A Gopher Tale…

The dog (Calli) is staring intently out into the lower yard, worried-looking but not barking or crying. She looks at me when I slip out the back door, whining slightly and so excited that I’ve come out to see what she sees. I peer down into the weed-infested space (I really should do more yardwork. At midnight. On Sundays.) and see one of the 3-foot-tall weeds jiggling, like something is down there. I make the executive decision to walk down the deck on the back of the house. It will look right over that space, and then if it’s a skunk, I don’t have to meet it up close right before school. Calli follows me, thrilled that I know what’s worrying her. I get to right above the wiggling weed and peer down. There’s nothing there. Nothing’s even moving at the moment. I wait. Calli waits, whining quietly. The weed starts to move again, and there is a noise of teeth gnashing. I look more closely. The weed is not just moving; the entire plant is disappearing inside…a gopher hole. Oh. OK. That’s funny. I laugh. Damn dog is scared of gophers. I try to put her out later to pee, and she cries at me, protesting, scratching at the door, and then running back in, Golden Retriever vs Gopher a pure loss in her tiny little mind. I love this dog, but damn…she’s scared of gophers. So much for protection.

Girlchild says it’s because she’s afraid SHE’LL disappear like that. Huh. Silly dog.

So I had tons of crap to deal with yesterday, but I was damn efficient and tried to keep irritation levels at a minimum, hard to do when having to give yet another state-mandated survey on top of state-mandated testing, none of which works the way it’s supposed to work. Our theory now is that the adaptive testing actually refuses to accept wrong answers at some point until students go back and try to fix some of their bad answers. That can’t be true. That doesn’t even make sense…but I have to admit, despite the fact that I’m a teacher, I don’t understand how these newfangled tests are working.

Then I finally made it home for girlchild’s dinner-making extravaganza (chicken salad) and some quiet time (not…prom-dress worries with SVU in the background) on the couch, trying to grade some more (I really want to be caught up. It may never happen. Ever.) until I gave up and started cutting Wonder Under, because I remembered my mistake of the night before. Make Art Dummy!

The thing is…photos of cut-out Wonder Under aren’t very exciting…

(trash on the right)…not even to me. Although that box is almost full.

Here’s all I have left to cut…

Now THAT’S exciting. Just one piece left. That’s one evening maybe. There are a lot of little pieces, yes, but there’s also some big whopping pieces in there. (Big pieces take less time to cut out.). I’ve done about 2 1/2 hours, so maybe another hour, hour and a half? I did one whole piece last night in less than an hour.

Now I can start to get excited about ironing to fabric. That’s way more fun. Color and stuff. Making artistic decisions and stuff. And stuff! But I do need to clean this space out first, get some shit out of here and straighten up all the fabrics, put all the stuff away from the last quilt. I still haven’t done that. Sigh. Damn. I hate dealing with that stuff. I can put the fabric away, pile it up by color and straighten up. When I finished the last batch of financial aid stuff, I put everything in labeled file folders, because I didn’t do that last year and it was chaos this year trying to figure out what went where and where everything was. But I still need a home for all that. I still learn from my mistakes. Good thing really. I make lots of them. But I’m a hoarder genetically, so even getting rid of the rest of the upholstery scraps from that recycled quilt causes me issues. What if I NEED them? Really? Seriously? I won’t be able to find them…that’s what if.

And I got a bunch of fabric from a mom I grew up around, the mom of some good friends. She’s not quilting or sewing any more, due to a series of strokes. I’m glad to take in her fabric…kinda makes me feel good thinking some of my stash comes from Sandi, but I have to put them all away too! I know. My problem. I’ll deal.

So I don’t remember where on FB I saw this, but this video about the nipple is good…I didn’t even know about the no-male-nipple laws. This is probably NSFW for most workplaces, which is also an issue, because if I were watching a video with topless males, there might be an issue, but with topless females, it’s always an issue. Go home and watch it.

It does seem like we need to Free the Nipple, people (without the comma, that’s an interesting sentence times two). Certainly looking at my art, it would be nice if people were a little less dramatic about nudity. A naked woman does not equal porn. Neither does a vulva nor a nipple.

Leaving you with that. It’s a good way to start the morning.

The Cutting of the Wonder Under

Mothers Day: the only day of the year children will try to feed you and clean up for you. Well, apparently the girlchild last did those two tasks at Christmas, but I’m fairly sure I helped. She did good. Food was wonderful…we will miss her when she leaves. I just don’t pay close enough attention when I cook to do it well. I’m always trying to escape the kitchen to my studio.

I did a couple of drawings this weekend while watching the end of True Detective, which was good. At some point, I couldn’t draw because I was concentrating too hard on the show…always an issue.

But before that, there was this…

Which I actually want to do over…and this…

Which might be OK.

And the other 15 drawings are still roaming around in my head, creating havoc with my ability to remember how or when to do anything (or maybe that’s menopause…hard to say).

And then at night, after dinner and cleanup and exercise, I finally got around to this…

The very titillating Cutting of the Wonder Under.

Stay tuned for many pictures of piles of paper cut out with fusible web on one side. Très exciting.

State testing starts today, so I have to be at school early, because I have duty and I have to get my room set up and all my stuff located. I’m completely unprepared, unfortunately. My brain? Mush. Dammit.

This Mood

So many things achieved. I hate when my mood doesn’t reflect what I’ve gotten done…some of that is moody hormones, unfortunately, but some of it is getting bogged down by other crap that just won’t leave me alone. The little stuff is really getting to me at the moment. Need to dump that mentality. Must be getting to the end of the school year.

My two quilts are going to the photographer today…I dehaired and ironed them this morning, got up a little early to make sure I had enough time. Probably won’t finish writing this before I have to go, but that’s OK. I graded papers last night too. Girlchild and I were going to go to this art and music thing, but it was canceled for the rain (yes. we had rain. a miracle.), so she went off to dinner with friends, while I watched the series finale of Sons of Anarchy. Sheesh. Well, it’s done anyway. I think it’s hard to end a series well (Sopranos for example, not as an example of ending well). At least they got to make a decision about how to end it, instead of just not being renewed.

So I finished tracing the Wonder Under on Bathtub 2 last night…

And no, Kitten wasn’t helping. She mostly sat around on the papers I needed and then rolled around presenting her belly for petting. Then attacked. It’s nice when she comes out though.

It took almost 8 hours to trace this quilt, which is more than I would have guessed, but there are some whopping big and complicated pieces in the bathtub and water that took more than a minute or two to trace. I usually figure about 100 pieces an hour. Tracing big pieces takes longer than small.

The next step is to cut them all out and then move on to the ironing. I need to clean up the studio first though. There’s some stuff in there that’s been there so long, I don’t know what it is. Time to get it out of the way. Summer cleaning is how teachers think. We don’t Spring Clean. There’s no time. Summer is when our brains like to get rid of stuff and reorganize and move stuff around.

So that’s on the list. Even starting now, I think. I can’t iron fabrics for the next quilt without some major cleaning in here.

I’ve had some conversations about smaller quilts I can make for sale this summer. I don’t want to do all cats, but I will do some. I’m thinking of a different owl and maybe a raven…and possibly one like the cancer donation quilt I did with the hands and the heart, but simpler. So I’m finalizing all that in my head and figuring out how to fit in at least three major quilts between now and the end of September. Ha! Wow. Crazy much?

Honestly, though, I’m kind of looking forward to putting some sort of plan together for summer work on quilts. It helps school feel less crazy. It helps quiet nights at home seem less lonely. It helps with the frustration of my job. It helps temper the teenaged mutant attitudinal beast who is currently on my couch, bitching about everything I say or do (walking away, my sweet. I love you, but I’m not in the mood). I’m crying at the drop of a hat these days, stupid hormones. Fuck. Going to draw today. Seriously. They’re whirring about in my head, causing strife and stress and nausea (oh wait, those are the hormones, right?). My photographer gave me some really positive comments about the quilts I dropped off…not that I didn’t like them, but I keep having this discussion about pretty versus significant. I prefer the latter. Most people like the former. I have to find the happy place between them for the stuff that sells easily and then keep making the big stinky stuff to keep me sane. Like sanity is my strong point! Whatever.

This mood. Sheeit. Dammit brain, I finished all this stuff. Would you back off for a bit? Sigh. We can engineer bridges, put humans in space for months on end, we know how to replace a lens in an eyeball without stitches, but we can’t find an acceptable treatment for menopausal crap? This world we live in. Don’t tell me it’s equal. It’s not.

Please Don’t Call Freud

Pouring rain. Heaven to California. Won’t be enough. Never is. But I can turn my water off for a week (to the plants…not the showers). I’m going to save water next year by sending the second kid to another state, a state with no apparent water issues…a state that makes its own water. Who thought greening the desert made any sense?

I have the end in my sights…which end? Lots of them. The end to tracing Wonder Under on this piece, which is strangely making my hand sore. I wake in the morning and it’s stiff and swollen. Probably this is more getting old or menopausal effects…because I never had issues before and I’ve traced for much more than an hour at a time. I’m up to 6 hours…

There are too many large, long, and convoluted pieces in this quilt. It makes tracing difficult…I hate wasting Wonder Under. It will make ironing difficult too.

This was the worst piece…

Crazy. Totally should have cut that up into smaller pieces. Oh well. So I’m at about 450 pieces done…didn’t do many pieces last night, even though I worked for over an hour. Of course, it probably took longer than normal because of pieces like that one above. So I need to think about the background for this one and whether or not I want to get more water or bathtub fabrics. Because that piece alone is a significant chunk of a half yard…and I don’t always have that sitting around…certainly not in water color. Whatever water color is.

I keep meaning to go to sleep earlier. I’m tired. My body protests the mornings, but some more than others. You’d think I’d be half dead this morning…stayed up later than the last few nights and it should all be catching up with me on a Friday, but I’m strangely OK. Headachy, but awake. Had headaches all week on and off. Thank you weather systems. Or students. Or financial aid. OK. So headaches could be caused by many things. They are NOT caused by donuts (don’t disabuse me of my notion please).

Totally have drawings rambling chaotically through my head. It was my monthly stitching meeting last night and they plopped a few more in there for me. It’s crazy how much stuff is piling up in there. My artist brain is rushing around, trying to record the ideas on these giant pieces of paper that she piles up in the corners, and then they all slip down and start sliding all over the place. She’s trying to keep them from getting in the way of going to school and remembering the parent meeting I have and that I have duty and it’s currently pouring rain and that I’m giving a test today and there’s that kid who can’t sign into the state testing but we think we figured out why so I have to check that today. All that’s being covered up by these giant slips of paper with intricate drawings of exploding uteri and fetuses reaching towards overloaded pregnant women and crones being pushed aside by perky-breasted skinny beasts with not a creative thought in their brains.

Yes. It’s on overload. Need to deal with that. Please don’t call Freud in on all that. I know exactly from whence it all came.

But it’s always good to just sit and stitch and talk out all your worries and amusements and giggle about stupid stuff, even though I’m old and wrinkly and decrepit and that’s not what society likes.

All I did was stitch feet.

OK. That’s not true. I stitched around eyes too. Two hours of feet though…basically.

Sometimes that’s the best kind of stitching, because it’s just kind of brainless. I can do bullion knots in my sleep now. And we talked about how to make phones do things and I’m trying to figure out how Siri can make dinner or lunch for me, because shit, I don’t have time for that, and she seems to have endless amounts of time. And then we talked about how Kathy can make money and the Other Kathy reminded me that I used to be an editor (crap, I forgot about that…no, I really did), so I’m looking at that possibility for extra work, plus they both voted for small cat quilts this summer for sale. So I need to go pull drawings with cats in them and start reinventing that wheel. Which is stressful, but not as stressful as trying to find hours in the day where I could drive to a job location and work there after being on my feet all day at school. Because my foot is killing me, despite the attempts to rest (ha!) and elevate it (double ha!) and wear an ankle brace, which a student thought was an ankle bracelet and I was on home arrest. At school. Trust me, sometimes that job totally feels like that, like now, with only six weeks to go and the hardest test of the year today and two weeks of state testing looming over us.

Big fucking sigh. I’m good. I can do this.

Thunder and pouring rain. Kids will be absent today because of that. Stupid.

An Hour a Day

Things that are good right now. Right this second. The dog is sound asleep behind my chair and is not eating the girlchild’s underwear. I am only teaching Punnett squares for about three more days and then I am done done done with the stuff that is apparently so hard we can’t do it. I had an awesome book club meeting last night and a long talk with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I have another social meeting tonight. Grades are done. I think I have uploaded every stupid-ass document Cornell needs onto the financial aid system. The boychild is coming home in less than two weeks. It’s supposed to rain. There are leftovers in the fridge for my lunch today. Google Classroom finally updated so I can grade assignments from my iPad. I’m wearing jeans to work today (this after a long work dress code discussion at book club last night). My foot hurts but it’s not a broken bone. I already had an ankle brace in my stash. I still like Cheerios for breakfast after some 48 years of eating them. Two of my quilts are traveling with the People and Portraits exhibit, and now they will be at all four AQS Quilt Weeks in 2016.

Deep breath. See. That’s all ok.

I had book club last night. This is a group of smart geeky women, the two oldest besides me are a good 10 years younger than me, but they are accepting and funny and sarcastic and intelligent. Some of the best conversations I have some months are at these meetings, no matter what the book is (we panned the book…Mass Midnight by F. Paul Wilson…lousy dialogue, messed up the story, didn’t even make sense at one point, not pleased with how they dealt with anything, except that the vampires didn’t get all sexy or sparkly). I don’t make it to all of them, because of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but I do have a good time when I go. I had a long conversation afterwards with a friend there, and it got me home and dinnerfied late (thanks to the girlchild for making dinner), but I did manage to get off the couch and do art. I almost always manage to do that. I’m not a couch sitter really. I’m usually grading papers (did that yesterday too) or sewing or cutting stuff out or drawing if I’m on the couch. Girlchild’s new TV obsession is SVU, of all things. Kind of a mental shock for her to go from weeks of watching Friends (which almost drove me bonkers) to the Law and Order offshoots. I suggested she start with L&O and she just looked at me like I was crazy. She finished the second AP test yesterday, so she’s a little braindead.

So I traced…

Only for about an hour. That’s the key. I think some people are like, well, I’m not going to get very much done, plus it’s late, and then they never get up. I regularly do about an hour a night, or try to anyway, and when I have more time (and energy, honestly), I do more. I can do almost 4 hours in a good night, but that’s rare, except on weekends and vacations. But an hour a day is 365 hours you didn’t spend on art before. An hour a day when you figure about 7 hours to trace all the Wonder Under for this quilt? That’s a week. That’s nothing. And I wasn’t always this good at it. I had to push myself to get here. I used to put it on my calendar, just like I did the blog writing. And then it became habit. And now, I have to be sick or out of town to not be making art, and even then, I’m probably drawing with the latter.

Which reminds me, driving to the book club venue last night, a drawing related to the Barton thing I showed you yesterday popped into my head. Like BING! And it’s still there, because I didn’t draw it last night. Aargh. I need a full day just of drawing I think.

So 4 1/2 hours in, I’m 400 pieces in as well. Only a couple hundred pieces to go. I’m feeling better about this piece. Progress. It helps.

Keep doing the work. Keep getting up off the couch.

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).

This Is Not It

Nope. Not it. I mean, I drew it, but it was late and I was kinda tired and you can tell because the lines are all loosey goosey and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. So maybe this is a study for the final one.

I mean, it’s not a bad drawing, and it certainly has fewer pieces than many of my quilts, and I know what I was trying to do, but it’s not it. It’s OK. I have the technology. I can draw a new one. The main idea is there. It’s not like I don’t do multiple versions of drawings on a regular basis, especially if it’s for a particular theme or show. Why wouldn’t I do a quick speedy draw…seriously, this took maybe 20 minutes, and most of that was trying to figure out the fingers around the wine glass…which I really like. I think that’s the only part I really like. No, that’s not true. There’s a fluidity of line in there that I like. So I’m not knocking it out. I’m not.

This is just not it.

So when I don’t draw for a while (it’s been a month or so), my brain doesn’t forget how…it just needs to remember how to hold the pen and control it, to let the art brain have the pen, to let it go. (please don’t sing that damn song) I wasn’t able to really do that last night. Maybe tonight.

So once I’d purged that from my hand (brain?), I cut out more Wonder Under. I’m hoping to get to the ironing stage in the next few days, which means getting this done and ignoring the fact that it will take me an hour to sort all the damn pieces.

I’ve been cutting for 4 1/2 hours. My guess would be another 2 1/2 to go? It’s a total guess, by the way. I could make an educated guess, based on previous quilts, but that would presume I am way more awake at the moment than I am. OK. Apparently I’m lame. The last bigger quilt I made, I spent about the same amount of time tracing pieces, but I was done trimming Wonder Under in just under 5 hours. Either that, or these pieces are more complicated. I could go for that…because all those overlapping leaves and freakin’ feathers take forever to trace? (but they’re easier to cut out)…I don’t know. Or I’m just slow.

If this thing is really going to take 80 hours to finish, I need to get going. I have 3 1/2 weeks to Spring Break…I need it ironed to fabric and trimmed by then. That’s about 25 hours of work. Yikes! There’s a soccer tournament in there too. I can do this though. I just need to work smart. And not get sick again. Speaking of working smart, I probably need to go to work as well…that whole teaching thang. It pays the bills so I can buy more fabric.

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.

Wonder Under Dreaming

Wonder Under dreaming…ten hours and 37 minutes of tracing Wonder Under, around 900 pieces (I didn’t number all of them, shockingly). I did the whole thing under the influence of pneumonia and rib-rattling coughing…starting February 17 and ending last night. I was obviously well and truly ill from the 19th through the 22nd, because nothing happened.

Here’s all but one yard, which I had already cut out…

So about 5 yards…most of it is the old stuff. One and a half yards is the new stuff, so I will apparently be performing a scientific experiment comparing the old to new on this quilt. I love that. (not really.)

I only have a little over 2 hours into the trimming of the Wonder Under though. I guess that’s this week.

It’s progress. I realized last night though that I needed one of the recycled pieces done (DONE) by April 1. Huh. That’s a month away. I can do that. I have one top ready to be sandwiched; I could do that today. And I bought some heavier black thread for the upholstery fabrics to quilt the outlining. Yes, I went to JoAnns. Hate that place. But I had a coupon. And otherwise, I have to buy Wonder Under online and ship it here. That’s expensivo. So I do the deed. I pull my numbered ticket and I stand there for-fucking-ever, waiting to tell them I want the whole bolt anyway, so they don’t have to cut anything, but I still have to wait in the fucking line. And then I go wait in the other long nasty line where they put all that crap on both sides of you, candy and shitty packages of socks and beads for Mardi Gras, just like at Michaels, and I think to myself, I hate this place, but I still go there, because it is what it is. Sales are more important than how shitty the store feels, I guess.

Then there’s this drawing that is fully realized in my head. My brain drew the whole damn fucking thing yesterday as I was driving to school. And I want to find the time and space (because you need mental space to draw) to get it out of my head, vomit it out onto the paper, but I have grading to do and I’m tired and still sick and kinda irritated today, which isn’t anyone’s fault, well except maybe the financial aid departments of all the colleges to which the girlchild applied, because why do you y’all have to be such giant pains in the ass? I mean really. This stuff makes my head hurt.

I entered another art exhibit last night. I didn’t think I’d have anything that would work for this show, even though the title and description are right up my alley…the size restrictions were part of the problem, and the rest of it is that so much of the recent stuff is already out traveling. But I found three that would work and went for it. Because why not? And then looked further out, the next 6+ months of big shows, and realized I needed to quit my stupid daytime job so I could make all the art I wanted to make.

Yeah. That’s not happening. I did ream my students yesterday for asking for MORE time to turn in late work. I said I wanted to have time with my daughter where I wasn’t grading papers. That I wanted to be able to sleep at night. That I wanted to go to her game this Saturday. That I was spending hours every night grading all their makeup work. That I was working way harder than they were. I’m done. Seriously. No more. This happens every year. There’s four weeks until Spring Break and the kids are mentally on vacation and I’m about to start the hardest unit of the year and I’m done. Another parent blows me off when their kid is doing nothing? Man. I just want to bring that kid home and feed him some real food and talk science to him, because he gets it, and then maybe after a year or so of my holding him accountable, maybe he’ll be the student he could be if he had someone around who gave a shit. And that’s what I told him yesterday when he said mom didn’t care: “You have 4 teachers right now who care, but we need you to care too. If you don’t care, we’re not going to waste our time. So you decide. Let me know.” And that’s the truth. He has that right now and it makes him alternately angry and full of hope, and he doesn’t know what to do with any of that. Neither do I, honestly. Neither do I.

That’s the reality of being a teacher. Dear politicians, y’all don’t know shit.

Calli. Such a doofus.

Yeah, so maybe I should make some art today and fuck the school crap. Because it’s messing with my head right now. I’m so frustrated with excuses and the reality of what I can get kids to do and the parents. I just can’t face it. I tried last night. I tried this morning. Better off losing myself in that Wonder Under dream…that place where I don’t have to think about what happens tomorrow or in April or this summer. Just cutting little pieces of fusible web out to make another scary Nida picture.

Or the other bathtub drawing. Yeah. Odalisque in Bloody Bathtub. Awesome name. Won’t ever get into a show. Whatever.

Artistic Meditation

I realize photo-wise this and the next stage are remarkably boring. Miles and miles of Wonder Under…although hey! I bought a new bolt of WU yesterday and it feels really different. You have to realize I’ve been using Wonder Under to make quilts since 1999. Or maybe 2001. Had to go look at the quilt list…I did start making art quilts in 1999, but I wasn’t a Wonder Under user until 2001. Most of my earliest quilts, I cut out the fabric and just lay it down on the background and pinned the fuck out of it. Stabbed myself a million times too, which is pretty damn stupid. But that’s how Joan Colvin showed me how to do it (and that’s how she did it too, and her quilts are beautiful).

Anyway, so here’s the miles…

I’m on the 4th yard, but had to start a 5th one because one of the pieces was too big to fit on the 4th piece…so probably around 5 yards of pieces. I was trying to keep the detail to a minimum (ha!) so I would be able to finish it in time, so there are some honking big pieces. I think, “oh cool, I’m gonna use up some of my stash!” but I know that it really doesn’t. I rarely run out of a fabric…I might get down to the tiny pieces that can really only be used for little things, but if you think about how much fabric I have (well, you probably don’t think about that, but I do), it’s really just a drop in the bucket. Kathy York was making a stashbuster quilt here, and made some comment about how it barely used any of her stash up, and it was only one color, and it was a huge quilt, and I’m like…YEAH! But we have to use it to justify buying more, right? York buys fabric for specific projects, too, so she is a much better person than I am. I buy fabric because I need it in my palette. I really do think of the stash as this huge palette from which to paint my quilts. And you always need more colors.

Anyway, my special fabric psychosis aside, there are some stash-busting pieces in this drawing, where I’ll need huge chunks of gray or white, and then blue, and some foxy red, which doesn’t mean a red that makes you look foxy, but a red that’s the color of a fox.

I traced about 200 pieces last night before I stopped. I really wanted to just keep going, but that would have been close to an allnighter, I think, another 2 1/2 hours and it was already midnight. I do still have to get healthy and teach and function like a semi-normal human being. Apparently.

And then the NEXT step will be cutting all those pieces out, which is another batch of boring pictures. The fabric-choosing…now there’s the pictures y’all will enjoy, because you get to see my stash and what I’m currently watching on Netflix. Always exciting.

But the thing is, even though the pictures are boring, this is sometimes one of my favorite parts of making the quilt. Tracing all those pieces out, standing at my light table, it’s really meditative. I have the TV on and I’m half-listening and maybe a quarter-watching, and I’m looking for each piece (sometimes it takes me a while to find them if I didn’t number particularly logically), and then I’m evaluating each piece for whether it needs an overlap to go under the pieces next to it, and then I’m looking to see if it continues underneath to another section at all, and it’s this place in my brain that’s like a big soft pillow. All the other shit just wanders off, looking for a bar where it can start a fight, and my brain just settles down, takes a deep breath, and does its work. Analyzing, drawing, going on to the next piece. And the next one. And the next one. And really nothing gets in the way of that, except when the tea gets cold (take break to walk to the microwave…should take regular breaks anyway), or when I need to pee (see breaks), or when the show ends and I have to pick the next one or fastforward through commercials. It’s peaceful. It’s relaxing. It’s a weird-ass form of meditation. The Wonder Under Meditation.

I always feel so much better after tracing. Fabric-choosing is kind of the same way. They use a part of my brain that pushes everything else out, which is why I lose track of time when I’m doing it. When I finally thought to look at the task-measuring app I was using last night, I had been working for over 2 hours. Just working. Just tracing. No way I could do that with grading without getting all antsy and irritated. Even quilting irritates me (mostly because thread is breaking or because it’s so much more physical).

Anyway, I had another idea for a bathtub drawing (a series!)…I think I’ve done two drawings so far, but only one really deserves to be a quilt, and now I have a third one in my head, and it’s really not pretty, but whatever…

This was the first one, and she’s still headless…

I actually like it now that I’m looking at it, but I would finish it much differently now than when I first drew it. Which is fine, because I’d enlarge it and THEN add the head. Only the top head. The bottom head is supposed to be gone. These are of course inspired by Kahlo’s bathtub painting…which I know I posted on here, but now cannot find. What the Water Gave Me, 1938…

And then the one I really want to do…

It’s next on the list…some day. But now there’s another one. In my head. And you aren’t going to like it. But it needs to get out.

But drawing is another form of meditation, one I hope to rediscover someday soon…really. It’s been long enough.