Triathlons

As usual, I'm overextended. I think my ADHD side does this to me on purpose to watch me run around in a panic. It seems like the busier I am at work, the more I need to work on craft projects to offset it.

And of course, when it runs, it pours. The grandbaby started school again this week, and we've all been scrambling to get everything in order and get into our routine. And my son asked me to keep his little shih-tzu, Coco, for a couple of weeks, since he's in housing transition. I'm crazy about her, but she's on my heels every second of the day and keeps me awake at night.

With the triple tasks of the job, my work, and home, I'm just feeling frazzled and overwhelmed. Here are a couple of things I've been working on this week:

I'm taking an online course at Quilt U on Landscape Quilts, so I painted these fabrics for practice:
Our instructor had an excellent tip for fabric painting: cover a board with contact paper, which I did. Typically, I try to paint on a plastic garbage bag, and the fabric ends up slipping and sliding. So then I have to iron the fabric onto freezer paper and all that mess. With this method, I covered a piece of foam core board with contact paper, and started out pinning the fabrics to the board. When I forgot to pin it and realized the fabric didn't slide, I was thrilled! After painting, I can carry the board outside and lay the fabric in the grass to dry. I used Setacolor for these (with a little Jacquard Dynaflo or Lumiere sprinkled on there and there). I was out of a couple of colors and didn't have to time to run out and buy more, so I worked here with what I had. I particularly like the salted piece (3rd from the left). The second lesson is available today, and while I'm anxious to learn how to use these fabrics to create quilted landscapes, I'm going to resist the urge to work on Lesson 2 until I've completed some other things.

The next project almost didn't happen. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled a fabric postcard out of the mailbox. It was beautiful, and I was excited because I've never received a fabric postcard before. But I was also puzzled; who sent this? Maybe it was the woman who so kindly offered to copy some polymer clay information from a book and mail it to me. In exchange, I sent her a little goodie bag with some fabric and paper snippets, a glass, copper-foiled pendant I had made, and some embellishments. I read the back of the postcard and realized that it wasn't the same woman. The message said something about looking forward to seeing my cards. I tried for a week to figure out what she was talking about; the only swap I had signed up for was a 3x3 collage swap that was due mid-September. I went through every email list I'm on, every Yahoo group, every notation on my calendar, and finally decided she was talking about the 3x3 swap.

In the meantime, I was doing some cleanup on my websites and Etsy store, and I thought I better double-check the email address I have listed with Etsy. I remembered that I had set up a new email address, which I hadn't checked in a long while (fortunately, I hadn't had any recent purchases at the Etsy store!). So I logged in, checked my email under that address, and saw pages and pages of messages about the fabric postcard group I had signed up for and completely forgotten about. DOH.

The postcards aren't due until November, but they've already started rolling in, and I figured it was best to get them done before my Quilt U class starts, which is much more intensive and time consuming. I had a small art quilt that just wasn't working, and so I had cut it up into pieces. One of the pieces became the design inspiration for my fabric postcards. Here is a completed card; 7 down, only 17 more to go!

The other project I may try to tackle this weekend is the 3x3 collage swap. Collage is not my strong suit, and I'm not sure why I signed up for this swap, unless it was to push myself (or punish myself!). The design process has been weighing on my mind. I'm not a design-in-advance person; I need to get started on the work, and the design comes out of the process. I know the pieces will take shape when I sit down to do them, but in the meantime they're nagging at me and I'd just as soon send them packing.