Cocooning…

Friday. Last Friday of Winter Break. I’ve been really out of it this break…not sure why, although I can blame some of it on being sick for the middle third and then feeling like I never caught up. I’m never ready to go back, so it’s a moot point to say it again, but here I am. In terms of classwork, I have one class of packets left to grade, one whole academic assignment, and two smaller one-class assignments. Plus I need a worksheet done by Thursday and my notes from December make no sense. So there’s that. Fun times. I might figure that out this weekend. Or not. I’m not really motivated to get ‘er done in terms of school, except to finish the grading because progress report grades are coming up. Soon. And I have this quilt to finish, plus the deck railings, which are taking forever to paint. It’s been wet and cold and nothing is drying until today, when it’s still cold, but there’s a breeze and that’s helping. So I have three coats plus primer on 3/4s of the sides and I need to do the other side. I was hoping this project would be done by this weekend, and that’s not happening. It never does. Seriously. DIY is torture. School feels the same way sometimes, and so does housecleaning.

I did manage to finish trimming all the Wonder Under; honestly, I finished the first large chunk of it in the first day, then the last little bit last night.

Scribble slept through most of it.

Then after I finished trimming last night, I sorted them all…

At this point, Scribble was less than helpful…she kept seeing shadows under the bins and shoving them apart to get to them.

Fun times. I managed to get it all sorted despite all that.

I also bought background fabric, so I’m hopefully ironing down to fabric starting tonight. The office is a bit of a mess, and I need to fix a pair of pants first, plus put away fabric from the last quilt and move some stuff out of the way so I can get to the fabric bins. But it’s not a lot to do. Hopefully I’ll finish ironing to fabric in the next week and start trimming. We’ll see how that goes with going back to school.

I went out to meet stitching friends last night…this one is almost done.

It’s the 9th tree in Sue Spargo’s Rooted, so the last of them. Plenty left to do on it.

You’d think when it’s this cold that all the cats would be curled up. This was only because Bowie wanted the blue blanket and me.

And Scribble was already there.

Babies sleep a lot.

Anyway. Next step in the quilt. Scribble tends to follow me, so presumably she’ll be in the office while I iron. She’s set herself up before in the sleep spot Kitten used to frequent.

I wish I had something insightful to say about the ICE shootings in the last few days, but it’s beyond me. I just finished an ICE-related quilt with a body bag in it, not because I can see the future, but because people had already died in ICE custody. This is heinous. It’s not law enforcement, it’s not making my world safer. My world is not safe at all, and I’m an old white lady. I can’t imagine the fear and anxiety being a person of color or someone in the middle of the immigration process must feel…I just know it’s wrong.

There are a lot of wrong things in the world right now…some of them have always been there, but we’ve made some attempt to make them better. And now that’s not even happening.

This one applies to so many things…

Back to vaccinations and health recommendations. So many idiots. So much not learning happening.

Anyway. If you like my work, odds are your brain is going through the same confused contortions mine is. With no solution in sight. So many lies. So much bad information. So disheartening.

It’s late in the day…I need to go buy some cat food and figure out where to get one skein of DMC floss. Then grade some stuff and clean some stuff so I can iron later. Read a bit. Eat something healthy…or not. Resign myself to going back to work in a few days. Fight for the time to have a life outside of my job. Go back to ceramics…it’s been two weeks since I’ve been there. Sucks. Work on getting the gym back into my selfcare regime. HAVE a selfcare regime that isn’t just about cocooning in the house with sweats or pajamas on. OK, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Long Shot…

OK, so struggling to make art, but I have managed to get into a new show, get rejected for the first time ever to a ceramics show (!)…also never gotten into one, but that’s OK, and mostly packed up another quilt to send to a show. Plus organized photos and sizes for a 2-person show in Virginia this spring, which needed to be done as well. Organization is hard. Art management is hard. Having to be at a school board meeting to persuade the damn people in charge of the money that we are the resource they should be supporting? Also hard. Followed by an early meeting this morning and tomorrow morning, also hard. Plus my knee was acting up yesterday; actually had to wear a knee brace all day…and we did a lab, so it was kinda necessary that I be mobile. I don’t know what’s up with my knee, but it can fuck off. I do lots of physical stuff to stabilize it, and then it just randomly decides…nope…today I’m not gonna. Ugh.

Anyway…I did do art-related stuff. Monday night, I sorted all the Wonder Under, so technically I’m ready to iron to fabrics…

Hopefully tonight? I need to finish packing this quilt up so I can get a shipping estimate, and then I need to clean up the fabrics from the previous quilt. That might take all my available time tonight, but I hope not.

I made it to ceramics after finishing grades on Monday afternoon. For once, they canceled a staff meeting so we could get actual required work done. I had spent a goodly chunk of the weekend getting grades done, so I finished what little was left and headed for the studio. My piece is waiting for the head to go in the glaze fire and my tree to go in the bisque fire. The rest of it is at home, waiting to be put together and fancified. Fabric and paint I think. So I wanted to try out some of the things I had listed as want-tos before…one of which was sgraffito frames. I may have thought myself into crazytown again though. Instead of just doing a plain square or rectangle, I got fancy. And complicated.

Twice.

We’ll see how it goes. It’s something new anyway. And smaller. By far.

And yes, I entered my first ceramics show ever and got rejected. I’m OK with that. It was a long shot. But you know, in the beginning of my quilt career, Quilt National was a long shot too…so we all get there.

This sweet weird thing, Why. Not., got into Art Quilt Elements.

I entered one of my big complicated pieces and then two smaller pieces that were not as complicated, both in construction and concept, and the big one did not get in. Which is fine. I made this piece in between two big complicated political pieces. And it is its own kind of complicated. It will be at the Wayne Art Center in Wayne, PA, opening the same weekend I’ll be in Virginia at the closing ceremonies of my 2-person show. Same coast! For once. But too far to get to, I think.

Anyway. My art travels. Sometimes I get to travel too. Just not as often.

OK. Today. Sigh. I don’t think I got into pilates this afternoon, but I’m taking my stuff just in case. I have an annoying meeting this morning, then am getting kids through ideas about force and mass and motion all day. Then hopefully pilates and then book club. I know I read the book, but I don’t remember which one it was. As always. One day at a time. Then hopefully getting this space clean enough to start the fun task of picking fabrics. I really do enjoy that part. So that’s a good thing.

So Much Easier

I’m back home. Briefly. Like four days, then gone again. I seem to have squished all my travel into a two-week time period. Like it’s almost not worth unpacking before packing again. Different trips though. For the residency, I needed to take seven thousand modes of artmaking. For visiting my daughter, I can stick to a sketchbook and some stitching. I do want to finish up using the dyes today…I should already be doing that, but I got distracted by things. I am very distractable. Distracted. Possibly distracting.

So here’s the last bit of things from the week at Dorland…this is where I dye painted every day in the morning and the evening, when the wind stopped being a crazy dick.

Sometimes it would pick up again right at 9:30 AM; sometimes it wouldn’t even have died down at 7 PM. I’d get a random 20-mph gust and be holding onto everything. But that was part of the challenge. Get up! Get off the chair, out of bed, and go paint before the wind or the dark comes! I’m having that problem today…no wind to make me move my ass. But I will paint today. As soon as I’m done with this, I’ll go set up the table in the driveway and paint until I run out of prepped fabric and/or dyes. I think I can do another 3 or 4. I like it! I don’t like all of what came out of it, but some of them I LOVE.

This is the last one I painted up there; the dyes washed out a lot (but I don’t have a picture of that yet).

I still love it. I’m going to wash all of them this week in the washing machine, final wash. Then decide what to do with them next.

Here’s these two washed out…I love the different ranges of brown in the top one. It all looked the same before I washed it out.

And the bottom one is perfect! By the way, I finally got test results and contact from Sharp…the test results popped up around midday (yes, I was obsessively checking the goddamned app every hour). Benign! Damage from last year’s surgery, probably from the radio transmitter thing they put in, because it went in in a different location from the surgery. Probably next year’s MRI will show damage from this biopsy. Sigh. Thanks body for inflammation and necrosis.

I also finished the second leg on this thing…

Just needs arms and a head. Not sure when I’ll get to that. I like doing it, but it’s so freakin’ slow. Not that the other methods I use are fast really.

I also tested out some of the other mark-making devices I had around the house. I need to wash these out and see what survives.

Some of those line drawings need color or something.

This view is of the valley during the day.

Oh man, I killed so many spiders in the house, mostly littles, but some bigs. One might have been a scorpion and one was a yick ugh camel spider/wind scorpion, not really either of those. It was under my bag when I moved it, went under the wood stove. Then the leather chair. I was obsessively watching it because it was huge. Went to bed and it moved across the room, under another bag (or worse…there were TWO of them). It was moving sluggishly and then sped the fuck up, when I screamed and brought in the shoe. I was gonna put it outside, but fucking no, not if you are that speedy and aggressive. Apparently it doesn’t have venom though…it just wants to be UNDER. Blech. No pictures. You can google it if you want.

I think this was from Sunset Point, which has a similar view to my porch. Closer to sunset.

There was a need to see the sun set each night. I’m going to be honest and say I never saw it rise. Mornings are not my thing. I did do one hike, but didn’t bring poles, so I didn’t do the whole thing. Probably did a mile and a half. Was strangely paranoid about wild animals and/or falling. Anxiety is a fun thing. It manifests wherever the fuck it wants.

Here was the indoor space when I had multiple projects going. I was in a Zoom or webinar, one project on the porch, a pile of stuff under the table, sewing machine to the left, the beginnings of the woman on the right. It was chaos.

Probably a smaller space wouldn’t have worked for me. I didn’t play with everything, but I did play with a lot of things. It was good; it was nice that it was close enough for me to fill the car with things to try. A longer trip? I’d focus on one type of thing, I think, and probably not the dye painting. It is chemical/supply heavy and a pain in the ass, honestly. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it again. I just am aware of the time suck now.

Once a day, y’all.

Some things from what I was reading over the week…

Drawing boobies whenever you want to. Still Christopher Moore’s Anima Rising.

This is intriguing…

From Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark.

Terrifying to think of…

More about education…

It’s mind boggling. But true. As is this…

Not my Supreme Court…still.

On fire.

I didn’t consciously know about the poet Andrea Gibson…I don’t follow a ton of poets. Maybe that’s a problem. But their stuff is beautiful.

And the world is less full and rich with their being gone…although their poetry remains.

While I was gone, two artist friends of mine were at the Lubeznik show in Indiana…in front of my work.

Which was cool to see.

I got home and unpacked a lot (not all of it) and cleaned part of the fridge, ironically, because to check out of the cottage, I had to clean it to save the cleaning fee, and I probably worked harder there than I ever do at home. That said, there were some things I pulled out of the cupboard that were sticky and I cleaned them prior to using them. But my fridge at home is mostly gross and I needed to get rid of some stuff, so I did all that. Kitten is now full time closed up in my office, to avoid Bowie interactions. So I’m living with a litter tray and food and water. This will be a little problematic when I need to start ironing tonight, but we’ll manage. She’s seriously old and needs peace. She’s currently on an old office chair and can jump down for what she needs. What she really needs today is a bath. Maybe later.

I also sorted the Wonder Under I finished cutting out up at Dorland…

I was tired after that. I’ll need to do some cleaning in here to be able to work on the next step. I also need to go into the ceramics studio…not sure when that is happening. I’ve got three doc appointments in two days (and one is a root canal, fun times), plus pilates (my hip is looking forward to that). Still trying to figure out the patterns of my blood sugar. Oh! And I need to make a video for Quilt National…I should do that today. Maybe. Maybe I should clean first.

Nova was glad to see me yesterday…

Lots of love. The others too…

OK. Dye painting today. I should shower first. I have pilates later today, but in the middle of the day, like a freak. I need to eat something. Might go straight to eating lunch. I have a headache. Sleep related? Not sure. My hip really hurts for some reason. The weather is weird, all cloudy and delightful. I should take advantage of that. So many things to do! That’s why being gone was so much easier.

Unchaos

Oy. It’s Wednesday. That was quick. I’m getting not much done on anything. I mean, I must be doing something…I just don’t see a lot of progress on any of it. Ah well. I do like progress. I like to check things off boxes and cross things off lists. I like lists to get shorter. Probably shouldn’t have become a teacher then…they don’t get shorter until summer. At some point this week, I will get more efficient. Just not sure when. I got one lab set up, another one put away, then another one set up. I have sub plans for the literacy afternoon tomorrow, but not for Monday’s knee doctor. That could be problematic. I think I can do that one as an EdPuzzle, but it’s gonna take me an hour just to set it up. Grades still due. Evaluation paperwork still not done. Can’t even get my head around that one. Sigh. Whatever.

Art stuff has been limited this week too. I did finally finish cutting things out on Monday! A miracle. 21 1/2 hours of miracle.

I finished during book club. Like the Christmas socks? My feet have been cold at night. Nothing else is.

Then I set up the sorting chaos…

I guess it’s really the sorting unchaos. That box on top is all the pieces I cut, and then I sort them by 100s to make it easier to iron them together. Can’t imagine shuffling through a box of over 2000 pieces to find one. I spent almost an hour getting to this point.

Sorting the little tiny pieces takes forever. I put a pile in my hand and just sort one by one. This table is actually missing three more boxes sitting off to the side for the 1800s-2000s.

Last night, I went to the gym, which was good. I also finished my book and cooked dinner, and tried to grade a little, but yeah, was not efficient, so I didn’t start sorting until after 10 PM. Not great. I still have all these to sort.

It’s probably 30-45 minutes worth of sorting. So that’s tonight. I have pilates but I don’t have to cook. I do have to grade first. But I’ll set an alarm to remind me to stop. I swear.

Here’s a video tour of all the boxes except those last three…

This is boring, I must admit. I get tired of standing there and sorting. It does serve a purpose though. Makes the next step a million times easier.

So yeah. Getting there. Not there yet. Don’t see a big chunk of time in the next week to work on this. Will demand my Day Job Brain allow for an hour a night. Day Job Brain is freaking out about workload. Shhh. Nice Brain. Be good. It’ll be fine. We’ll grade like the wind. I just looked at Saturday’s schedule. Ha! Fuck. OK. It’s fine. It’s Wednesday. I could be super efficient between now and then.

Forgot this picture…when I got home yesterday, all the animals were in one room. It was weird. They don’t really socialize much. It’s usually one in this room, one in that room, and one that follows us all over.

I guess my homecoming was exciting.

Anyway, so I’ll be finishing the sorting tonight and then coming in here to the studio to try and straighten up enough that I can iron. I have two boxes of fabric I need to wash because of the cat…maybe I’ll start that tonight as well. Who knows? I could be amazing tonight. Last night? Nope. Was not. Not at all. Finished a book, though. That’s a thing. I’m allowed to do that. Should do more of it.