Cat Eating Peas

I didn't quite catch him in the act...this is post pea-eating. But I saw him. Of course, you're thinking, hey...why are there peas lying around on the table? Me too. I am asking this question. I have kids...what can I say. They reject food...it can't stay on the plate...it has to be on the placemat. I would prefer trashcan, but not an option.



My son asked me today if I thought any other teachers had houses as messy as ours. What a nice boy. I said he should go to school and ask his teachers how messy their houses are, and then ask them if they have kids and a spouse. Then I told him I was joking and he shouldn't ask that, but maybe he could go clean something. He only likes to clean things with sticks (brooms, mops, etc...sticks). Kids make messes; spouses occasionally help to clean them up. At least I think I remember that.



Couldn't figure that arty blur out? Here it is from farther away. Yes, they're going to school.



But I've managed to get approximately 13 seconds of handstitching done per day since school started. Yes, I stitched for 26 seconds yesterday and none today. OK, exaggeration. I actually took the giant naked lady to my daughter's piano lesson, folded it carefully so no revealing bits showed, and stitched away on the flames at the bottom. AND I found slide film in my fridge, so I don't have to try to make a kamikaze trip tomorrow to get some.



Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my blood sugar is sky high, I have a deaf student and an autistic student who are great kids and a bunch of future jail residents. I'd like to think that they aren't set in stone at the age of 12, but some of the parental influence is so pervasive that I'm not sure any of us can cut through it.

On that cheery note, my checkbook needs balancing.

The Smell of Blueberry Muffins

My SIL is to thank for this indulgence. I mean, it's 100 degrees plus out there, so it makes sense to turn the oven on for more than an hour to make blueberry muffins. We didn't get to pick our own berries this time (although we did spill a whole pint over the back of my car. They look good, don't they? Imagine how they smell...



I'm doing some embroidery on the Earth Mother quilt. Simple stuff. Here's the thread, perle cotton size 8. I got some more at the quilt store the other day. Didn't have enough colors. As always. I NEVER have enough colors.



I just started while the kids were swimming today. Haven't done much. Don't have much time to do it, if I want to enter this in some show this fall. So I will be a good girl this week and make sure I make time for it. By the way, so you understand my insanity, my students show up on Tuesday, all 158 or so of them.



Speaking of students, I ran into one the other day whose name I totally couldn't remember. I felt bad. But I've had over 600 students in just over 3 years, and I'm about to learn another large batch. It's amazing I can remember my own kids' names. Anyway, this was a gift from a student who blew off school to go guess where? So he brought the teachers shot glasses from his trip to Cancun. This still makes me laugh. Maybe he thought they were cute little vases. Yeah right.

Comments

Comments always welcome. Karoda mentioned "etching" out time for art from my job. It is a matter of using a sharp implement, not just to carve out the time, but to poke at the people who try to take the time away from you. And then to poke at yourself when you waste time doing stupid stuff like cleaning house or futzing around on the computer instead of making art, when you already gave yourself permission to make it tonight.

My goal last school year was to find more time DURING the year to make art. It happened. A little. Not as much as I'd like, and I found my mental status suffering when I didn't. My goal this school year is to get better at separating school from real life from art time. Unfortunately, I currently have 40 more students than last year and a whole new class to teach that I suck at. At which I suck, to be grammatically correct (and no, it's not grammar I'm teaching...I'd probably be OK with that).

However much I need to be planning for school tonight, I will make the time to work on this and on the embroidery I want to put on the piece I just finished binding.



I have 10 minutes before I need to leave for piano lessons and Boy Scouts...I don't really feel like I can take the embroidery with me, because of the whole giant naked lady issue. That part sucks. Maybe I should make more benign, family friendly art. Naah.

Make Art, Not Schoolwork

OK, so the last two days, what I should have been doing is preparing for the new school year, driving up to school and getting my room ready, devising amazing lesson plans with the two new curricula I'm getting (but don't actually have yet), or researching intriguing methods of teaching Darwin on the web. But I didn't do any of those things. Instead, I finished the binding on the last quilt and ironed a new one whose pieces had been sitting around since April. It went really quickly, one day. I took a picture of the head in progress. Nice leafy neck.



I also took a picture of the whole thing ironed, but it was really blurry and horrible, so you'll have to wait until I have another chance to photograph it. I feel good about getting it done. School can't be my life. I mean, it CAN, but I won't let it.

The dogs are now fighting over toys. Growling and snapping and aargh. Exhausting.



Tonight, I could worry about the math curriculum, I could schedule the science curriculum, I could really worry about my class sizes (37+ kids in a classroom that seats 28), or I could quilt.

Southwest Block 10

Here it is. Sand Dune Arch. Arches? Can't remember. Ready for Pattern 11. No pressure, oh teacher of mine. I know you started school today. I understand. No really. I do.



I got all the binding on the new quilt. What's funny is that I was pinning the binding back at my daughter's soccer practice, praying the entire time that no one would ask to see the quilt (I had it folded with just the back showing) because it has a HUGE naked lady on it. I may be a soccer mom, but I'm a bit of a twisted example. I'm even team mom...bwa ha ha. Infiltration of the pack. I will take over the WOOOORLD.

Right. Back to sewing or ironing or some other girlie pursuit.

Dysfunctional Camera Card

I guess I need a new camera card. I took pictures of my significantly nonawake kids this morning on their first day of school, and the camera says the pictures are corrupt. Corrupted? Hmn.

It did take some pictures. For instance, and I don't know if my parents read my blog regularly, but I have been searching for my 9x13" Pyrex dish for about a month now. It wasn't in the drawer where it always is. Back when I was married, if I was looking for something that I used fairly regularly and I suddenly couldn't find it, I knew my ex-husband had taken it, used it, and left it in some totally random place. I asked him if he had my Pyrex (knowing that it was unlikely). He didn't. I asked my mom if she'd seen it (she occasionally unloads my dishwasher). She hadn't.



I found it this morning. In the cupboard under my bathroom sink. Where my dad had put it to catch water drips in case the faucet he had newly installed leaked. About a month ago. You might ask why I hadn't been under the cupboards...well, he was going to adjust the faucets, so I didn't put anything away. I asked him if I should. He said no. I didn't. Until today, when I realized I was tired of tripping over the stuff, he was gone for 3 weeks and then had guests for a week, and then was off to a wedding for another few days, and it would probably be October before he had time to deal with the faucets. Which Is Fine. But I'm not tripping over all that stuff until October. So the Pyrex is found. And a man used it and left it somewhere I wouldn't even think to look for it. The universe continues.

I'm reading this book. Mom gave it to me for Xmas and after having read Angela's Ashes, which is as depressing as any book I've ever read, I just couldn't bring myself to find out what depressing notions about teaching Mr. McCourt was going to bring to the table. Then my new principal sent us a letter with 2 pages of quotes from the book, and I was intrigued. It's not bad. He's still depressing, disturbing, but somewhat funny in a cynical and sarcastic way. The Resolve? Dog is not potty trained.



Now I will use my childless day to find binding for the big quilt, trim it (have to clean the floor again because the dear sweet puppy thing peed on it again), and maybe get that done. Yeah. And start another! It's funny how it still feels sad to drop them off at school on the first day. Some reminder of their getting closer to leaving me for their own lives. What a mope I am. Meanwhile, the dogs continue to try to kill each other for fun.



And now you know how messy my house is and what kind of destruction the cats have wrought upon my furniture.

Three Hours and Counting

Actually, three hours of just quilting the background. I think it took another three or four to do the line quilting in the darker color. But I'm done. And that's a good thing.

This picture of wrinkled paper intrigues me. I'm not really an abstract artist, but I keep taking weird abstract pictures for ideas. I'm also not really a landscape artist (I didn't draw those Southwest blocks), but I keep taking landscape pictures too. I guess you can't really take pictures of the stuff I make into art.



Yesterday, I had to go to three sewing stores to find this thread. My extremely local quilt store has a not-great selection of rayon thread and this background is a weird gray blue color, so nothing matched. I went there yesterday on the way to my daughter's soccer game. Then I went to a JoAnn's that I normally don't go to, because it was near the Birkenstock store, and I needed new shoes for school. That JoAnn's obviously caters to a different clientele, because they had a totally strange collection of thread, none of which was appropriate. So I gave up and made my driver (yeah, right) head north on the freeway to the other JoAnn's, where I found the right color in 3 seconds flat, and then in true JoAnn's fashion, spent an inordinate amount of time waiting in line to pay for it as some woman argued over the sale flyer and what was in her basket with the clerk. I hate that place. It is a necessary evil, I guess.

I bought three spools. I usually only buy one, but this is a big quilt, so I figured I would need two, and then I thought I'd ran out on the last big quilt, so I bought three. Don't question my logic. I did of course forget to buy any for the next pinned quilt, which was really dumb, because now I'll have to go back tomorrow. Sigh.



I have two days before I have to be at school. I don't have enough helpful information to feel prepared to start teaching again. Know that I do not wish to be a principal or a superintendent, but I do know that there are ways to deal with staff effectively, and I have yet to have a principal who seems to understand that. Maybe it is my years in the corporate and freelance world, where bad behavior tends to get you fired or to have all your employees quit.

Then I took this picture of some window film back in May 2005. Another weird abstract that intrigues me. Maybe I should use them as backgrounds.



Tomorrow, I will do some hand embroidery and maybe some inking on the quilt. I will probably have to go buy binding fabric, unless miraculously I have something appropriate in my stash in enough yardage. It seems unlikely. The kids have their first day of school. I feel their pain.

Insert Additional Animal and Increase Heat

Not a good equation. My parents are traveling, so Missy comes to visit again. Yet now Ivy is here too, so the two spent all day yesterday playfighting. Exhausting to watch or even hear, and I worry when Ivy's entire head fits into Missy's mouth. Seems Missy is getting Pissy.

Eventually, though, the heat and exhaustion kicked in and they stopped fighting over the toys. The dogs that is. The kids are still fighting, but since school starts MONDAY, these are the last few days of summer for them.



I pin-basted this piece yesterday. Had to clean the entry floor first, and then some dog peed on it after I had finished. The floor, not the quilt. Ugh. Although someone (I'm not naming names) peed on another quilt on which I'm still trying to sew the binding. So I can't throw it in the washing machine, because it still has pins in it, but I can't stand the pee smell to finish the hand sewing. I don't even know how it ended up on the floor. I rinsed it out (the pee was still wet) and hung it up to dry. We'll see how that goes.



I don't have enough free pins around now to pin-baste another quilt, so I'll have to finish quilting this one before I do another. Like that's a problem! Although I did finally find the master drawing for one I've been working on since April...couldn't iron it until I found that. My studio is a disaster still, despite an entire summer of "free time" to clean it up and organize it. I have come to the conclusion that there is just Too Much Stuff in there to actually clean it satisfactorily. And I sold some of it and took a bunch to the thrift shop. I know the problem. It's an 8-foot by 10-foot room that is my office for school and my art studio. There are three tables, a file cabinet, and 3 bookshelves. I need more bookshelves (Dad, are you reading this? Are you going to help me build the second story for my library???).

And yes, I know I can buy more pins at the store. I'm ignoring that fact in hopes that I will actually finish something this summer out of necessity.



More importantly, I started quilting. Unfortunately, it is hot here and my foot pedal is even hotter. I am currently waiting for it to cool down so I can quilt some more. I burnt my toes. And before you tell me to put shoes on, I don't really feel like I have good control of the foot pedal with shoes on. I've tried socks, but they're too slippery and the heat goes through them pretty quickly.



Maybe I should finish writing my Christmas thank you notes instead. Don't say it...

Backs

I finished stitching down all the pieces on my current fabric wonder. Why do I do this? Because they don't stay down otherwise. I know that some quilt artists do not stitch them down, or they let the quilting hold everything down, but I don't. So there. First of all, I'm not using just hand-dyed fabrics, so they don't always stick as well as they should (that and the crappy old Wonder Under I keep using not on purpose). I enjoy picking out weird and appropriate (or inappropriate, as the case may be) commercial fabrics for each part of my quilts. Hence, there is always an image on the back that is hidden away as soon as I sandwich the sucker.

Here's the chick who resembles Mother Mary.

And here's her weird little kid.

And as far as actual quilting goes, I like the image to pop out, so I usually use a black or dark thread to go around and line everything, and then I use some allover pattern in the background. I'm really way more about the image than the quilting. I like a texture in the background, because I think it makes the unquilted areas more apparent. I like LOOKING at quilts with amazing quilting (Melody Johnson www.fibermania.blogspot.com and Robbi Joy Eklow www.robbieklow.com are two I've enjoyed recently), but their stuff is more abstract than mine, and it lends itself to quilting like that.

Anyway, that's my view on quilting my own pieces. Your mileage may vary. Speaking of mileage, how irritating is it that gas prices fall the day after you fill your tank? Sheesh. I coulda used that 30 cents.

HA!

Hey. You know who you are. Happy birthday! Scary...huh?

Life Interrupts

It always does. I spent yesterday at Legoland with my daughter and her friends for her birthday party. It was actually fun, but exhausting, and it meant I got no quilting done on Monday or Tuesday. Prince Charming kissing Sleeping Beauty looks really weird in Legos.


Monday was filled with housecleaning (yes, I did it...no really) and replacing my windshield, which cracked I believe because some bad juju is hanging around me and trying to spend all my money. I didn't have the money to spare, but it's gone now, so I guess the juju is successful. I should draw the juju. Actually, I tried to draw last night, but I was too tired and I was watching something with subtitles. Note to self: you cannot draw during TV with subtitles.

That's my son hanging upside down in that thing. I did it with him the first time, and it took about 45 minutes before my stomach stopped moving around without me. So he did it with some complete stranger teenaged boy the second time (SECOND time? Is he NUTS?).


Today I am exhausted. Not enough sleep. Not enough rest. Still have 40 million errands to do and only three weekdays until the kids start school. I bought batting and washed it (yes I'm anal), so I'm ready to sandwich this baby as soon as I get it done. Maybe today. This little piggie gives up and takes a nap. Like that's an option.

Priorities

I laid out the backing on my floor...it's linoleum, so I just iron right onto it, although it helps if the room is CLEAN (more on cleanliness below). Then a puppy kamikazes into it and I yell and have to reposition the fabric.


Then I lay out all the pieces and try to get them to line up and iron them down enough so they'll stick. Then I pick it up and do a serious iron with water spritzing and counting to 30 and all that official stuff. Then I try to figure out what pieces I've lost (I wrote most of them down, and they're usually the really little ones, the ones the size of grains of rice). I replace all those.


Then I start sewing. And I sew until my foot pedal gets too hot to stand on, and that's my enforced breaks, so I don't get pain in the back or shoulders. Yes, the repair guy has taken apart my pedal and can't find a reason for the excessive heat, but I'm sure it will catch fire some day while I'm sewing, and it will be at a really bad time, and I won't be able to get a replacement for weeks.


Back to CLEAN. I have little girls and their moms coming on Tuesday for my daughter's birthday excursion. My house is not clean. It doesn't even approach clean. I mean, there's clutter, but under the clutter it is not clean. If I had a choice, I would spend the next two days quilting this sucker. But you know I will have to clean. At least some. So I will balance the cleaning (which the kids will help with) and the quilting (which the kids will NOT help with). In the end, the house will still be a bit messy and cluttered, and the quilt will probably not be done, but I will be happier then if I left the house the disaster area that it is today.

My fairy godmother needs to bring me a cleaning lady.

A Woman Fused

She's fused from head to knee. The lower legs will be attached when I fuse to the background, as will the horrible halo thing that has Wonder Under Stickiness Issues. She will look different when I quilt, because I quilt with a dark thread, and I will probably ink and embroider also for more definition. She is so calm looking. Obviously this is NOT a self portrait. Today, if the kids behave and if I am paying attention, I will get her fused onto the background.

Hi, I'm Kathy, and I'm a Fabriholic

It's true. I can't deny it. I've been fighting the urge to acquire fabric for about 3 weeks now. Almost every day, I come up with a roundabout way to find time to go to the local fabric store, and every day, I talk myself out of it. No money. Can't afford it. Have plenty (ha! as if that's possible).

Yesterday, a friend who is downsizing handed me a box. One of those boxes that you buy a million reams of paper from some office supply store in...a big box. And a bag. ALL FULL OF FABRIC. Oooh.


I managed to keep out of the box until after dinner tonight, and now I'm washing it all (yes, I'm anal, and also allergic to fabric chemicals). It's gonna take about three loads, I think, maybe four, and I am orgasmic.


See, the thing is, everyone has their fabric buying niche. You buy the same colors and tones, and when you realize you're doing that, you try to go out of your way to buy in a different color, to build up your stash of yellows, or like when I started the Southwest quilt, I knew I needed more orange, brown, red in the earth tones that you see in Utah, so I went shopping especially for that. But my friend, she buys in a different tone than I do, and that's what makes her donation to the poor me so awesome. There's stuff in there I don't think I ever would have THOUGHT to buy, but it so complements what I've got.

AND. There's a brown fabric I must have bought in about 1990, when I first started quilting. I love that brown. I use it in applique all the time. It's probably in 90% of my quilts. It is the quintessential brown. And I have maybe a 3" square of it left. I probably bought 1/2 a yard back in 1990, and I don't use big pieces of it usually, and recently I've been more careful about using it up. She had a good 1/2 yard piece of it in her stash. I Worship This Woman. I owe her like homemade cookies or a stripper or something. Not sure what.

On another note...
I entered two shows today. I was feeling lame and stupid about having spent the whole summer NOT accomplishing diddly squat in the quilt arena. At the beginning of the summer, I needed to finish 3 quilts. I start school in 11 days, 11 hours, and 40 minutes (not counting), and I still need to finish those 3 quilts. Aargh. But I managed to enter these shows and consider entering three more in the next month or so (assuming I finish at least ONE of these three looming over my head).

There are photos that go with this post, but Blogger AGAIN is having issues with posting them. I'll try later.

Less Spider Content

I'm thinking I should find a spider webring to link to, since I seem to have more spider content than quilt content some days.

My daughter, whose 9th birthday is today, bought herself a Venus Fly Trap (as many daughters that age probably do, right?). Yes, this is a freaky picture of her.


My mom helped my daughter catch some flies and put them in a ziplock bag, so she could bring them home to feed the Venus Fly Trap. No, my mom is not clinically insane, but she is a little wacky.

Then my mom called me later and asked me if I wanted another tarantula (because I love spiders So Much, let me tell you). Well, as part of the Official Science Teacher Code, I am required to take any animal offered me, dead or alive, creepy or cute, poisonous or benign, so I said stupidly Yes, gimme the big scary spider. As I'm on the phone with my mom (who found the creature in her backyard...well, the dog found it anyway), I'm imagining my dad in the background, restrained by my mom, as he holds a shovel up in the air yelling "Get out of the way! I'm taking that thing DOWN!!!"


The hardest part about the new tarantula was getting it into the container, because it decided it wanted to go the OTHER way, up the tupperware, where my hand was, so I screamed like a girl and dropped the tupperware, the wooden spoon, and the tongs (all good spider-controlling equipment). I did manage (with help) to get that sucker back in the container. It's HUGE. Probably 4 times the size of the other one (which is now so obviously a juvenile). This thing creeped me out so bad that I had to leave it outside until I went to bed, and then I woke up in the middle of the night and weighted down the top (Super Spider will BLAST the top off the container!). Yick.

Quilt Content: here is a leg. Yes, I know most legs don't have cats on them or brightly colored yin/yang symbols, but wait 'til you see the rest of it. Hopefully today, in between making birthday cake and driving around the city to drop off and pick up kids, I will be able to make art. Yeah.

On Sunday, We Iron

And that's what I've been doing. In fact, I'm still mentally in that mode, so I'm having a hard time coming up with words for this entry. Amazing, eh?

I had this vine ironed Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday morning...can't remember. It ironed fine. But then when I started working on some stuff above the head, I ran into monstrous Wonder Under problems. I don't know whether I had another bad batch of Wonder Under, or if I didn't throw out all the bad stuff, or what, but a third of the pieces had the really sparse webbing of one kind of bad batch, another third had the problem where the paper won't come off the fusible, and the last third was fine. I was seriously frustrated, and not looking forward to hours of fighting this stuff, not to mention what the last batch did to my sewing machine. Sigh.


But after taking 24 hours off from that (and recognizing the influence of PMS in my life), I started up again. I had a critic, though. Limbo was not sure of my color choices. Actually, he just wanted to play with the long pieces of fabric I was flipping around on the ironing board. He eventually left for less stressful arenas.


And I managed to finish the base piece with very few problems. A good sign.


Now I have to go grocery shop, or we all starve. I'll probably have to cook too. Sucks.

Progress Is MINE

OK, that's a little over the top. But I'm so happy to be finally Putting This Dang Quilt Together. I started tracing Wonder Under and cutting it out in June sometime, I think. Then ironing all those pieces in July. Finished cutting the 821st piece this afternoon, and started ironing them soon after.

They look so pitiful in this box. Like there's no way all these inky dinky pieces are going to make anything of significance (and that may well be true). But I am spurred on by the arrival home of two quilts today that were in shows in Santa Cruz and Pennsylvania. Two more will ship off next month to Illinois. Another one is traveling the world...I don't even know where it is right now. So it's time to make something new.


I did pin-baste a quilt yesterday, an older quilt that I put together in January, but I don't really like it. It needs a lot of extra work, I think, like inking and maybe even embroidery, so I put it on the bottom of the priority list because it will take too long to finish. I honestly have about 2 1/2 weeks before school starts, and that's it. My goal this year was to finish more quilts than last year, and right now, I suck.

I did like how the leaves went together for the newest quilt. I ironed them real quick before the kid's piano lesson, with the damn cat continuing to try to sit in the middle of the carefully arranged pieces.


Unfortunately, Blogger is determined that I Post No Bills um Photos. Later, my precious buzzy bees. I will post photos once Blogger allows.

Tarantula Update

Because that's why you're reading this blog...for the tarantula.

He's out. He's molted. He's getting BIGGER and HAIRIER. All things I adore in a spider...yick. Maybe someday soon I'll know what kind of tarantula he is. He used to be really nonhairy and medium brown. He's getting blacker and getting longer hair. Very interesting. Now back to fabric...

I'll upload the molted picture once Blogger comes to its senses...

Finally! I can upload. The tarantula is on the left, his molt on the right. He is significantly bigger. And creepier. Tarantula puberty.

A Tarantula on Its Back

Um, OK, let me preface this with the fact that I am a science teacher. Because I am a science teacher, kids bring me animals. Sometimes they're alive. Sometimes they're roadkill. Sometimes they're animals I can stand to keep. This one...well, he's questionable. The kid who gave him to me, also questionable. Anyway, Sleeping Beauty (oh, I did NOT name him) has been with me for about 9 months. In the beginning, he refused to eat. I thought he was going to die until I saw him kill that first cricket. Then he finally molted, how exciting...I didn't see it happen, but I saw the molt and was thrilled, so I gave him a bigger cage. Then today, we had just dumped in a new batch of crickets and I had walked past him to check on the dinner status, and he was lying on his back.

OOOH! Say all you who know tarantulas. Realize that nowhere in my teacher manuals is there anything about tarantula behavior. So I freaked out and thought he was dying. I tapped on the side of the container, and he moved, so I didn't know what to think. Google. Amazing thing, Google. Apparently, this little sucker is going to molt again. Wow. Very cool. But also apparently it's bad to have the crickets in there while he's molting because he's very vulnerable. So my son, a 10-year-old with a very strong heart, offered to pick out all the crickets by hand (with a molting tarantula in the cage). Weird kid, yes. I tried using a fish net, but shockingly the little suckers kept jumping out of the net. And then, since apparently he's not going to want to eat for a week or so post-molt, and because I don't have a great method for keeping crickets alive for very long, I let the crickets go in my yard.

It's been a weird afternoon. Here's Sleeping Beauty now. On his back. Explains why he's been so cranky lately. And he's gonna want sex afterwards. Silly boy...I don't have any spare female tarantulas lying around (thank god).



Maybe I'll be able to get a molt picture later. Because I know there's a bunch of Quilt Art people reading this blog and it has absolutely nothing to do with fabric (oh hey, I sewed a backing together today. Wooo!). There. Fabric content.

Actually, I'm currently sewing up a snake. A fabric snake.