I See Spring Break Over THERE…

My uterus woke me up this morning around 4 AM…either that, or my neighbor left in his dump truck. They kinda feel the same to my tired, overworked brain (three days until Spring Break, can you hear the angels caroling in the heavens? It’s OK. I can’t hear them yet either, because I still have to survive three more days of school, including a field trip to the zoo). I wake up, brain zinging along, WOW! Yelling at me that something’s wrong, sung at the top of my lungs, adrenaline surge powering through my heart and blood vessels. So you do what we all do: you get up and pee, get a glass of water, pet the cat so she settles back down, and lie down, determined…DETERMINED to go back to sleep. Because being determined about it helps (that’s sarcasm, by the way). Who knows how long it took to actually fall asleep after that, but it wasn’t right away.

Last night, I was sitting at my desk, hoping to power through the last pieces of the Ventura Earth Mother, sure it wouldn’t take long to cut them out, but midnight was approaching and I was tired and I thought to myself at one point, “Self, you only have about 10 pieces left. Go to BED. They will still be there tomorrow.” Well, you know how that conversation went…the same way it always does. Because I thought to myself (again), if I finish tonight, then tomorrow night, when I come home exhausted after teaching and then sitting through a teacher award ceremony (supporting friends), then I won’t want to sit down and cut, so I just won’t until really late. And then it will take one more night.

So I bullied through. And finished…

Nine hours and 38 minutes…all cut out. Next I sort and start ironing…which is cool. I’m ahead of schedule…not that it will help me, because I have no sewing machine Tuesday. And I keep finding little pieces from when I spilled the box. It’s funny…they seem to appear from nowhere…like I’m sure I checked the whole desktop and all of a sudden I’ll look at a totally exposed area and a piece is just sitting there, like it was hiding from me and it just came out. It got tired of hiding and wanted to come back into the fold. Ugh. It means there are more in there somewhere. Fuckers.

Based on previous quilts, ironing will probably take 10-11 hours…but I think I’m officially halfway done with this one. The next stage is the fun one, when the image starts to emerge in color. I’m excited about that. I’d be more excited if I didn’t have three more days of school, but whatever. I also need to pick the fabrics for the other smaller one before I start ironing, I think…mostly because those fabrics are currently ALL OVER my office, and I don’t even think I have enough bins to sort the pieces at the moment because of that (which I was going to do tonight…). Sigh. OK. Well, that’s decided then. I have to pick out the fabrics tonight/Thursday…however that works out. I’ve been refusing to do schoolwork at home at night, because all the assignments I have for this week are mostly independent, so I’m grading at school every day. I feel like if I do that, I shouldn’t have to do it at home.

Meanwhile, my uterus is being a pain…literally. Next week, I get to do a bunch of tests that will confirm that I don’t have cancer or some other weird thing…it’s just my body doing the stupid stuff it’s supposed to do, which is FINE…I’m OK with that, but just freakin’ get ON with it and stop torturing me with your wishy washy crap. If you want to stop producing eggs, then just DO IT. Don’t fuck with me while you’re doing it. I give you permission. Maybe I’ll make my uterus a quilt, so it knows how I feel about this (like I haven’t been doing that all along). Seriously…perimenopause fully proves that there is no intelligent designer…or that he’s an abusive asshole. One of my students was complaining yesterday about how if she has to use the bathroom for her period, that it takes longer and passing period (4 minutes) is not long enough, and I said she needed more practice…that teachers could do it in 90 seconds flat, including hand-washing, and then she claimed I must be using a pad, not a tampon. Yes. I have to discuss these things with my students…I explained to her that 3 out of her 4 core teachers were females who regularly had their periods, and that we couldn’t use the bathroom whenever we wanted, so we had to be fast and efficient, and surely, it’s not THAT hard to pull a wrapper off a tampon and insert it (maybe it is if you are only 12 or 13…I don’t remember…). I think most of the world has no clue what being a middle-school teacher is like…we deal with content and technology, and then we also get puberty. And hormones. And Spring lovey-dovey crap. And self-esteem issues. And stink bombs. And cutting and bullying and suicide and drama and relationships and pregnancy and sex. Plus they still dance around when they have to pee really bad. And they’re trying to figure out how to have relationships with adults they aren’t related to as well, and that’s a fine line right there.

OK, so I have to go to work soon, but really, I deserve donuts and a heating pad and maybe a margarita.

Dropping Balls…

What I woke up to (after someone shoved my sticky door open, making a horrible noise and giving me an adrenaline rush that made it impossible to go back to sleep): girlchild has been sick. Apparently that sick included a sore throat (a fact she did not share with me yesterday), which partially explains her swollen face and neck at 11 PM last night when she went to bed. Her dad is on doctor duty, once he finds her insurance card (minor issue). I think it’s strep. Yay! The elderly cat, who is decidedly not elderly when she wants to bitchslap a younger cat who might be in her territory, is apparently bleeding intestinally, and insists on walking around the house, dripping blood everywhere. I can’t get a sub this late. I’m hoping my mom can handle the cat. But who knows?

I’m personally praying to the Goddess of the Mother to keep me from strep, because I don’t have the time or energy for that shit right now.

SIGH. My students told me yesterday that all of us teachers were cranky and had no senses of humor at the moment. I refrained from telling them how close we are to Spring Break, because if I admit that it’s a week and a half away to THEM, they will stop working completely. As it is, I still have about 80% of them on task…for now. They’re right, though. I am cranky. I’m not getting recharged. I’m feeling distant and disconnected from everything and whether there’s hormones involved or not, it’s just fucking with me. I think I need a massage in a hot tub. With cheesecake.

I should be ecstatic somewhere in my head. Why? I finished ironing last night. Whoo! (OK, that was a faked WHOO, but if you fake it, apparently you can make it. I don’t actually believe that, because it’s never worked for me.). And I guess I am somewhat relieved…maybe.

Last night, I ironed a bunch of leaves and grass and blue hair (her hair is the water) and these are the jellyfish parts…

And I also did goldfish and the sun…

Those are sun parts. I used oranges for the goldfish.

It got later and later and I got more tired and I kept thinking, “Really, you should be grading. Why are you being so irresponsible?” Fuck that shit. Iron away baby. By the end of the evening, this is what the fabric pile looked like…

I don’t keep them all neat while I’m working…I just clean it up each night so I can see it all again. While I’m working, I pile. But there’s more yellows in there and obviously the blues are there and I had to add another orange friend (it’s not really orange…it just has a lot of orange in it), plus some purple for the jellyfish, and some pinks for the shell that’s in there, and I don’t remember what else…oh, more green. Because there’s never enough fucking green.

SIGH. It’s done. It took 13 1/2 hours, much longer than I thought it would. I don’t know why. Whatever.

It also took 103 fabrics…

Which is a lot. Looks very colorful…not sure what it will look like in real life. The larger pieces are more toned down…well, mostly.

And here’s my next task (minus the doctor thing and the vet thing and the sore throat/bloody anus thing, and then there’s the pool motor, which yeah, I don’t know, I’m just running water in there and praying)…cutting all of them out.

That’s probably another 11 hours or so. Twelve? Fuck, why do I even estimate? No, seriously. Probably twelve. I’ll commit to that. If I do two hours a night (ha!), that’ll be 6 days. Except I won’t do that every night. But I only need it done by a week from Saturday. Earlier is fine. Then I can do the other recycled one. Then my first task of Spring Break (besides cleaning house and trimming the damn bougainvillea and finding some semblance of my happy) will be to iron it all together, so when my sewing machine gets out of its annual cleaning appointment, I can start stitching it down.

SIGH. I know. I said that already. In 18 minutes, I can start calling doctor, vet, and mom. Oh yeah, and going to work. At the same time. I’m sure there’s some ball I’m dropping today. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m fairly sure I dropped it.

A Sliver of a Place…

Eleven hours plus…I really wanted to just throw sleep to the wind last night, ignore the fact that my job requires you to be ON at all times and being asleep is not an option, and finish ironing. I am that close. Maybe another hour or so. But I was tired. Huh. Stupid body. What do you mean, you want to sleep? You suck at it. Yes, practice makes perfect, but you’ve been attempting this for 48 years now and obviously you just don’t have a talent for it (seriously, as a kid, I didn’t sleep well either). Just give it up.

Mom brain realizes it’s only Tuesday and I have to survive three more days of school, and lack of sleep makes me cranky, and I’m already cranky with the kids because they think grades are magical things that I bestow upon them, and if they have an F, it’s because I did not bestow upon them something better. It’s never that they just didn’t do the work. It’s on me.

So that was part of the frustration of yesterday that dragged me home behind my car and made me too tired to stand at around 11 PM.

OK, yes, I know. Many people go to bed WELL before 11 PM. It’s a perfectly reasonable bedtime. But when you know you could finish the monster task you’re on by 1 AM? Sigh. Well, obviously I was tired. Annoyingly, I’m still tired this morning, even though I have an extra hour of sleep under my belt. Hopefully I’ll finish tonight (the ironing. Not the sleep).

Last night, I ironed a fox and some thorns and some clouds and lightning. Honestly, it wasn’t much. I added some browns for variety…

There’s some orangey browns for the fox too. But everything else was already in the boxes. The browns on the left, I didn’t put them away because I need them to hold up against the greens I haven’t yet picked for the leaves that grow on the brown branches (hello convoluted sentence). That’s where my brain balked, because I have multiple overlapping leaves, so I will need a run of greens and I was just too tired to contemplate it. It’s probably a good idea I didn’t, because my brain is sort of offline at the moment. Or there’s too many things in it. Hard to say which. Needless to say, I have a cut on my finger from cooking brainless last night, I’ve forgotten more than I’ve remembered, and my eyes are still at half mast.

It’s no fun to be annoyed by one’s own existence. I need to clean house, trim the bougainvillea so people can park in the driveway, clean up around the pool, fix the kitchen window screen, cut a piece of glass, buy a frame, hang some art, clean up, put the suitcase in the garage, dammit. How hard is that? The answer is that it all seems to take up so much time and I only have a few things I want to spend time on at the moment, and none of them involves a mop or clippers.

I’m in the 700s, smack dab in the middle of them…

Although there are some 600s shoved off to the side…mostly roots and grassy bits that I haven’t dealt with yet, and then all the leaves, I think. Then all the big stuff on the bottom is up in her hair…so yeah, I am nearly done. It’s hair and some facial details (lips, eyes) that are not flesh tones, and then the sun on her head and that’s it.

Dammit. Why didn’t I just finish it off last night (you were too tired). Fucking limited hours in the day.

Ah yes. I’m in a mood. An artistic mood. One that tromps all over all the other moods. Except they’re still there. I’m still fighting that low-level depression that messes with sleep and happiness and contentment. I think one of the things that makes me keep creating is that I’m never satisfied…that when I finish one, it’s not enough. It doesn’t fill up an empty inside me, so I have to make another one. No, that wasn’t The One…and there will never be a The One, guys…I know that…there will never be A Piece that makes me think, OH! That was it. You don’t have to make any more art. You’re done. You did it. That was The One. Fuck that. I keep making because it’s NOT the one. Because there’s still something to be said. Because I couldn’t put it all in one piece. Because that one said This and I still need to say That.

AARGH. It was a frustrating day yesterday and I’m still carrying all that inside me. Maybe if I’d stayed up and not slept and finished, it would be OK. Or maybe I would still be frustrated. And fucking tired. Wait. I am tired.

Here’s the bin of stuff to be cut out…it’s going to be very exciting over the next week watching that pile get smaller and smaller…

OK. Not really. I mean it’s slightly more exciting than watching paint dry, and sure, I get through a ton of stuff on my Tivo, but it’s not thrilling to watch or write about. But then the FOLLOWING week, I’ll be ironing it together, and that surely IS exciting. Plus it will be Spring Break, and Goddess knows I need that at the moment, even if it will be hours and hours of no one being around. There is no making my brain happy. Make art, which mostly has to happen in this solitary place, but you still need people…but not the ones that cause drama and scream at you. There’s a sliver of a place in there where I can exist and be content…if my brain lets me.

Ironing Like a Beast…

Sometimes stuff pisses me off.

I know you’re shocked by that.

But when it does, I do what my counselor always tells me: take care of yourself. Do something nice for yourself. Now with a normal female, that might mean a pedicure or shopping for a new skirt or chocolate. Eh. I make art. So when life conspired to punch me in the face yesterday, and I was sitting there, grading shit, still grading shit, always grading shit, hands shaking, so angry and upset and frustrated that I was about to cry, I took a deep breath, set a line for the end of the feeling and grading of shit, and decided to make art for most of last night.

Well, except, I also needed to sleep. So I did that too.

I kicked some ironing ass last night. But before I did, I started sorting all the recycled pieces from Mariah’s quilts for the second piece in Diverted Destruction 8, which opens June 27 in Los Angeles, by the way. I figure I’m going to need them grouped together instead of piled on the floor in the living room if I ever want to make a quilt out of them. Here’s pink sorted and purple piled…

And here I am working on the green.

Blue is mostly done. I did it while I had pneumonia. Sitting on the floor was doable then. So I have a few more colors to sort, and then I’m done with that. It’s overwhelming to sort these, so it’s better if I just do a little each day. I don’t have very much of most colors, so that makes it more difficult…lots of squares and triangles and strips…but that’s what this show is about. How do we take stuff that normally would get tossed out or put aside, and then turn it into art.

THEN I started ironing like a beast…this is all the flesh in the Ventura quilt…

There isn’t much, because remember? No nudity, no politics, no violence. So she’s mostly covered. Her face and hands show, and her shoulders. And there’s bits of flesh showing behind things. But that’s it. So to iron the flesh colors, I had to pull pieces from the 300s, which is where I’m at, all the way through the 700s. So now I don’t know how far I am, except that I have 7 hours in. When did that happen?

And then I pulled fabrics for the great blue heron that makes up her left arm…

Grays and blues, but the blue in the wings had to show up on the background, so that was a challenge. So now it has some purple in it. I’m OK with that. The idea of the heron will be there. And I picked some really interesting wing-feather fabric. Had to fussy cut the bits I wanted, because it goes all over the place into pink and I didn’t want that. Much. There’s some turquoise in there too. I left a little of that.

Anyway, so that got me to the end of the 300s, but half that wing was in the 400s (all the pieces from 435-485, basically…who numbered this thing?), so again, no idea how far along I am, but maybe have something over 500 pieces ironed? Maybe halfway? It doesn’t look like halfway, but what do I know? It must be halfway. I spent 2 1/2 hours ironing last night and then had a very hard time stopping. Made myself stop. Still tired this morning though…here’s all the fabrics I’ve used so far…

You can see the fleshy run and the heron is all on the left. Next up is sunflowers I think…and then a cat? Or the heart. Not sure. Yes, she’s covered in plants and flowers, but there’s still a giant anatomical heart. This is all for a show where I have to jury in, by the way. So I might not get in. And I will only have one entry, because every single other piece I have has nudity, politics, or violence (or all three) in it. Sigh.

Here’s pieces ready to be cut out…filling up the box.

Two weeks until Spring Break…and I’m still on schedule. Miraculous.

Here’s a chair that Kitten has destroyed…

And now inhabits. I’m not fixing it until she’s gone. There’s no point, unless I use bulletproof fabric…and I’m not even sure that would stand up to Kitten claws.

Luckily, she leaves my fabric stash alone.

Not Thinking Too Hard…

I brought home 119 science packets last night, the last unit we completed. I had already graded 21 of them at school, one small class’ worth, but I really need to finish the rest over the weekend. Funny, this is the smallest number of students I have ever had (maxed out at 190 one year), but I still can’t balance the grading. You take a weekend off or you schedule it so everything is due at once, and all of a sudden, there’s an avalanche. I just started my 14th year of teaching, and I still can’t find a best practice on that part of the job.

So I sat there for about three hours…and I got through 68 of them. The pile on the right is done…

The pile on the left is still staring at me…balefully. I watched a bunch of TV to drag me through it, and I got faster and faster (which is why sometimes it’s better to just bully through and do ALL of it at once, because once you’re on a roll, you DO get faster and faster). I stopped and made dinner in the middle (girlchild blew me off for yet another Friday night…whatever), and at around 10 PM, I quit. I have my smallest class and my largest class left. It’s easier to grade the good students, because everything is there, complete, and in order. The ones that kill me are the kids who don’t put anything in order and put random stuff in there (one kid stapled a field trip permission slip in there…guess it made it look more full). Sigh. Worst part of my job…well, besides navigating politics and administrators.

Anyway. I was exhausted by then, but in true Kathy fashion, I don’t ever let that stop me from making art. OK. Sometimes I do. But not last night. Just grading all night and not doing something for me makes me cranky. So I dragged myself into the office and looked at what was next to be ironed. And remembered I needed to do a label for the quilt that sold, so I did that first. By the way, the second Catching Cancer is available, if anyone’s interested…

It’s 10 1/2″ w x 12 3/4″ h, $140. Let me know.

And then I started looking at elephant pieces. Teensy weensy wrinkles and eyeballs and lots of gray gray gray, which can be blue-ish or yellow-ish or brown-ish. Grays annoy me. I use them all the time. I love gray. But it drives me nuts. If I were really anal-retentive obsessive compulsive, all my grays would be sorted by their base color and I wouldn’t have to search all through a million bins trying to find the RIGHT gray (I never have the RIGHT gray. I am always buying more gray). So I needed a run of 7 fabrics for the elephants, because they are standing in front of each other, so you have to think about that.

Well, YOU don’t. I do.

There’s only three elephants, but they take up about 100 pieces of Wonder Under…

And I had to add fabrics for eyes and tusks. Here they are all laid out. The old Wonder Under is releasing like crazy. The new stuff is fucking awesome. It doesn’t release and the paper comes off like a dream. The only issue I’m having is that my iron is getting stuff stuck to it from the old Wonder Under, and I can’t get it clean enough, and that is having an issue with the paper of the new Wonder Under, which is really plasticky. I didn’t read the instructions (ha! never do…), so maybe I need to reduce the heat. Or clean my iron better.

It took about an hour to iron all the elephant pieces down…

The next thing on the ironing list is an apple tree with the tiniest pieces ever…because some crazy woman thought that was a good idea. Then I move onto HUGE pieces of body parts and bird wings. I might need to go gray/white shopping. Seriously. There’s a huge heron wing in there, so I have to figure out what color that is. Blue gray? Maybe?

Underneath my feet while I iron…

She was very tired. So was I at the end of it…girlchild came home way too late (apparently clocks are so passé). By then, I was sitting again (so tired yesterday…couldn’t stand to stand and iron for long), working on the binding, which has to get done today, so I can get it photographed tomorrow. Boom! Then I need to start the other recycled piece.

It’s good to be finishing these and moving on. I’m not enjoying the Have-To’s on the quilt front as much as I enjoy the Want-To’s, but those Have-To’s get into shows, and right now, with my rejection rate on the stuff I LIKE to make, if I’m going to be in shows, I have to cater a bit to whatever the hell it is they think they want. I can’t try to figure out why the stuff I really want to make, the stuff I enjoy, why it’s not getting into shows…unless it’s an invitational, so they don’t see it beforehand. I just have to move on and try to balance the stuff I really like with the stuff I need to make for whatever reason…paying the bills, participating in a group show. It is what it is. And I do actually think this Ventura quilt will be cool in the end…even though I really had to fight my own inclinations to get it drawn.

All right…I’m sewing that damn binding on now. Obviously I am Thinking Too Hard.

Catching Cancer

My students sometimes think all diseases are contagious, even cancer, and you have to explain that some things are genetic, or inherited, and some things are mutations, like cancer, which can be caused by things like smoking or UV radiation, but can also be somewhat random, and then there are the things that are contagious. But for a while, I always have a group of some kids who must have cotton balls in their ears who think not only that rocks are alive, but that you can catch cancer from the kid sitting next to you. They also think Mountain Dew can keep your sperm from getting a girl pregnant, so keep that in mind.

I drew these hands because…this is convoluted, but this is how my brain works too, so hang with me…I was doing the FFAC donation quilt, which benefits cancer research, and I was flailing for ideas, so I took my sketchbook to my monthly stitching meeting with two creative minds, so I could try to get something down. They talked a lot about ideas and I did some weird sketches, and I don’t think I did the final FFAC drawing until later, but they did try to help. Because of that, one of them, who is a breast-cancer survivor, sent me a link the following day to some breast-cancer cells, which honestly, I had never closely looked at, and they are freaking spiky scary-looking beasts.

So I was sitting in a bar later that week (like you do), waiting for a friend to show up, and I started drawing these things…in a hand. And I couldn’t tell if the hand was catching it or letting it go or just being spiked all to hell by it…

And later I did another drawing…

And then two people showed interest in those. So I made them into quilts…this is Catching Cancer 1…

(10″w x 11″ h) And I should admit that I screwed up when I traced the Wonder Under on this one, which is why it’s reversed.

And here is Catching Cancer 2…

(10 1/2″ w x 12 3/4″ h) Which I finished Wednesday night? Yes. After the banquet. When my brain wandered off into depresso world.

It only took that long because I was sick for most of February. And the first one is already sold. The second one? Maybe. There was interest, so I am waiting to hear.

I’m lucky in that my DNA has not mutated into these spiky fuckers (they really are terrorful things), although y’all know I’ve had more mammograms than your average 40-some-year-old due to some weird shadow beast who lurks in my left breast. I was glad to make these, glad they will find good homes.

Now I just need to finish all THIS stuff…

So I can get onto the OTHER stuff I need to get done. Tonight? After gym and grading, maybe I will be able to function well. Not the last two nights, although last night, I had to create an assignment and a webpage for school today. Someone needs to tell Google that teachers don’t want to make assignments at the last minute. Give us a scheduling button, you dumbasses. All I can think is that they don’t know how to schedule themselves. So yeah, I was working at 11:30 PM last night. Do you hear that politicians? Huh?

Yeah. Moving on. Survive school. Make art. Maybe sometimes sleep.

Fighting a Mood

I think I started yesterday’s post with Oh Holy Hell. Or did I? I was sick yesterday apparently. No really. I was. Ran a fever and everything. It was strange. Woke up nauseous as hell, ran a fever, fine today. I do not understand. I feel like I have completely lost touch with my immune system. Or for that matter, my reproductive system. Possibly my nervous system as well. Digestive? Fuck. HELLO BODY. Please come in. There is no connection. We need to re-establish communication here.

So seriously, need to get back to exercising and hiking and the gym. She says, as she looks at this week’s calendar and snorts Cheerios out her nose. Huh. Good intentions.

So after I lolled around on the couch yesterday afternoon, feeling like crap, tired as hell, supporting a cat’s claws with my fleshy bits, I eventually dragged myself up and did the stupid independent study contract I needed to do for the kid who will be gone for two weeks before Spring Break but who already does no work, so I spent an hour making this thing for him and he probably won’t do more than half of it, if that, based on his current grade. Dear Politicians: I didn’t get paid for that time, but I did it anyway.

Then I finally got my act together and started picking out fabrics…well, I started with laying Wonder Under out…

Which requires almost zero brain power, and yet I fucked it up. I love it when I recut a complicated piece and then find it later in the wrong pile. Did I tell you I was running a fever? I was. Piece 29 was down in the 70s. No idea why. I didn’t actually get very far…

Fewer than 100 pieces ironed…the flames kind of discombobulated me. I couldn’t figure my own drawing out. (FEVER!) Here’s what I’ve used so far…

There were a lot of clouds and snow. It was good to get started though. It will be easier to keep going now…momentum you know. It keeps you moving. Science!

At some point, though, I was too tired to stand. Or sick. Hard to know. So I sat and sewed bindings for a while…

Yes, I used kiddie fabric on the back of the cancer hands. It was happy fabric. I used it to make baby quilts. I think we should totally fight breast cancer with baby quilts. (No, I’m not fucking delirious. Why do you ask? The fever is completely gone this morning.)

I finished the smaller one.

Then I started the larger one and went to bed. Perchance to sleep. Until 5:30 AM, when the girlchild came in and told me she was sick. (no fever) And then I couldn’t go BACK to sleep. Sleep is such a THANG for me at the moment. I never get enough, even when I try to get enough.

So I have some other random stuff here, like this video from IQF Houston last November…this was the official video they took…

It’s pretty much the same as what Margaret Fabrizio posted (because she was standing there recording me while I did this one!). But you should go check out their other videos. I will…when I have time…I swear! They will just keep playing in a row, so if you’re standing there ironing fabrics, like I might be some time this week (looks at schedule again and chokes up with laughter), you could just watch all of them one after another. Though that might be more quiltspeak than you can handle.

And then there was this…the cats who hate each other…

I was sitting between them, but they stayed when I extracted myself and did not hiss at each other.

Cat in a box. All the cats have been in this box. It’s in the window in my studio, right behind the sewing machine. Apparently it is the best cat place ever.

I do not know why this cat tolerates this…

I delivered a quilt yesterday, so I had to put a label on it, dehair it, and provide sticks of hanging.

It’s a good thing I had that yesterday, because I got rejected from two shows in three days. I’m on a fucking roll! Whatever. While I was dropping it off, I was checking out the gallery space where me and one other artist will be hanging our dual show in January. So big fat whatever, right? Sigh. I don’t know what to think about all the rejections. Oh well. Move on. It’s not like I’m going to stop making art all of a sudden. I’m way too stubborn for that.

Yeah. I’m fighting a mood. I’m sure I’ll come out of it soon.

That Was Easy

Well, if you have a shitty day at work, then it’s easy to come home (after watching a soccer game) and say to yourself that you are done with your job for the day. There was a brief moment of guilt when I considered that I really should grade tests or extra credit or something, but then my art brain took over and explained how I had already used up THIS much energy on work today, and I wasn’t required to use up any more…so move on, little doggie, and make you some art.

Then there was the question of which project to work on, but I’ve got the Ventura quilt on my mind, kicking me in the frontal lobe, Hey! Get me done! Put me on the priority list! You don’t need to clean the house! I’m more important! So I cut out little pieces of Wonder Under while sitting on the couch with the girlchild, watching the same episodes of House that I’ve seen three or four times…until I finished. Wait. I finished. That was easy. I wasn’t expecting to finish cutting them out last night. But I said about 2 1/2 hours and it was just under two. Six hours and 17 minutes total…so not that far off the other one.

And it wasn’t super late…so I set up for sorting…

One bin for each 100 pieces…you know, it’s funny. I have this procedure now that I use with every quilt, and I don’t remember when or how I came up with it…I mean, at some point, I must have been sitting there with a few hundred pieces of Wonder Under (back in the day when I didn’t make quilts with over 2000 pieces?) and thought, how can I better organize this? It’s been so long, I don’t remember starting to do that. But now I have bins that are numbered, so I just go hunt down (in this case) bins 0-8 and lay them out and start…

Believe it or not, this quilt isn’t that complicated, so it was less than an hour. It’s funny that a 900-piece quilt is one I consider pretty easy to do at this stage in my art career. It’s big, but not huge. The one I’m planning for over the summer…I think I will be saved by the size restriction on it. Otherwise, it would have a million pieces in it.

Anyway, I’m ready for the next stage…fabric choice! Except I don’t have a background picked out yet, and that’s what I don’t usually have in my stash. I don’t know if I have time today to get a background…probably not, because she’s only open to 5 PM and I have dance practice (don’t laugh. It’s a long story, mostly unbelievable if you know me well enough) until 4:30 or so. Huh. So tomorrow probably, after school. I could do that. I should probably measure the drawing, though, so I know how much to get.

Exciting! I like the fabric part. The studio/office is a bit of a mess though, so I’ll have to deal with that too.

And complicating my schedule, as always, is soccer. Girlchild’s high school team was in the CIF (state) semifinals last night…

They started with this lineup that included the 9- and 10-year-old club players who hopefully will be future high-school players, which was cute. Apparently we were on TV too (local TV station).

It was a tense game against a team we had tied against before…

A very physical game…

Like check out the legs…

By the end of the second half, it was tied 1-1, and it stayed that way until the last 20 minutes of the game, when we got our second goal…

And under the light of the full moon, managed to keep the lead. There was a lot of screaming. This is the first time they’ve made it this far, and the finals are Saturday night. Not my favorite way to spend Saturday night, and I will have to stitch right through it to reduce the stress. Seriously…these games can shorten your lifespan if you don’t do something else while the girls play.

Anyway. It’s the last game of the high-school season…not to take a deep breath or anything, because the first tournament of the second half of the club season is two weekends later. Oh well. My trimester grades will be done by Saturday night…and worst-case? Her team comes in 2nd. Not a bad finish. And hopefully I’ll get some fabric ironed this weekend too (don’t think about having to grade tests and unit packets).

Poking at Me…

So apparently after mostly recovering from pneumonia (I’m still coughing on and off), exercise can kick your ass. I finally got back into it last night, and I needed a nap afterwards. This is proof of old age right there! It’s OK. It was a really long day already, and an occasional nap is not a bad thing. I can either nap in the late afternoon (OK, it was early evening), or I can stay up really late, or I can do both! Like last night.

It did mean I started dinner late and then I was working on grades, which went even later. I have five things that still need to go in the gradebook, but I’m not collecting two of them until tomorrow, and the other three will get handled on Friday. Luckily, they are not grading things…they are just calculations of stuff the kids are supposed to do all trimester, so it won’t take much time. I want to be done on Friday night. Seriously done. And I will be. I still need to grade makeup tests, which I hate doing, but whatever. And then on Wednesday, kids are handing in the last unit and taking a test, but those will go to the next trimester, because there’s no way I can grade them in time. I’m really trying to be organized!

I’m trying to be organized because the art…she calls me. I was reading entry forms on Saturday (trying to be organized again) and one blurb made an entire drawing just pop right into my head. That’s two that are residing up there. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to get them on paper. I keep thinking about it, but it takes mental energy and space to do that, and I haven’t found that yet. Last night, after dinner and grades, I had choices about what to do next: trim the two cancer hands and put bindings on them? Ugh. Sounds like decision-making. Finish quilting the upholstery nude? Ugh. Sounds tiring. OK, then there’s only one thing left (besides drawing, which I had already dumped off the table, due to a lack of available brain power): cutting out Wonder Under for the Ventura piece…

So that’s what I did. It was sufficiently brainless enough that I could handle it. Obviously, I had way more available brain power over the weekend (because I gave up on the grading?).

I also traced some stuff on freezer paper…

This is the piece I’m not allowed to show. In fact, I don’t know when I’m allowed to show it…it’s not my pattern anyway. This is what I work on at soccer games at the moment. I really should be finishing all those birds I’ve been working on for the last two years, but I haven’t been in the mood. The more tense the game is, the less I can do complicated embroidery. Just stitching bits of wool together seems to be all I can handle.

In other news, the girlchild should start hearing back from colleges in the next 2-4 weeks. No stress here! Seriously, I’m not looking forward to it…we know she’ll get in to a few of them at least, but then how does she choose? Hard to know…wait on the financial aid stuff, I think. The boychild really only had two choices…so it made it much easier.

Meanwhile, those two drawings in my head are poking at me like small children…hungry to be released. Maybe I should find a way to get one of them started today…or tomorrow…she says, looking at her calendar and all the shit that is piled upon it (metaphorical, vague shit…not actual shit). It’s possible I am overextended. As usual.

A Relatively Healthy Balance

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

Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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