How to Do Stuff…

The summer heat is here, although not as bad as it will be in September. It’s muggy and the air moves slowly, though, and I just sweat no matter what. My head is full of chaos…making decisions is difficult at the moment. My head is doing all the trip planning, making sure I have everything I need. The bathing suit top came in today and fits perfectly (thanks to the goddess of boobage), we ordered a new ice chest last night that will stay cold longer, and this morning, I started packing things up into stuff coming in the car vs stuff being shipped in a box. Weight is a lot of that or if it can spill or if I can live without it if it doesn’t show up. All stressful. I bought a new ironing pad that can survive the heat of the car…no matter what, our trip is going to be overly warm. Crater Lake looks like it will be in the high 90s (ugh). The wonder of traveling in the summer…this is why we like spring instead.

Quiltwise, I finished stitchdown yesterday afternoon…after doing some on Friday night, almost done.

We were gone for about 24 hours Saturday/Sunday, so here was Sunday afternoon…

Then I found a backing, washed the batting, cleaned the entryway floor and tried to clear it out enough to spread this thing out…

It’s not very wide, about 40″, but it’s 80″ tall, so not small. And complicated as hell, of course.

Last night, before I started quilting, I fixed two pairs of pants that had been waiting about a month. One pair is going with me, and the other is ready for the start of school. SCHOOL. Yeah, I know, but I’m coming back right into it. I’ll be quilting today. After I decide which dyes to take with me and whether to take anything else to color things with and whether to take another slow stitching project, because I don’t have enough? Crazy really, considering what I’ve packed up. I don’t think I need more stuff. Really. I do hate being bored or not inspired. But I don’t think that will be the case. So pick the dyes I’m taking (I’m not taking all of them), then figure out how to pack the dye stuff containers that are too tall for the boxes I have OR go through the garage for a bigger box OR ask the boychild if I can borrow one of his, because it’s not clear and will protect things from light? IDK. I’m in waffle mode. I can’t make decisions. I did well so far this morning; went through my dye info from last year’s self-directed residency and made some decisions about what materials I needed.

I finished the squirrel block, so I can leave it behind.

I’m bringing a few more for the first part of the trip, plus brainless sitting around, which does happen.

The Man and I went to Julian for his birthday…went to two cideries (England v Norway).

The second cidery…

We then checked in and headed to a winery for the end of the game (sound only) and to get some food elsewhere (beginning of Argentina v Switzerland)…

Crows were active. Back to the room where the Man took a well-deserved nap and I tried to finish a book that was returning to the library today (don’t worry; I finished it a few hours ago, which is why this is late).

Then onto the last place for the finish of the Argentina game.

We’ll be in Lassen National Park for the final. Not sure we’ll be able to watch it; might be hiking, and that’s OK.

Julian was pretty dead. It was hot and warm and cloudy and muggy, but it was a good break from being here, I think. We’ll be repeating the experience but a long way away starting Friday. The Man is going to help me drive up to Bend, with lots of nature on the way, and then he’ll fly home to work and deal with animals. I wish him luck. He’ll probably appreciate the peace and quiet and the bed to himself (plus four cats and a dog). He’ll live on hot dogs, burritos, and beer (nothing new there). All is good. I’m revising my food list based on the Cyclospora outbreaks…that’s the last thing I need. If I can find a farmers’ market for a few veggies, I will, but I’m shifting toward the stuff I can cook. My brain keeps a never ending cycle of how to do stuff going on inside, so I don’t forget silly stuff like tape or Saran wrap. I think I’d live without them, but it’s easier to have them. The notes I took at the last residency were useful–reminded me of things I would need for this one. Smart former self helping today’s self.

Meanwhile, one of my quilts finishes up in an exhibit at the New England Quilt Museum on July 20, and then ships to this exhibit…

That’s a detail of Dale Stuart’s quilt in the show. Amazing work. I’ll hopefully be starting drawings for the next Soul Stories piece for 2027, plus another piece hopefully for a show here in San Diego. If I get in. All I’m getting are rejections at the moment. I take a deep breath and power on. I go through phases where nothing gets and then it all gets in. It’s not a reflection on myself or my work…it just is what it is. So in response to that last rejection, I entered another show for a group I’m in that I’ve never shown with…so hopefully that will happen. If not, enter again. Make more work. Enter that. Repeat.

Ooooh…here’s another possible topic for the next Soul Stories quilt.

I’ve got some work to do in the yard to help with this. For when I get back.

From the book I just finished…

This might be a good summary of how I work. I do these painstaking drawings, number each piece, trace them, etc. And then pick all the colors out without a color master, just to drive all the perfectionists bonkers. Yup. That’s me. Hell, I drive part of my brain bonkers every time I do it. And yet, it works.

OK. It’s the middle of the day and I need to consider eating lunch. I have physical therapy today for my knee/heel today (she took on my heel, which I appreciate) plus book club. Don’t remember which book, but I know I read it. I need to pick a smaller number of dyes to take with me, decide if I’m shipping one box or two, decide what I will store things in during the trip, cut some paper for large-scale quilt drawings, start quilting, and breathe. I really should also sand the fascia and do a second round of Bondo in there. Go through my written supply lists and make sure I’m getting those things packed. That’s just today. Tomorrow is a whole ‘nother list of lists. And notice I didn’t even mention ceramics…yikes, I think I’ll stop by today after PT. And see how things are going. And I’ll try again the next three days, see if I can get the torso ready to bisque fire. If not, it can sit, and I’ll bring the neck home and put it in the damp box for the next month? I guess? Ugh. So many things to consider.

The Word of the Day Is Chaos

I’m trying to get my writing back on schedule. My brain has been summer break fuzz. I did realize over the weekend that I’m leaving for my residency in less than three weeks, and I have 17 thousand things to do before I leave, so there’s a tiny bit of panic in there. But also, I’m still waiting to get my car back…it’s been gone since Thursday. I’m glad I took it in, because the radiator probably would have died and maybe the battery too and that would have sucked big time. So it’s all good. Still don’t have the radio thing fixed though. Sigh.

OK, let’s start with fabric…I finished ironing everything to fabric last Thursday…

I used 176 different fabrics.

I like to sort by color; it gives me an idea of what I used more or less of in that particular quilt. Although sometimes if pieces were small in one color, it won’t be as obvious in the quilt as when I use big pieces of colors…like I know there’s big gray clouds everywhere and some big fleshy patches plus a giant sun. So those fabrics will show up more in the quilt than they might in this color sort.

I actually started trimming them during an art Zoom on Wednesday, but here’s the first official photo of trimming on Thursday night…

Top left is trimmed, top right is not, bottom is trash, which I hold onto until the quilt is done in case I lose a tiny piece and need to replace it. I also keep all the sorted fabrics until the quilt is done; same reason.

Scribble likes to sit on my lap while I do this, which is not always convenient. No way can I reach my tea in this situation.

But I will rarely say no to a cat on my lap.

Friday night…flipped

Trimmed stuff is on the right.

Saturday night…trimmed still on the right…

More Scribble assistance.

Sunday night…

And more Scribble…

She doesn’t stay for super long. And she does bat at the loose bits. So at this point, I am almost 13 hours into the trimming and I probably have at least 2 hours to go, if not more. I’m hoping to be done today, but there’s a lot of chaos today that needs to happen as well, so we’ll see. I need a car!

I also took a ceramics class on Saturday from Moni Blom. I had gone to a demo class of hers before. Her stuff is just fun and whimsical…

However, I didn’t consider that whatever I made in class would need to be added to list of things I needed to get done before I left! I made two sculptures…you can see another student’s piece behind my blurry ones (obviously badly focused in the moment).

Plastic is covering my Fallopian tubes. You know. Like you do. I made two because the first one (taller) was starting to lean. My hand is holding the second one. In real life, you’d make all the parts and let them sit for a day before trying to put them together. I’m hoping they are still standing upright when I go in to glaze them today or tomorrow.

I dropped at least two of the parts doing this anyway. Fun things though. Would look great in the garden, if your garden was less chaotic than mine.

My heart made it out of the bisque fire.

Oh yeah, they said the sculptures needed to sit for 2-3 weeks before firing. That’s when I leave. Yikes. I’m a little stressed at the moment at the timing of everything. I’m trying to enter shows too, and that’s kind of a clusterfuck…can I ship before I go? Can I deliver before I go? Who knows. I dumped one because I couldn’t tell…not enough info. Frustrating.

More art-related stuff. This is the Instagram of the newish group I joined at the end of last year.

You should go follow it; this is a detail from a piece by Luana Rubin. We have a show just finishing up at the New England Quilt Museum in a few weeks, then it travels to Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England. There will be an exhibit at IQF in Houston, Texas, but I unfortunately won’t have a piece in that. I was considering going, but it’s all a timing thing. Then it will all go to Road to California in January. There are more exhibits planned, but I will be making a new piece to travel at that point.

Here’s a photo Margaret took of me in front of one of her pieces I really liked, when I was up in San Francisco.

One of my favorite shirts too.

I had two work-related events in the last few days; here’s my whole teaching team at the retirement party of one of our principals…

Almost mentally on break. Soon. I said goodbye until August to a lot of people on Sunday. I suspect I may be on Zoom with this crew at some point before that though.

Ah this.

I’m eternally frustrated by humanity…and the lack thereof. Because this…

And this…

FFS folks. We work our asses off. And it’s so hard starting break and having people tell us we’re LUCKY to need this time to recharge so we can go back to working our asses off. Unpaid too. I won’t see a paycheck until the end of August. But at least we have this…

Thanks to my solar panels and the battery. They help.

But this happened today…

And the more disturbing part of this is the far right’s argument that childbirths are down and we need more babies. From teens? Who need more supports? Which you have also decimated? What the absolute fuck. So I’m considering a quilt about this. Maybe. I have so many things I have to do in the next 7 months quiltwise. The topics are up in the air though, so if I can get my head around what this would look like. I think I can. Certainly there’s falling…lots of falling and flailing with no help.

And lastly, because it’s summer…

Although not potatoes; too many carbs. It’s summer and my blood sugar is a pain in the ass. Plus I have two MRIs next week, and though I’ve done one with my glucose monitor in, when I called, they said no for the first one…so I think I’m going without the monitor for a week. Which is a little scary with the numerous lows I’ve had. My body is in recovery from school still. And the heel pain is still there, though walkable. So I have another acupuncture appointment set up. And I have a pile of exercises to get through. Plus a pile of pieces of fabric that need trimming. I need to be ironing this thing together in the next day or so. Yesterday, I started putting the 20+ quilts away that had accumulated in the girlchild’s room over the last few months, as shows returned work and I finished a few. I got three rolls of quilts dealt with, but I can’t fit one of them under the bed any more. Not sure how I fit it before, because I didn’t add anything to it…just tried to put back the six quilts that had come back. I can’t lift the other roll up onto the bed, so I’ll deal with those tonight. But I think I need to start a new one and I’m not sure where it’s going to go. I’m still storing other people’s art for a possible airport show that hasn’t come about yet. I feel like I’ve had those hanging around for a year or so. Ah well.

OK. Today. Need a car. Need to go grocery shopping (see ‘need a car’). Need to paint the back deck railing for the third time. Need to finish cutting things out. Need to get to ceramics if possible and glaze. Definitely tomorrow if not today. I’m doing laundry. Need to put quilts away. Need to lay out stuff I want/need to take to residency so I can get a good idea of what I’m shipping and what is going in the car. Need a walk, honestly, but it’s warm. And no car, so that limits my walkiness. I do have a lunch for today though. And I have paint and stuff to cut out. So if I can’t leave the house, there is (unfortunately) plenty to do. I need someone to help me lift this quilt roll up. Should have had the Man help before he left for work. Oh well. Plenty of yardwork to do (always…never ending). You know what I don’t have to do? Lesson plan. Grade shit. Go to school. Whoop whoop for that.

Tracing Things…

I’m supposed to be dressing like the 80s today…you know, neon, leg warmers, big hair…but I didn’t dress like that in the 80s. I was thrift shop, sewed it myself, leaning toward suburban punk. I don’t own 80s wear. So I’m wearing a Keith Haring shirt to commemorate all those who died of AIDS in the 80s…also wearing red, to protest my school district’s refusal to bargain. Fun day. They’re doing a Field Day instead of a staff meeting, because apparently we’re stressed and very busy and competition helps with that. The end of school is always such a crazy mess…this isn’t helping.

I dropped three quilts off for photography yesterday. I’m entering a show with them; we’ll see if they get in. I started tracing the next big one onto Wonder Under, but before I did that, I traced this little one that needs to go in a ceramic piece.

It won’t take long to make this little one.

I finished drawing the new big one Friday night…

I think I actually added stuff after this…

Oh yeah, a crow or two and some body bags.

I numbered it Saturday night…I thought it was around 1300 pieces, but no.

1454 pieces, assuming I didn’t miss any or double number things. I’ve done both.

Last night, I started tracing…

Exciting for Scribble apparently. I had to move her off the Wonder Under a few thousand times.

Barely started. A million pieces to go.

My piece for Soul Stories: Threads of Existence is at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA. It’s been there since mid-April, but they had the ‘opening’ this last weekend.

Mine is the blue one on the left. There’s some amazing work in this show. It will travel to Birmingham, England, in August.

Besides art, I ran a lot of errands this weekend. Fun times. Shit that needs to happen. Some of it was fabric-related. I did finally start stitching the border flowers on Sue Spargo’s Homegrown. It’s all sewn together, so it’s big and not great for taking to meetings.

It’ll take me a while to finish this.

The little dog and I hiked on Saturday. The weather was lovely.

The rattlesnake was not. It didn’t even warn us until after it had moved back into the brush.

I did pick up the dog. His eyesight isn’t great and I didn’t want him lunging after the snake anyway.

The baby owls are out and flying around the neighborhood (sorry for the noise, y’all).

Much faster getting out and about than last year’s only, who hung around for weeks. I think this is still their homebase though.

I obsessively check the weather where my residency will be. Not sure why. Planning anxiety. I did order a bunch of stuff for the trip over the weekend. But look at the 15th.

Somewhat disturbing. Otherwise, the weather is not a lot different than here a lot of the time. A little colder, but it’s over 4000 feet in elevation. So that’s why. Summer will be warm.

Simba is irritable that Bowie is in his spot. Bowie is actually in MY spot and I am in Simba’s spot.

Whatever works.

Here’s a plan for the day…and the world apparently.

And here’s another way-too-real message…

Followed by this one, for San Diego and the rest of the world.

Way too real.

OK. Today. Teaching the last of evolution before the state science test on Wednesday (math is tomorrow). Then I’m probably missing the field day for an eye checkup. Still getting flashing lights in the right eye, over a year after vitreous humor detached. Then hopefully ceramics? And some stitching and grading (not in that order) and tracing. Getting close to the end of this year…that’s a good thing. They don’t seem to be getting easier. The adult part…the kids are fine (well, as fine as they’ve ever been…they should put their phones down more often). Gonna need more caffeine to get through it all.

Accept the Fuzz…

Hey. It’s Spring Break. I’m exhausted, overwhelmed, buried, and woke up sick this morning. That squirrel is back on the fence, running along…he hasn’t figured out how to get to the bird feeder yet (the Man moved it). I’m waiting for the Mark Rober adjustments to the feeder if he does figure it out (if you’ve never watched Rober design systems to foil squirrels, it’s definitely a squirrel hole to fall down some day.). I leave early Wednesday morning for Virginia, and every time I turn around, something else gets added to the to-do list. The oil light came on in my car yesterday after driving to Long Beach and back for an art meeting (hardly any traffic, luckily). Hoping I don’t get all those people sick. But I felt fine yesterday…just tired. And I’m always tired. Here’s to hoping my middle-school-teacher immune system kicks in (and my flu shot) to make this thing go away quickly. I don’t have time to be sick. I don’t want to be sick on a plane either. Sigh. OK. Need to buy/find masks now.

Did I finish my taxes on Saturday? Nope. Not even. I packed and shipped a quilt that will be at the New England Quilt Museum as part of the Soul Stories exhibit opening there around April 14. It will travel to Birmingham, UK, and then to International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, in November. I can’t go to any of those shows, I think. Ah well. The quilts travel more than I do…always.

I have the closing reception for the Fantastic Stories exhibit at the Virginia Quilt Museum this coming weekend. We’re doing demos on Friday and then an artist talk on Saturday. If I had a car and more time, I’d then drive up to the Art Quilt Elements opening at the Wayne Art Center; I have a piece in that show as well. The opening is from 3-5 PM. It’s about a 4-hour drive from where I am in Virginia, I don’t have a car, and I’m planning on going to museums in DC on Monday. I’m not making it to the opening. I couldn’t do the 8-hour roundtrip drive plus rent the car. Money is tight. I’m appreciating the museum finding us a place to stay while we’re in Virginia and transporting us around. Saves me a bit of money I don’t actually have.

But this is the artist’s life…I could never afford to be a fulltime artist and feed my kids. The paychecks are not regular (or honestly big) enough. One quilt selling from this show would cover my expenses easily, but my stuff does not sell easily unfortunately. I probably don’t market well either. In my spare time! Anyway, if you are in Dayton, come see the show. If you miss it this week (it comes down Saturday night), I’ll have a piece in the No Boundaries exhibit that opens right afterward, on March 31.

I did finish the smallest of the dye paintings last night. On Friday, I finished all the embroidery so far and was considering threads for the hair.

Then Saturday night, I started working on the hair…

This is the smallest of the pieces I’m working on…

This one is about 20″ square…smaller than I usually do. And last night, I finished up the purple in the hair…

And sewed the sleeves down on the bottom edge (I waited to make sure the embroidery didn’t catch in the sleeves).

I don’t usually make pieces this small…trying to see if this is faster than the other way I make quilts. For something this size, it’s not.

Official photos will have to follow. I have a piece about this size that I did last year, in my normal technique, and it’s about the same number of hours. Interesting. It’s still a worthwhile process though, for a different type of image. I’m not giving up on it. Certainly, I make more work by adding the embroidery, but that was part of what I wanted to do. Moving on to the next one tonight. Might be some bedazzly stuff going on with that one.

I really wish they’d pay TSA. Getting on a plane and going to DC is somewhat nerve-wracking, now helped by long lines and ICE agents.

Such a frustrating system we have at the moment.

This was not surprising, unfortunately. Men in power. Strength and love to Dolores Huerta.

But true. I don’t want anyone in the Epstein Files to be in power anywhere. Don’t care who they are. That’s the difference.

Going back to the Dark Ages, y’all.

This is how men control the story. Take the meds away…I don’t see anyone removing Viagra or its equivalents. Of course not. Not making men responsible for their bodies and what they do with them. Birth control is mostly hormones…interestingly, hormones men have as well.

This is what I always feel like at the beginning of Spring Break. Except when I’m sick.

But it does feel like a good morning despite the headache and sore throat. I’ll try to stand outside in the sun for a bit. Just stand. Then go back to prepping for this trip, trying to grade stuff, trying to finish taxes, trying to keep up with all the stupid stuff I’m supposed to be doing in the next two days. I’d like to get to ceramics today too…maybe later. Brain is very fuzzy. Spring Break fuzzy? Sick fuzzy? General old age fuzzy? It probably doesn’t matter…accept the fuzz.