Roll Into the Hole…

I really didn’t want to wake up this morning. It’s silly, because there’s no NOT waking up. There’s animals (one is barking his head off right now for no reason…OK, it’s probably something, but really…wait, that was his happy yip so the Man must be back from the dentist), there’s neighbors, there’s neighborhood noise (damn neighbor with his saw…you’d think he’d sawed all the things, but no…there are more things to saw). Really, I should go to bed at a regular time and get up at dawn and work then. Except that’s not how my brain works, especially for the first week or two after I get out of school (it hasn’t even been a WEEK)…I’m a night owl through and through. This morning shit is not fun (yes, I’m aware it’s barely morning at this point…I’ve been up for hours). I didn’t want to wake up because I started cleaning the office/studio yesterday and it’s in that stage when it looks like it will never be done and you will never find a home for all the things you’ve unearthed. I did, however, find the book I’ve been searching for since Thursday (it wasn’t in here, by the way…it was in the girlchild’s room, of course), but I have not found the frames I feel like I have somewhere. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I bought a set of 4 and will need to buy another set? Sigh.

So yes, I am still in the braindead flailing part of Summer Break, where I stare at AI-generated videos of cats diving into swimming pools and wonder why people like war so much. Like if we’re really gonna worry about nuclear capability and bomb people over it, why are we picking on the bottom rung of the ladder…

This is from a video comparing nuclear stashes, and Iran isn’t even on the list. Now, it would be stupid as hell to bomb Russia…and I don’t want to bomb anyone, but seriously, how lame is it to go after a country that was under control until the current president backed out of a deal that was keeping them under control. Idiots. Absolute idiots. But if we’re looking at this, we’re not looking at the protests and ICE and breaking laws left and right and stupid ugly bills, are we.

It’s a lot.

So I had started my next quilt drawing and began inking on Friday night…

You can’t quite see it, but in pencil, on the left, there’s a hand stopping a missile. I inked that Saturday night, after the bombs dropped on Iran.

Added an American flag to it, because it’s ours. The Statue of Liberty was already penciled in. Last night, I inked the ICE swamp…

Because that’s what it is…a swamp of people wearing masks and maybe being legal sometimes? But mostly racial profiling and who knows if some of the people out there are actually ICE or not? They apparently don’t have to tell us. Need to add some swamp trees. Decide what’s happening under the arm underneath them. Oh yeah, added a bomb and an explosion. This drawing is evolving with the current situation. Not sure where I’m going next. Into space? Seems reasonable.

I did some clay glazing on Friday. Very peaceful.

I did the red.

And some flesh.

I keep breaking the left hand off. Frustrating. It’s a level issue…it’s lower than the rest of it. I might need to make a base for firing. Hoping to be back today or tomorrow. We’ll see.

Saturday was the opening of In the Land of… at the downtown library. It’s on the first floor.

It’s super hard to photograph things in glass cases. Here’s the front of mine with part of Jennifer Spencer’s piece…

And here’s the back…

There will hopefully be a video of me talking about the piece and maybe a video of the whole show. I’ll post if I see them.

I’ve also been trying to applique all the flowers on the borders of the Homegrown quilt…

It’s time consuming. But I’m almost done with the top and bottom ones, so then I can do the side flowers. Until then…

Plus doing a lot of escapist cleaning and reading to try to manage my brain. I have a biopsy set up in 2 1/2 weeks. There were two things they found in the MRI that didn’t show up in a mammogram. Better safe than sorry, but it did ramp my anxiety up. Also, the last biopsy wound hurt for a good 6 months. So it’s fun when they say oh no, it doesn’t hurt. Such bullshit. Then last time, when I called after three weeks, they admitted, oh yeah, it might hurt for a while. But it isn’t the pain I worry about, of course.

OK, today. Finish cleaning this disaster of a room. Getting my hair cut (it’s way too long). Trying to find a dress for a wedding Saturday. I had one ordered, but it was too small in the boobage, and I don’t think the replacement will get here in time. Ugh. I hate shopping for clothes. Oh well. Whatever. Then do some drawing, maybe finally get the binding on that other wool quilt, pack up two quilts for delivery for another show coming up in San Ysidro area. Yardwork of course. Try not to roll into the hole of nuclear bombs and children dying and people being deported who came here and followed the rules.

Trying to Live a Full Life…

OK, so this week is just plain weird. State testing for two days, so 3+ hours with kids for two days, then they leave and I hopefully am super efficient and finish grading everything (ha! hahahahah.). Then I leave at some ungodly hour on Thursday for Quilt National, knock on wood, everything goes well. You never know. I certainly don’t. Looking forward to it though. Seeing the art. Talking to artists. Fun stuff, really. It’s one of the things I appreciate about the art quilt world. In fact, I was at a local SAQA meeting on Saturday, and it’s cool to see people present their work and talk about what they do. It makes me feel like I don’t do much, though…they’re all starting philanthropic groups and teaching classes and writing books…and I just make quilts. It’s OK…I don’t want to teach quilt classes and I don’t know what I’d write a quilt book about that would actually get published anywhere, so for now, I’ll just keep making the work. Which is, in fact, the part I like best.

So on Friday, I had to put two heads back on, and finally decided that the clay coathanger was not gonna work, so I made a new hand with a hole in it, and I’ll make a metal coathanger to go in there. That’s a better idea anyway. I got everything reattached and put the first super light layer of underglaze on…

It’s a bit too pinky. I’ll work on that. I’m gonna be underglazing for a while, no matter what. I’m hoping I don’t have to keep fixing things, but I’m sure I will. There’s a lot of things attached to this.

I finished tracing the last of the pieces for the new quilt, which is small (for me), on Friday night. And then I cut them all out.

It’s only got like 137 pieces, so it was fast. I was going to start ironing to fabrics on Saturday, but Kitten had some major pee/poop issues and it involved some fabric bins. She’s decided that’s where she lives now, and I had them covered by towels, but that’s not enough in this case. So I ended up washing two bins of fabric with the pee remover stuff and then sorting through about 8 bins of fabric, culling fat quarters for donation. I never made it through all of my fabric over a year ago when I last did this, so it was a good time to do that. I keep the stuff I use the most, and because I use super small pieces with most fabrics, those are the ones I cut in half, donating some to Social Justice Sewing Academy and some to the Navajo Quilt Project. It allows me to keep buying some fabric (I like a huge palette), but not be drowning in fabric. Here’s some of what I sorted through.

Grays and blues mostly. It’s also nice to reacquaint myself with fabrics I haven’t seen for a while. There’s some in those bins that will be hair in the new quilt, I think. The blues, not the grays, just in case you’re thinking I’m normal.

Last night, I finally started ironing the pieces of the new quilt down to fabric.

Not so exciting in the color ranges at the moment. This won’t take long. I might even finish tonight. We’ll see.

At the SAQA meeting on Saturday, I recognized this artist, Ellen Ann Eddy…

I’ve always loved her work; I took one of her classes early on in my art quilt development, but obviously, her method didn’t really stick. I do have a baby I made in her style way back in the day that I meant to make into something bigger. Maybe should pull that out.

That is how I feel some mornings, but I’m definitely not 29. My knees are not anywhere close to 29.

Anyway, art tonight, grading all day, kids complaining that they still have to work…all day, every day. Book club tonight! Yes, I finished the book, thank goodness. I actually really liked it, although I’m blanking on it right now. Not really awake. Lots of meetings today. Gotta write sub plans. All good. Trying to live a full life means I have bits of bougainvillea in my thumb right now, a quilt in progress, many shipping dates coming up, at least one thing I need to enter, cat laundry to do (yes, more, but not pee this time), and four thousand things to grade. Or throw away? It’s possible I will do that. Shhh. Don’t tell the kids. Must go to work now.

Legit Bugs

Hey oh. I suspect everyone thought yesterday was some day besides Friday…I heard ‘Saturday’ and ‘Monday’. I knew it was Friday but somehow forgot to actually WRITE on Friday. I was busy. I got up and showered and went to the ceramics studio, came back for a stitching Zoom, then a trip to the local farmers market, and then a ton of sanding…more of that in my future. All good. I just forgot to write anything. Ah well.

I’ve been trying to finish the two smaller quilts, or at least get them to handsewing stage, before I start ironing the big one together. I got the first one quilted a few days ago…

And then started the other one yesterday…

This is what happens if you walk away from the machine and don’t fold everything up so Kitten can’t get to it…

I sorted the big quilt’s pieces…

That took a couple of hours. In clay, I did some final glazing on the winged woman…

I suspect she went in a glaze fire yesterday, but we’ll see. She has fabric in her future.

And then I started underglazing on the current piece. The base is ready for it…

I didn’t finish.

More clay tomorrow…I’m trying to go in every other day during the summer. Between the quilt stuff and the clay stuff, this summer is delightful. This is my solution to burnout.

I did…well, I didn’t volunteer, but when I was asked, I said yes…agree to do some demos at the Oceanside Museum of Art’s Street Level Volume 2 event in a couple of weeks. I never understand my brain when it says yes to this stuff. Although it gets my work and name out there, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll be demoing bugs.

I ended up enlarging that little one on the bottom. Some are legit bugs. Not sure about the bottom one. I’ll have them in different stages and then demo some of the stages. We’ll see how that goes.

I bought this for the prep room at school for the next school year.

It’ll make 50 cups of tea…between me and my co-teacher, hopefully we won’t need all of those cups in one year, but who knows.

Butterflies everywhere…

I’m still watching that cocoon.

No hatching…hatching? Is that the right word? I don’t know.

It’s been warm. Not the heat wave you keep seeing on the news.

I mean, they keep giving us warnings, but I think we’re still pretty bearable. Cats may disagree.

My phone thinks my volume is too high.

Intriguing. I’ve been listening to a book while quilting and doing yardwork and housework. I have one earpod in. Apparently now it will decrease my volume whether I like it or not (I need to be able to hear over the sewing machine. Fascist phone. What if people are hard of hearing? Anyway, I’m sure if I Google it I can figure out how to turn it off. Technology. Took me 30 minutes yesterday on chat with a Zoom person to figure out how to send feedback about their new cost increases. Y’all, I am not a professional Zoom user. I do not use it for my business (well, sometimes I do, but my business is one person. Me.). Why don’t they have a level between the free Basic and Pro that does not cost so much? For what I use it for, I don’t need all the AI and phone stuff…I just wanna hang out with my faraway friends on Zoom a couple times a month. Sheesh. Stupid.

OK, quilt guild meeting today. Need to sand doors (ugh). Lots of doors. Need to finish quilting this small one and pack up one to ship to my SIL for her wall. Her job is to sell it off her wall. Or just enjoy it. Also fine. The yardwork needs to start, as we go into a warm week. Carpet starts Monday…so I moved a bunch of drawers, but still have some stuff to move at the last minute…that’ll be tomorrow. Hoping to hike today? But will need to wait until 6 PM I think for it to cool down enough. That interferes with the Man’s dinner plans, although he’s going out to lunch, so he’ll probably need a nap. Might be hiking alone. Plan.