination and distraction. I wonder how much of that she will grow out of and how much she will fight for the rest of her life.

So, after yesterday…well, I always learn stuff about me after really bad days (weeks, months)…I learned that I need to make art. Every. Fucking. Day. So I did lots of it tonight to make up for the lame crap of yesterday…I cut stuff out…

mostly flesh and thorns tonight…lots of big fleshy leg pieces…

There’s all the scraps. The pile grows.

Girlchild left this lying around…

Apparently if they send all these postcards to Macy’s, they’ll donate money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. She did one card about her AP Bio grade and another about snow in San Diego for Christmas. Good luck with that, child.

I also quilted tonight…because the girlchild was in one room doing homework and I didn’t want to disturb her by watching TV and cutting stuff out, so I did the other art quilt task that is hanging over my head…

Although I did have a thought about whether it was better to have this piece be finished in January 2014 rather than December 2013…for one thing, I could show it longer…but then I would have fewer quilts finished in 2013…which wouldn’t really matter in the big picture. Who’s looking at that as a matter of my success? Well, except for me, and I can just get over it. I’ve finished 8 quilts in 2013, although two were small and none have been finished since September. It’s OK. I rarely finish anything between September and December.

The cats are all adjusting to Jake’s presence, which means Babygirl is perched up higher than normal…it’s hard to move the mouse when she sits there.

I asked her to deal with the computer backup issue, and she just stared at me.

Girlchild came to school yesterday so we could get to her soccer game. I left her alone in my classroom for 15 minutes and she started writing song lyrics on the board.

I left it up to entertain my students this morning.

I finished this book today…Blackout by Connie Willis…

It’s one of two books that I’m reading for a book club…the second one is on its way via the library system. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, like for the first two thirds of the book. It was mostly WWII historical stuff, although it’s about time travel, but then it got more interesting when the system stopped working right. I’m not a history fan usually, and even less so of wars, but this is less about the war and more about people’s reactions to what was going on in England during WWII seen through the eyes of people from the future. The second book, All Clear, is really a continuation of the story, so we decided in the book club to read both for the months of December and January.

Meditation…it was about change…about being thrown off course and maintaining one’s position, resting in uncertainty…I think that’s what I’ve been doing for 6 months now. It doesn’t feel good, but that’s not because of the change itself…it’s because of how the change happened, which sort of created a reaction in me…this sadness, grief, depression now I think…I think it has moved into that, because I can’t shake it. I mean, I do shake, like a dog, and bits and pieces fly off, and then I get angry and pull pieces off and throw them far away from me, but there are so many clumps that are clinging to me and just hanging on and I can’t shed them. I was so much better at this post-divorce. My anger at the situation was so much stronger and I was so much stronger, and I just jumped back up and into living and forcing myself to be something. Now I just don’t have the energy or the drive for that. I don’t want to do some things over again. This is why the girlchild labeled me a downer. And my counselor says I purposely do some things to push people away, and I say, but those people that are pushed? I don’t want to deal with them anyway. I’m not going to stop being an artist to please the majority of people out there. I’m not going to start wearing makeup or high heels and cute little dresses just because people expect women to do that. I’m not going to start being like the majority of women out there just because that’s what women do. I just don’t care enough to do that. If that’s what your expectation of me is? Then fuck you. I want to make more art. I want to get into more shows. I think I might want to write a book or seven. I want to be at peace. I want to be happy. None of these will be under the Christmas tree this year. This year is all about survival…of the fittest? I’m not sure I am the fittest. I don’t seem to be. I seem to be pretty messed up. That said, I am pretty damn strong. Strong enough to keep getting up, to keep creating, to keep trying to make it better.

Resting in uncertainty…it’s an uncomfortable place.

That Road Is Burnt Out…

Remember those mornings, few and far between since becoming a parent, the ones you used to covet…dozing in the morning? Not awake yet, but you don’t have to be awake either, half dreaming. Those are my enemy now…that’s when my brain dreams stuff I don’t want to dream, stuff I can normally push to the back of my brain and ignore, because honestly why waste time on stories like that, trying to answer the whys…there’s no fucking point now in knowing the whys. Even my counselor said it would be helpful for me, though, since it makes it even more difficult to traverse my own healing with none of the questions answered. But if you realize, again, that there is only one person you have to deal with for the rest of your life, maybe what other people think doesn’t matter…of course, that’s not true. Which sucks. So the morning. It kicked my ass. But I got up anyway. The cable guy was coming to fix something. I had to be up and showered. Probably a damn good thing, because I’m not sure what I would’ve done if he hadn’t been coming.

I slept badly. Which also sucks. Damn cats. Damn brain, mopey piece of shit. Damn life…damn job. OK, but my students decided Friday was National Hug Day (it wasn’t) and about 30 of them hugged me. I think it was a conspiracy. My counselor was trying to talk me out of a label someone else gave me, of being negative, and she finished by telling me those kids wouldn’t be hugging me if I were at core a negative thinker…kids don’t like that. She’s right…it wasn’t me. I may be cynical, but I’m not inherently negative. Depressed? Damn straight. That’s fixable. I hope.

We’re still working on my stress reaction. I do all the right things (exercise, meditation, get outside, see people, write about it, try and manage whatever the fuck is causing it)…I’m missing the stress relief that comes from being in a good relationship, but the goal is to be self-sufficient, to cope with high stress without being reliant on someone else for how you feel. I don’t trust anyone else right now anyway and probably won’t for a while, so I should probably become even more independent than I already am? Except I was told I was too independent. I don’t know where to draw the line…independent as fuck on certain things, vulnerable and willing to get help on others? Confusing. Wish I could just go back to sleep…quiet sleep, no stupid dreams that wake me up sad and confused.

Meditation talks about the intellectual vs the emotional…the intellectual tries to fix what’s causing the emotion, ties it down and tries to get a confession out of it. In meditation, I am just supposed to rest in the emotion. I do. I do that all the time with the sad. I sit right there in the sticky marshmallow sad fluff and let it try to suffocate me. I just cry until the crying stops and the sad is still there, it comes in waves, sometimes so big they almost drown you, but always like a puddle of sad that you’re standing in, every fucking day, rarely do I get out of the puddle. Sticky mud grabbing my feet and keeping me cold. That’s sad. That’s depression. I can hold it off, stand in a mostly dry spot, for a few hours if I’m drawing or sewing…actually, that can be problematic. I sewed today and for the first hour, cried. Then I got the alpha waves. I get there faster at the gym with a good book. The physical drain helps more than the art drain. I need a treadmill with a sewing machine…

I did Quilting Impossible today: dark navy blue thread on dark navy blue background, right eyelid still twitching off and on, bad blinding light coming and going from cloudy day to sun, crying intermittently, blocking all necessary vision. Really stupid. But eventually it got me out of the stupid place. Remember how I said Sunday was going to be mean to me, fight me about getting art done? That’s why I quilted this morning…

for an hour and a half…

probably got a third of the way through the background quilting.

That bit has a lot of hair on it, fluff maybe too, which is why one of these is always on my machine…

A roll of packing tape for picking up hairs before I quilt over them, best I can. I remember going to the mountains once and forgetting that. Big mistake. Had to pick out all those hairs by hand. Pain in the ass. So the number-one use for packing tape in my house is not taping up packages…just so you know. And mostly at the moment, it’s because of this beast…

Who believes tea was put on the Earth for her consumption…

And gets mad at me if I do not allow her to sit where she likes (on the quilt that I’m currently quilting, in case you were wondering). Yup.

I kicked her off three times. She’s a stubborn beast. I bet you can imagine what she’s saying to me right now. Yes, she knows all those swear words.

So I thought I had beat Sunday, that the rest of it would be a piece of cake, because I had planned my day and managed to get myself up and out of bed and deal and actually do art-related stuff. Yeah. Stupid.

First of all, the toaster just died. I’m sure this was God telling me how he disapproves of me. If you actually believe that, please don’t tell me about it. I’m sure it was just its time to go. Deep breaths, though, because that’s more money going out in a month when it seems like I am bleeding cash. No, we cannot survive December without a toaster. Lame, eh? The electric teapot or the fridge will be next. I hope not. So I had to go out on another errand and find a new toaster. Girlchild was doing research at one of the local universities, SDSU, which if you live out here and know where I live, is west of me on the freeway. She had permission to drive, her dad had given her a map, and she was meeting people there. She was supposed to be home at 5. At 5:30, now dark, I called her dad because her phone wasn’t picking up…she’s notoriously bad about charging it. We started trying to call friends, but didn’t have the numbers for the people who were supposed to be with her (yes, we actually had to call one of her soccer coaches to get one number). Time kept going on and we were trying to decide what to do, since no one knew where she was, and she finally called, an hour late…freaking out…crying…from a Barnes and Noble in Mira Mesa (25 minutes north of here…not west…not even on the right freeway) because she had recognized it from my monthly stitching meeting. She borrowed a stranger’s phone and I told her how to get home (yes, I offered to drive up there and she said no). She walked in the door and into my arms sobbing 25 minutes later. Hard to be mad…but easy to be scared, both her and me (and her dad). So we’re revising some rules…but definitely making sure the phone charger is in the damn car is one thing. Scariest part is knowing that we will send her off to college in a year and a half and she will have to negotiate this stuff on her own. Make good friends, kid…meanwhile, we’re also having her memorize the freeway maps of San Diego County…she said the sign for Riverside is what scared her. Yup. So I grew at least 400 more white hairs tonight and my stomach is still a mess and now I’m grinding my teeth (yo, counselor…where do I put this into the stress scale?), but she’s here and safe and hopefully appropriately freaked herself out so she will pay better attention next time to phone and directions. Some things we all need to learn the hard way.

I keep telling myself that. Some things you have to learn the hard way, and apparently over and over again.

So it was a good thing that I had held true to my promise to get the damn tree…

It’s a little frazzled at the bottom, but it won’t be for long…

I started putting lights on it and it smells up the whole house in a good way.

I sat and cut out crazy-ass pieces for the Silver quilt…yes, that is the bottom of a bird wing…owl, I think. Call me crazy. You won’t be the first. Sad, scared, frustrated. It was a day. It tired me out. I’m taking it to bed. Hopefully the early wakeup call for work will scare off all the stupid dreams that betray my heart. Give it up, babe. That ain’t the way to happiness. That road is burnt out and a wasteland. There’s nothing there that will make you happy. Walk on. Once you get through all the sharp pointy rocks and the charcoal, there will be new growth. Next year when you’re putting the lights up, you’ll feel differently. You’ll be looking forward to the boychild coming home from college. It will be different. You will be different. All you have to do this year is get through it the best you can.

The Haiku of Exhaustion

I was too tired last night to even write the Haiku of Exhaustion. I seriously had the whole thing written in my head, but I fell asleep while meditating, and then I decided that multiple nights with less than 5 hours of sleep needed remediation. Intervention. Luckily my brain went along with it, because god knows I’ve thought that before, and my brain doesn’t always put sanity first. But I slept…hard…and well…until Kitten wanted to pee. But that was in the morning. And I had slept…the sleep of exhaustion. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the damn haiku. Maybe I dreamed myself writing it. I’ve dreamed myself writing novels before…dreamed the entire plot and outline and writing it and then woke up and lost it all. I’m probably a pretty amazing person in my dreams.

I drew tonight…

I drew at the South Park Walkabout. Yes. I went by myself. I went Christmas shopping and actually managed One Whole Item off my list. I ran into a friend and her family and got to answer the question of “are you here by yourself?” with clarifying questions twice. I held it together…although at one point I said something about being alone forever. I hope that’s not true, but it’s not off the table…that’s for sure. I did correct myself. I guess you’re never alone when you teach middle school. You’re never alone when you have kids…even when they move out. You’re never alone when you’re a cat lady in training. So there we are. Plus in my head, I might never be alone. Yes, her eyes are crooked. I was drawing in the dark…

I was drawing at the Station Tavern. One of the pluses of being alone, dammit, is that it’s easy to find somewhere to sit at restaurants where there is never room for two. The waitress asked if I was alone too (I guess I need a shirt…or a hat…or a sign…yes…yes, it’s just me…alone…thanks for reminding me). Then I got glared down by many bearded hipsters and their leather-clad vixens for taking up space at the table. Whatever, bitches. I was here first and I’m not taking up that much room.

Yes, that is Hipster Santa awkwardly flipping you off. That was what I was drawing to the glaring people. Let the old lady eat her dinner, people. It’s her treat for the month. She deserves it. Be nice.

The food was good. I brought half of it home. I felt OK. Then I got in the car and sobbed the whole way home. Whoops! Oh well. Shit happens. In my case, tears happen. Move on. I came home, built a fire in the fireplace, meditated, and started writing this post in that room (it’s warmer than this room…I’m in my office with my sweatshirt hood on my head, wishing I knew where my fingerless gloves were right now.).

So tonight was marginally better than last night…I cut out fabric pieces last night for a whopping 17 minutes (OK, that’s more than I did today). Work stuff got in the way…work holiday party. Sigh. Such a complicated thing, my work existence. Yes, the eyelid is still twitching. The last two weeks before break…brains are mush. Grades. Sigh. Wish I still had that mental buffer against work issues that I had back in September. But now our team has been approved for the first round of one-on-one computers, rolling them out in February or so. Deep breaths. I’ll get my head around it during Winter Break. We’ll have tablets for monitoring the kids and their work. And somehow magically everything I teach is going to migrate to the web. In three months or less. Yeah. And the Easter Bunny still exists. Santa too.

Today was gym, rain, soccer, rain, and errands, and yelling, and wow. Girlchild’s whole game was in a monsoon, I think.

OK, this was in between monsoonal bursts…there was one before the game even started. I went and sat in the car and graded during that one, only coming out about 5 minutes before the game started. Then we had about three downpours in the first half…

But I stitched through them.

I didn’t stitch much. My hands were cold and I was trying to keep stuff dry. I had the big umbrella, but it’s not made for rain…only sun…so it leaks. And then the rain was going sideways for a while…

It’s really a miracle I wasn’t more soaked through…

It’s blurry because of the rain. The monsoonal rain.

The girlchild made a really nice left-footed shot at the goal…she’s on the right with her leg in the air. Everyone is looking towards her, and I can’t figure out where the ball was.

It was cold and wet, but at least I wasn’t in the mud like some people.

I’m in charge of laundry. Away games they always wear white. Nice. The friend I saw at the Walkabout said Martha Stewart would have a recommendation for removing the mud stains from the socks…they do always seem to come out of the shorts, but not the socks (different materials). Sigh.

Anyway, they won. This is a pre-official-high-school season tournament…two more games next week and then semis and finals on Saturday, which ought to be interesting, since that’s the extended family party. Not looking forward to that either. Except I’ll get to grade or stitch in the car on the way up. Sometimes I have to focus on the little things that please me…like Christmas lights…

Which is my favorite part of this season. The trees and lights…

I draw those lights all the time. Seriously, they’re in lots of my quilts. I tried to explain why once, but I don’t really know why. The mood? The color? The shape? The long string of them that can be wrapped around things? Don’t know. They’re just there. I don’t think of them as sinister, but as safe. Happy even? Maybe. I don’t know that I can qualify anything as happy.

I finished a book today, The Round House by Louise Erdrich.

I’ve always liked Erdrich’s books. Most of this book was amazingly good…there was some drifting off into history or something that lost me for a while today. It deals with conflicting federal, BLM, state, and Native laws regarding rape on Native land (or land that has territory issues, as in the book, where literally take a step one way, and it’s federal law, a step the other way, and it’s not). Her books aren’t happy, but there are happy moments. There are also tragic ones and painful ones, but there is always a good dog. It was a good book.

I like to use the cover of the book I actually read when I post about books. Strangely anal, I know. Whatever. I read it as an ebook, too, so even less relevant. So that’s the cover I had. Then I saw this cover…

Interesting. The snake? The tree? The religious connection…tenuous. I do like the graphic quality.

And then there was THIS cover.

This is my favorite, although probably also not relevant. The book is about the plight of raped Native American women, but told from the perspective of a 13-year-old son of a rape victim…so the cover is good, but? I don’t know. Maybe relevant. I have now officially caught up with all the Erdrich books I had missed in the last 8 or 10 years. I need my reading app to tell me when my favorite authors have a new book out. It sort of does, but I have to remember to click through. And then I don’t like to list a bunch of books in my To-Read list…I don’t know why, really. Because I’m afraid I will end up with a giant list of books to read and no time to read them? I do have a list…it’s on my phone. It’s just not in the app. I have to think about that…consider why I’m resisting using that function. It might be really useful. Maybe.

Anyway. That tired sleep thing is back. I got no art done today. It was a lost day. Not really, because I did a lot, but the art centers me. So I will have to make time for it tomorrow. Wow. Tomorrow just laughed at me. It doesn’t think I can do it. Well, fuck you, tomorrow. I’m a stubborn old bitch and now you’ve gotten me pissed off…so there WILL be art tomorrow (hopefully more than 17 minutes of it, but you never can tell). Sleep first though.

Art Keeps Me from Flying Apart

So I had art goals for this week off from school…and as always, I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to…but that’s OK. I got a lot done, including grading for school (that’s what I do during all those Avengers’ movies…by the way, someone needs to explain how Captain America’s actor changed his body so much in that movie, and Thor? Love Thor.), which puts me ahead for the next few weeks…that will help. I don’t have a life, so I have more time to get art done, I guess. I have even less of a life over the next few weeks…the holidays suck for that, plus the high-school soccer season is starting, plus tournaments, plus crazy school crap, plus family stuff, plus ex is going to the UK. And that Xmas holiday. Sucks. Whatever. I’ll figure it out. Anyone wanna help me with the shopping? I’m flailing.

I did all the outline quilting on the Love (not love) quilt.

It only took about 3 hours and 15 minutes.

Look. It’s Kitten. I’m not sure why I didn’t get more quilting done. It was hard to just quilt, even with music playing, because it’s too much free time for my muddled little brain.

It gets upset. Angry. So then I had to go for a walk. A long walk. With a dog.

So I did that. And found a British phone booth. Strange.

It was a beautiful day. After about 30 minutes of walking hard and fast with the dog, I was feeling a little better. Less angry. Less sad. Not a good combination, those two emotions, especially while driving a fast-moving needle past your fingers.

Nice gate…

This was my quilting setup…big table with machine (under the quilt), boychild often on the couch or the chair. Headphones on. Both of us.

It really was too dark to quilt at night…on navy blue fabric with navy blue thread. A little crazy. I do this every year. Really. I do. Go back and look at November for the last I don’t know how many years. Routine.

I meant to cut pieces out for the Celebrating Silver quilt too, but that didn’t happen at all. It could have, but I was too tired. Funny, because tonight? I’m wide awake. And it’s bloody late. Stupid brain.

Last night, I managed to clean up the fabric a bit…the mess I’d left before we went to the mountains…

It was fabric chaos…because I had wanted to get halfway through, so through the 600s…but I didn’t. Too much bullshit on Tuesday morning. Couldn’t deal. Need mental space to be able to pick fabrics. My brain has to be able to access that mellow art space where it can color the picture in my head. I wasn’t there on Tuesday morning. Too freaked out. So it waited until last night.

Babygirl has apparently decided ironing boards full of fabric are nice to sit on. Nope. Give it up.

These were all the fabrics for the Maiden, which I got done last night…

She got to be blonde. Her sister, the Mother, was a redhead. The Crone? She’ll be silver. I already know what her hair will look like.

Then I looked at the clock. Super late. I’m not doing much better tonight. I managed to finish off a bunch of stuff, bird and skull and big stick…

Don’t remember what else…I’m only at piece 747, though…so 500 to go. Not ideal.

I thought about starting the Crone tonight, but I’d still be ironing now, and I have to try to get my body back on school sleep time. That means not staying up until 2 AM. So I stopped. I’m 8 hours into the fabric-choosing stage…probably got 4-5 hours left. So it’s unlikely that I’ll finish before I go back to school. That’s OK. I also wanted to finish the quilting, and I’ve got probably 2-3 hours left there as well. Because of the setup in my office/studio, it will be easier to finish the ironing before the quilting, so I’ll do that. If I can finish the quilting in the next week or so and get the binding on, that quilt will get done this month…which is good, because it needs to be photographed before the end of January. Then the other quilt, I’ll need to get it ironed down before Christmas so I can get it stitched down and quilted over Winter Break and photographed before February 1. I’d like to start another one in that time period too, so that’s on my mind. Not sure if I’ll do a smaller one (or two) first, or if I’ll do the next one on my list. We’ll see. I don’t have to decide right now. I just need a loose plan…goals to get through for December. I’ve got those. Make lots of art to distract my stupid brain. Check.

Remember how we needed white shirts for the family photo? I found this one for the boychild…

You can buy it here. He is also planning to dye his hair and do a mohawk (he has a lot of hair, so this could be really impressive). Grandma will love it. Really. (I’m not really planning on doing this. I just dream about this type of rebellion.)

I really want to be a street artist when I grow up. Street artists have this ability to paint and realize it will be gone…sometimes in days…

Amazing how they even paint over the stuff they just painted. I wanna be that free with my art. Maybe that’s my goal in the next year. Plus I want to use spray paint and do stuff that’s really big and looks awesome in timelapse photography. Plus I want to be on a couch and spray paint the ground. I have really simple needs.

And I need this pregnancy app for when I teach human reproduction…

Unfortunately, it’s not free. The useful stuff rarely is…because education has so much spare cash lying around? Seriously…my students would really benefit from this.

My mood today? I got through. I did stuff. I ran errands. I went to the gym. I finished a book, the second in a series…Crossed by Allie Condie.

It was pretty good. More YA dystopia where we try to eradicate anomalies (and disease) from society and realize that would fail because humans have free will and all. Plus love. You know. The ending was a little iffy, but there’s a third book in the series, so they had to set up for that. I would have done it differently, but I haven’t managed to write my breakout novel yet, so I can’t really complain.

Life. I get through it. Art keeps me from flying apart.

The IQF Houston Experience

You read about the quilts…now let’s talk about the entire experience. Overwhelming. Yup. Totally. It doesn’t help that Texas is two hours later than here, which means I keep having to wake up at ungodly hours to do stuff, so I’m only half coherent. It really didn’t help that it was Halloween, because crafty women (whether quilters or stitchers or whatever) are often a truly frightening tribal experience when in a large group, wearing similar clothing, or weird hairpieces, or sparkly light-up hats. I can’t deal with that stuff…although, if mom had a hat like that, I probably could have kept track of her better.

So there’s the hotel experience. There’s the flying. There’s the classes (I don’t take those any more). There’s the famous people (in the quilt world). There’s a million quilts. And then there’s the vendors.

Now I don’t really use a lot of supplies in my quilting. I have a light table to beat all light tables (after 23 years of quilting, I do not consider this a bad thing…plus it was free). I have my mom’s hand-me-down sewing machine, which is a pretty damn good machine. I do buy fabric (although not a crazy amount, despite what it may look like to the uninitiated), batting, and thread. I don’t actually have a massive thread stash…it all fits in one plastic doohickey container (if you saw my mom’s stash, you’d realize this is NOTHING). I have some pens and a ton of embroidery thread (remainders from my crazy-quilting days). I have those applique ironing sheets…I have about 5 or 6 of those. That’s probably more than most people, especially when you consider the big ones aren’t cheap, but I use them a lot and I need that many on your average quilt. I have pens and sketchbooks and paper. I have Wonder Under. I have my stitching gloves, pins, and safety pins for pinbasting. I have scissors. I don’t have a ton of scissors, but it’s probably more than your average noncrafty household. I have colored pencils that I occasionally use on fabric, usually because some handdyed fabric ran and I need to cover what it did. I have needles…lots of those.

People often give me doodads and stuff for quilting, like special holders for quilting or different fusibles to try, but I’m kinda stuck in my creating ways at the moment, for whatever reason, so I don’t really use a lot else. I do like handdyed fabrics, though, and I’m often looking for more of that.

So when I go to a massive vendor mall like IQF Houston, I’m mostly overwhelmed…and underwhelmed. I don’t really buy patterns. I did buy two this time, and I’m not really sure why…

I sat there and listened to a woman ask the seller about 5 times, “but what are they FOR???” and the seller kept saying, “They’re not really FOR anything.” Well, yeah. Do I need a candle mat? Not really. Whatever. They’re cats. And owls. And apparently I needed cute cats and owls. Don’t judge.

I wandered into a lot of booths, mostly embellishment stuff and threads (hand embroidery, which I really don’t need more of), and then I got to the handdyed fabrics of Laura Wasilowski and Frieda Anderson. Now you’re talking…and this is the ONLY place that really got my business…

I know how to dye fabrics. I just don’t have the time or patience to do this stuff.

Ten yards. Did I need 10 more yards? Don’t ask that. I walked past a million other fabric, doodad, pattern, and machine booths and this is what I got. The Artfabrik store is here if you like this kind of stuff. I got 8 of Frieda’s and 2 of Laura’s. I don’t know what that means. Mom was an enabler. I would have probably only gotten two or so if it were just me, but they were offering one free yard with the purchase of four, and then mom mentioned my constant need for more browns (as she said, something about my obsession with DIRT at the moment, like it’s a BAD thing). So I got more brown. And green. And there you are. I should admit that I didn’t pay for them…mom gifted me.

I look at the long-arm machines, but don’t really need one. If I can push and pull a 72″ by 84″ quilt through my machine, it’s unlikely that I need anything fancier than that. If I did, I have friends with such devices…but they probably would take issue with my need to quilt at 1 in the morning. So I walk past all those long-arm booths.

Mostly I would kamikaze through an aisle of vendors, avoiding the crazy people, going into maybe one or two booths each row, and then waiting at the end for mom to make her way through (she’s not a slow woman, trust me, but she likes to look at more stuff than I do). I lost her multiple times. She must have run past me somehow. I was watching the man who had to guard the mens’ room (I love that…they needed a guard because the line to the womens’ was so long). She must have snuck by me.

Food in Houston: we ended up at one of the same restaurants as last time, with a longish wait because there are a million women in town and they will only walk so far to get food. Every restaurant you went into had long tables full of quilters. I have not heard the tribal call, so I usually just eat with mom. She’s going deaf and her hearing aids don’t work well in noisy restaurants, so I get to translate the Southern waiter accents for her. Really, I’m not yelling at her…she can’t hear unless you yell.

I did go to the gym one morning…amusingly, there were only 4 other people in there, and two were men (I recognized one as the husband of a well-known quilter…that was a little creepy…the wonders of the blog world).

I tried to find plain milk in a variety of places, but Houston apparently thinks milk should be chocolate or it should go home. I finally had to buy milk in a cup from Starbucks, paying more for the milk than for a cup of tea…crazy, that. Houston also doesn’t believe in sourdough bread.

The view of some office building seemed to fascinate me…

Or maybe it was just the sky reflected in the building…

We stayed in the Hilton this time, a much shorter walk, which was nice…plus everyone staying there seemed to be a quilter…and you could see the Convention Center from our window…

Of course, when I hung out with friends, I could still see my hotel, so I’m not sure we needed to be THAT close…

I’m not a social-enough beast to really use this experience the way I probably should. I did better this year about talking to people, but I think I still prefer the intimacy of the Quilt National experience, where there are fewer people, but all the artists are there in one space.

And today, in the mail, the announcement for Portland’s new version of the show, Quilt! Knit! Stitch!…so Long Beach (so close! so convenient!) is gone and Portland requires money for a flight and hotel and food. Not happening the summer before I send the boychild to college. It’s OK. I will survive. I have all of you here, on the net. I probably talk to more of you here than I do in real life.

Reviewing IQF Houston 2013

Yes, I took pictures. I’m never very logical about it. Sometimes I take pictures because the piece speaks to me…sometimes it’s because I want to complain about it. I try to stay away from the latter, but there are a couple in here. I don’t take a whole lot of traditional quilt photos, mostly because I find them boring. I suspect there are traditional quilters who walk right past the art quilts in the same way. So this is Kathy’s highly selective (I take fewer photos when I’m tired!) reconstruction of maybe 1/32nd of the International Quilt Festival at Houston, 2013, remembering that she had already seen West Coast Wonders and the Dinner @8 exhibit in Long Beach, and somehow she missed the placemats completely…I SAW them…I just didn’t have the mental energy to photograph any of them. My bad. But since most of you don’t come here for my quilt-show reporting, I’m not going to worry too much about my lame-ass reporting style.

Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry (sweetie, it’s too many names…I get why you’re keeping all of them, I really do, but please…maybe just calling yourself Caryl would be good) has created a series of thirty 30-inch-square pieces that celebrate her thirty years of quiltmaking, referencing her past work, themes, etc., and using her fabric collections to complete them.

So. Here’s what I think. First of all, the more power to her. She has a strong body of work that is well-liked by many, the exhibit already has 8 venues it’s traveling to, and she definitely has the technical ability to be showcased like this. I liked being able to look closely at her insane stitching…

(Electric Ellipses #2)

Especially in the more cellular-looking pieces and the two beach sand pieces.

(Casting a Long Shadow #2)

That said…why redo ideas from the last 30 years? I don’t get it? I know it might be hard to put a retrospective together if a lot of your work has sold, and I do get what you’re saying about the exhibit being pulled together by all of them being the same size, but…eh. Make New Work. Put some old work in the show. I don’t understand. It was popular, though, so apparently I am in the minority. I want to see new work, though. You have a new life…how will that change your art?

Bodil Gardner had at least 4 pieces in Houston…with two in the SAQA: People and Portraits exhibit with mine. I’ve always liked her work…it’s quirky and graphic and slightly off, but Martha Sielman mentioned something in the People and Portraits Walk and Talk that I’d never really thought about…her work is inordinately cheery. There’s never a sad moment. It’s just nice and joyful and chaotic and happy (unlike my own work).

This is Santa Lucia and that is one BIG and happy spiral-eared dog. Maybe I need to channel some Bodil. Maybe she’d let me come stay with her for a while. One of the pieces in the People and Portraits exhibit had a large central female figure, like her pieces (and mine) often do, and there was a coffee cup balanced on her shoulder, like I often do. Sielman said that Gardner says it refers to how women often share a cup of coffee (or tea) together as part of their socializing, and that if she were doing men, she would probably do a beer stein instead.

Another featured artist in People and Portraits is Sonia Bardella, whose faces have a particular quality to them.

This is Venice’s Carnival, which takes place near where she lives.

The best part is the detail she puts into the clothing in contrast to the skillfully painted faces.

Dianne Firth made four elements pieces for an exhibit, with Wind currently showing with the traveling Quilt National exhibit. This is Fire…

Which, like Wind, is much more stunning and vibrant in person…and was based on the volcanic eruptions in Iceland in 2010.

Betty Busby curated an exhibit of quilts called A Walk in the Wild, a SAQA exhibit of artists from New Mexico. Below is Busby’s piece, Desert Fox.

All the pieces were similar sizes…this is Where Earth and Sky Meet by Susan Szajer.

Her work deserved a detail shot…there are even tiny beads in there…

This one…Eight Ravens by Judith Roderick…was one of my favorite quilts in the show.

Her silk-painting technique adds a lot of interest and depth to her pieces, which have that graphic quality that I love, coming out of the printmaking world.

And the subject matter of the ravens is also a favorite. This piece glowed in person.

There were two dinosaur pieces by Shannon Conley that I liked…S Is for #4 is below…

Coelophysus bauri is the dino depicted in both quilts, apparently was thought to be a cannibal until recently. In the quilt above, Conley shows him in his Triassic-era habitat, with S Is for #3 below showing him in modern-day New Mexico.

Conley is a scientist who put real teeth on that first quilt…hopefully not valuable fossils (naw, they’re polymer clay). Here’s a link to her posts about these quilts.

Kathy York is one of my favorite brightly colored artists…you’ll notice I photographed lots of bright-colored quilts (a dream? hope? wish?). I posted York’s video of populating this quilt, Park Place, a while ago…

You can see it here on her blog post where she writes about making this quilt…

This is Stella in Yellow by Joanell Connolly.

Stella is the dog in the raincoat, rescued from the animal shelter. I love the contrast and the pattern, with the pitiful-looking dog off to the side.

Both Stella and this one were part of a pet exhibit, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs, bringing awareness to saving animal lives. This is One Cat, Two Cat by Laura Bisagna.

Bisagna had been feeding a stray gray cat, and every day it would come out and eat, then go behind the house, and seemingly come out and eat again…until she realized there were two gray cats.

This piece was deceptively simple-looking until you studied it up close. This is Winter by Laurie Weiner.

The piece is whole-cloth, hand-dyed, and trapunto, but the quilting is what drew me to it…

Intense pattern and texture makes up this piece. I saw a lot of this close, patterned quilting and I’m always attracted to it, which is amusing, because I so don’t quilt like that…but it’s true that type of quilting would not lend itself to the images I create…so I am happy to admire it in other people’s work (and call them insane behind their backs…while they say the same about me and my 2000-piece quilts).

The sky drew me to this piece…In the Bleak Midwinter by Ruth Powers.

Being a Southern Californian, we rarely see winter landscapes such as these.

I always like to show Tanya Brown what pieces hers are hanging with…so there’s Under the Gingko Tree…

featuring her painted whole-cloth work and crazy tiny stitching…

As well as her boy actually standing still…a minor miracle in itself.

This one drew me to it with all the crazy detail…It’s a Crazy Life by Gail Thomas.

Gail’s own beautiful, long white hair was used to quilt this piece as she recovered from health issues…

Her painting on the fabric is very colorful and detailed.

This piece drew my eye because of parts of it…overall, I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I liked the faces. This is You Are Here by Victoria Findlay Wolfe…

The people are from digital photos manipulated in Photoshop and printed on fabric.

It’s an interesting use of a traditional pattern with modern tones to it…I’m not sure I like the whole thing (the silver lamé really bugs me), but I liked those parts.

This quilt had lots of funky details in it…and I kinda like how it’s just all globbed together…

And the use of pattern in the fabrics is really interesting too…

This is Japanese Calendar by Fumi Kido. The Japanese do often have a certain feel to their quilts…

I’m not sure what that’s about…because they often use American patterns, and it STILL feels Japanese to me. This one has a different appeal to me, though…very stylized but with those details.

I do hail from an applique background…and this one was beautifully done. This is Four Loons and Friends by Patricia Sellinger.

The symmetry and design in this quilt are stunning…and she embellished the birds with beads as well.

This is an original design.

I liked this one because of the flame-like blobs wandering across the design. This is May Your Burdens Be Light by Kazuko Covington. This is an original design using New York Beauty blocks, made after the tsunami that destroyed her hometown.

Those blobs now look like tsunami waves…

This one won best of show…Chihuly’s Gondola by Melissa Sobotka. That’s $10,000, people. It’s a beautiful quilt, but it is from a photograph of Chihuly’s installation in Texas from a few years back.

So tell me this…is there a difference in the art applied between Sobotka’s copy of another artist’s work (is this a Sobotka or a Chihuly?) and the Jane Sassaman (original design) below? I think yes…but I wasn’t a juror in this show (and probably never will be invited to be one either). I think Chihuly deserves a healthy percentage of the prize.

This is Jane Sassaman’s Illinois Album, also an award winner, but in my eyes, a much more deserving one.

You decide.

Another Bodil Gardner happy piece, this is I Arise from Dreams…

Sheila Frampton-Cooper had two of her graphic, colorful pieces in the show…this is Lair of the Amethyst Deva…

I see legs…Sheila’s another tight, detailed quilter, which suits her big, bold, abstract work.

Nearby was another somewhat controversial piece…yes, it’s abstract; yes, it’s colorful, even pretty…Roses in the Window by Carol Morrissey. On the surface, an original design from a photograph she took…but how did she get all those circles? Is it the same place my mom gets her circles? Where is her hand in this quilt?

Does what equipment we use to create a piece make it more art or less art? You’ll notice I have no pictures of quilts with digitized photos where the artist has printed it out full size and just stitched over it. I need to see the artist’s hand in the work…I need to see what they’ve changed or made their own. Feel free to BE a photographer (there was a great photography show at IQF), but if you’re going to put it on fabric, make sure there is a purpose to that. Why fabric? Why not just print a photograph on paper and frame it and be done with it? It’s something to think about…

Another Kathy York…this is You Are What You Eat…

Speaking of having your hand in your artwork, York made the batik flowers herself.

This piece…I still need this one explained. The graphic nature explains why I like it, but there is some weird stuff going on in this quilt. This is Alice’s Kitchen (obviously Alice in Wonderland) by Miki Murakami…I love that this is so NOT typically Japanese.

All she says is that this is how she imagined a kitchen in Alice’s story, even though there wasn’t one. I think I want to talk to this woman.

Sue Bleiweiss makes wonderfully graphic and deceptively simple pieces. This is Tutti Frutti City.

This one intrigued me…it was just plain weird, yet cool. This is The Birders by Suzanne Marshall, an original design inspired by a 1565 manuscript…ahhh…there’s why it’s weird.

I’ve taken pictures of her work before…liking the weird medieval qualities to her work…

Just look at that unhappy face.

This one caught my eye because I couldn’t (at first) figure out what it was…I thought maybe it was leaky tubes of paint. Silly me…it’s just Oregon Buoys by Jane Haworth.

I like my idea better…but I guess it caught my eye. Chaos and color.

Another Frampton-Cooper piece, this is Venus in the Garden, named by her sister, who saw Venus Flytraps (I see an angry parrot…that wouldn’t be a nice name though).

This one had a stunning use of color…this is Antelope Canyon by Kimberly Lacy.

And another winner, Tuning Fork #11 by Heather Pregger.

It’s a very graphic piece…she does lots of pieces like this, though. I wonder about that. I guess it’s a different challenge to work abstractly with the same shapes than to do what I do. (It would drive me bonkers though!)

OK, so there were all these cow quilts…something to do with a book. I liked this one because?

Come on. Guess. OK. It’s a cow skelly. How can you not love a cow skelly? Actually, I was walking past this part of the exhibit when someone pointed to the earrings on the cow and said, “Honestly, some of these quilts you cannot use as a QUILT!” Oh my. No ma’am, you can’t (she wasn’t old…younger by far than I am). So. There you have it. It’s a MooSkellyNotQuilt. Actually, it’s Dia de los MOOertos by Patricia Ward.

This one…it’s cute. It’s tiny. It’s beautifully made. It’s a prize winner. This is Masanobu Miyama’s Wind, a picture of the artist’s dog.

The statement talks about an original microfused applique technique. I do not know what this is, although micro means small and those pieces are freakin’ small (I should know).

This one caught my eye because of the fabrics…in the US, we are so into our cotton and occasionally a silk or two…this piece, The Berlin Bear by Marjan van der Heijden, was made completely with leftovers…

That were stitched together sort of haphazardly, but in a beautiful way…

Truly amazing use of fabric.

This Japanese landscape is so Japanese because of the taupe, but the imagery is so American…I wonder what the Japanese countryside actually looks like and why this appeals to them. This piece is A Place to Long For, by Aiko Yokoyama.

The fabric and design is beautiful…I just wonder why it’s so appealing.

So that’s my take on IQF 2013…there were probably quilts I didn’t photograph just because I was tired or in a mood (I was in a mood a lot), so don’t take it badly if yours isn’t here…mine is just one set of slightly jaded, tired, and miserable eyes among 60,000 viewers. I do know that I will miss IQF coming to Long Beach, California, because it was cheap and easy to get to, and I don’t think I’ll be going to Houston again for a good, long while, but I did enjoy some of the quilts quite a bit. I’ll talk more about the experience in general at another time. I do provide artist’s links when I can easily find them and confirm that they belong to the artist. If your work is here and you have a link you’d like me to use, please let me know.

Deep Breaths

I don’t even know if I can put a coherent post together tonight. Long conversation helped my mind settle…realizing that when I make art, whether it’s the drawing, tracing, cutting, ironing, or sewing, that one of the reasons I feel peace then is that I am in the moment right then…I’m not worried about the future or diving into the past and hurt and regrets…I am just right there, right then…and that is the closest to normal (Kathy normal, not your normal) that I have been in months.

So it makes sense that I should do more of it, right?

Things I took away from the quilt festival today:

Quilters help well. They like to gather forces together and fix things that need it. Case in Point: Libby Lehman suffered a stroke some months ago and paying for her treatment has been an issue. You can read updates here on her Caring Bridge Libby Lehman site. I like to think of most quilters as people who share information (and fabric and thread), but they do also seem to take care…whether it’s taking care of their own, or homeless animals, or what’s for dinner.

The Japanese: does the Japanese countryside look like that? I’ll have to post that picture later…but much of their work seems so Americanized that it makes me wonder what Japan is really like. I think I will have to go back there some day (last time I was there was when I was 9 months old…don’t remember much).

I apparently have a crazy brain, but not in a bad way (more than one person told me this after either hearing me talk or seeing my quilts). I do not consider this a problem. I tried to have mom record my little talk, but technology beat her and we have no video. We should have practiced more. Apparently the app is not intuitive. Enough.

Waiting at the end of every aisle. Mom is like an errant bug, illogically traveling based on some unseen pheromones that drag her here and there. I stand in one place, waiting for her, and people keep wanting me to move around and get out of their way. I am like a post, an immovable column. I lose her multiple times. She is not following directions.

My view of Houston from the gym…

My view of the Convention Center from the gym…

My view of life from the gym? Cannot contain in photo.

Fabric…the only thing I bought…or was gonna buy, until mom jumped in…

All hand dyed stuff by Frieda Anderson and Laura Wasilowski.
The iron set up by the window (for the view)…

And messing with sewing on the floor (a logical place to sew, if you ask me)…

Writing this post…

Home tomorrow. Hope to bring back some of the wisdom and peace that came from tonight’s conversation, but know my brain will do what it does…even when I try to remind it what’s best, it does not always listen. But I will get there eventually. Deep breaths.

It’s Not Easy

First of all, I’ve been awake since 3:30 AM, so anything I write should be suspect. Second of all, I’m in Houston, Texas, home of the International Quilt Festival, where approximately 60,000 people (yes, mostly women) will attend the quilt and vendor show.

Why the hell am I here? I have two quilts in one of the special exhibits, so I came for that. I’ll be doing a Walk and Talk of the show (I will only be talking about mine) tomorrow at 11AM (tomorrow is Friday, in case that’s confusing, because honestly, I don’t what time it is at the moment).

Mom came with me…she will try to record me tomorrow, but we haven’t persuaded her phone to DO such things yet, so I don’t hold out great hopes. I did much better this time…I actually talked to people at the SAQA Meet and Greet (be impressed…I think it’s because I am seriously sleep-deprived).

I woke up this morning thinking, “Normal dreams?” I’m having dreams of a normal life, perhaps even MY normal life…like not sad and stressed and walking in a fog (I have now typed ‘dog,’ ‘fig,’ and ‘fof’), but like normal-feeling. Maybe that’s why waking up is so difficult. Reality doesn’t feel normal. Reality feels bad.

Everything is tainted by associations with the past nine…twenty-two (??) years. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without feeling it resonate with something that now hurts. Airports, airplanes, sitting on a plane, sitting by the gates. Bloody hell, some peace please??? Can I just have something that’s just mine and not attached to all this crap?

I sat there on the plane as mom talked to some other quilter, and I hurt. I read, I stitched, I tried to sleep, and the hurt tied my guts in knots until I couldn’t sleep. Or eat. I turned the music up louder and worked on my stitching callous.

Sigh.

I’m better now. A lot of the quilt show doesn’t interest me…there are lots of quilts that just don’t even touch me (and I’m not being very open-minded at the moment…it needs to seriously catch my eye for me to even get closer). We’ve only made it through half the quilts (saw mine!) and skimmed a portion of the vendors.

One woman told me I should exhibit in Europe because they’re not prudes like the Americans (not her exact words). Another woman told me never to lose my unique style (I don’t think I could do that if I tried). I met some people I already knew and some I’d never met but had known for a while.

I need to go to sleep (mom was down for the count an hour ago). We’re getting up to go to the gym in the morning before the show opens (so virtuous). It’s not easy being here, but it’s not easy being anywhere at the moment, so I might as well be uncomfortable here. It’s not fun, but it’s a change, and change can’t be bad at the moment.