I’ve been working on whole cloth quilt designs and I’ve gotten proofs for 42 of the designs. They are now in my Spoonflower shop here: Click on “New” and all the newest designs will pop up. My shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
I got my Pfizer booster shot on Thursday. On Friday, I had a reaction which wasn’t unexpected. I had a reaction after the second Pfizer shot. Brady knew there was something wrong. She insisted on sleeping in the bed with me. She covered me with puppy kisses because she’s convinced puppy kisses will cure everything that could be wrong with her human, and she brought me some of her toys to play with.
It’s not always easy living with bipolar disorder. In mid-September, I had reason to believe I had been exposed to covid. Even though I’m fully vaccinated, I could have a breakthrough infection or worse, be shedding covid virus while asymptomatic. I got the first available appointment for a covid test. The results were supposed to be available within 24 hours. The results were 9 hours late. By that time, I was having stress pains in my chest. Fortunately, the test was negative.
Once I have a major anxiety attack, I’m susceptible to severe stress pain for a while. A friend passed away recently and the funeral was yesterday. For an assortment of reasons, there are people I never want to see again who were likely to be at the funeral. I made a plan. If I absolutely had to interact with one of these people, I’d say hello and walk off. Even with a plan designed to spare me the greatest amount of stress from seeing any of these people again, I still had severe stress pain. Fortunately, none of the people I never want to see again were there.
Today, safe from people who tried so hard to hurt me, I’m having major stress pain. I’ve taken extra klonopin. My choices were increase the dose temporarily or have chest pain for a couple days.
Now that I can see distances clearly, I’ve noticed I have invisible eyelashes. So I bought some mascara. Being a bit eccentric and not wanting boring brown or black mascara, I bought a tube of purple and a tube of green. If you’re going to a funeral, make sure your mascara is waterproof. Mine wasn’t. I had to try to soak up liquid purple mascara before mascara ran down my cheeks.
One of the side effects of cataract surgery is the need for reading glasses and the never ending search for my reading glasses. To that end, I’ve got more than one pair. One for my office, one for the living room so I can knit while watching TV and one for my sewing room. I’ve made beaded strings to replace the ugly string that allowed my glasses to go around my neck.
Last night, I looked up at the sky and saw a thin slice of moon. I tried to get both the moon slice and the tree in focus but couldn’t. So I have three versions of a moon shot.
Slice of moon. Nice, but boring.
Fuzzy moon. Almost, but I really wanted both in focus.
Both eyes are fixed and I’m seeing in stereo again. This is good. I’m learning to grab reading glasses when I need to see the computer, read or sew. I used to be able to read and sew without glasses. My eyes have been corrected to overcome the extreme nearsightedness. The right eye, the one that was fixed first, was tested last week. 20/25. The left eye was fixed this past Friday and, although fuzzy, my eye was 20/70. The fuzziness has now disappeared. The vision in my left eye will improve. I’m left-eye dominant so I’m back to being able to look at the world from the left rather than try to look from the right. I need to relearn how to use my camera. For wildlife and landscapes, I would wear prescription sunglasses that were single vision for distance. I’d look underneath my glasses to see the camera settings. Now, I cannot see the settings without reading glasses. This relearning is going to take a while.
I just put 42 new designs into my Spoonflower shop. I’ve ordered proofs for 42 whole cloth quilt designs. I find writing tags for my designs tedious, and finally decided to skip writing tags to say what the design could be used for. Fabric is fabric. You want to make lingerie from fabric that has a street sign pattern? Go ahead. There are no lingerie police. You want your yoga pants to match your wallpaper? Go ahead. There are no yoga pants police or wallpaper police. You decide what you want to make from my designs. I’m now writing tags just to list the colors and explain the design.
I ordered proofs of 42 whole cloth quilts on Friday. I should be getting my proofs in a couple weeks. I’m excited about putting them in my Spoonflower shop.
I’ve been working on figuring out how I want to quilt Ketamine Brain.
I thought about using a different color thread for each quilting design, but now that I see it, I don’t like that idea. I’ll have to look at this for a bit before I make any decisions. If I go with this design, it will be the most complicated quilting design I’ve ever done.
While I was looking for an empty page in my sketchbook, I came across this sketch.
I’m not sure if I want to turn it into a quilt.
I’ve been working on fabric designs again.
I need to think about adding jewelry to my on-line store, Deb Thuman Art. I had intended to sell my latest creations at the local farmers & craft market this month. That’s not going to happen. Jim had surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff a couple weeks ago. He’s not going to be in any shape to put up an EZ-Up. Don’t let the name fool you – it’s only “easy” if two people are getting it set up. Brady isn’t ready to be at the farmers & craft market. Too many people, too many dogs, too many interesting smells. We can’t leave her home because we will be gone about eight hours. That’s too long to leave her in her crate without her having an accident. I’m not interested in finding a gallery in which to sell my work. I, and everyone else I know, has had a miserable experience with galleries. Damaged work. Payments not made. It’s not worth the headache.
It’s not easy sewing with only one eye. My computer glasses will help with the eye that has the lens I was born with, but not with the eye with the new lens. Working without glasses, I can see up close with the eye with the original lens, but not with the eye that has the new lens. I’ve tried taking the left lens out of an old pair of bifocals. I can see with the eye with the original lens, but only distance with the eye with the new lens. PITA.
I discovered I can’t drive. I’m not seeing enough clearly. I’ll be able to drive again when I get my other eye fixed.
I finished the prototype for a messenger bag. I’ll have to use it for a while to see how I would like to change the pattern. I managed to twist the handle when I attached it. I’m not in the mood to remove one end and remove the twist. It stays as it is. It’s too difficult to see what I’m doing.
There are outside pockets on the front and the back, a pocket on the flap, and inside pockets on the front and the back. I don’t know what happened with the color. The bag is really gray and tan. I used upholstery fabric for the outside of the bag. Jim used to work for Gunlocke – a company that makes high end furniture. He could buy leftover fabric from the company store for $1.00 a yard. That was 21 years ago. I still have a generous supply of upholstery fabric.
I don’t know what went wrong with the color. The bag is really gray and tan.
I’ve been working on cheater blocks which I’m told are now called whole cloth quilts. I start with a background, and then play. I’ve got almost enough whole cloth quilt designs to order proofs. Once I get the proofs back, I’ll put the whole cloth designs in my Spoonflower shop.
I’ve been working on creating my own backgrounds to be a starting point for my designs. Colored pencils on white paper. I blurred the background so it doesn’t look like a bunch of pencil marks.
Shipping within the US is included in the price. If you are outside the US, email me at debthuman@zianet.com. I’ll research the shipping costs for you. Just let me know what you would like to buy. It’s possible the shipping costs are more than you wish to pay. Not a problem. It cost me $1.50 USD to send a Christmas card to my brother-in-law who lives in Canada. Shipping outside the US can get expensive.
Brady barks non-stop if I put her in her crate and leave the room. So I took her into the bathroom with me so I could take a shower. While she had fun trying to drink water from the shower spray, she didn’t like it when I gave her a little squirt. She tried to wipe off the water with her paws.
Jim cut a piece of foam and I made a pillow cover so Brady has a lovely, new bed….that she refuses to lie on. The cover is made from heavy duty upholstery fabric. I pre-washed the fabric in hot water and put it in the dryer. If it’s going to shrink, I want it to shrink before I sew. The pillow cover has to be machine washable.
I went through computer hell yesterday. First, I tried to hook up a Brother printer. Per the box, it works with Mac. Except it doesn’t. Turns out, Brother hasn’t bothered to keep up with Mac OS updates and the only Macs that it will work on are at least three updates ago. Next, I tried hooking up a Canon that’s supposed to work with Mac. Except it doesn’t. Jim is dealing with the university book store to see if it will work with a cable or in the alternative, what do they have that works with the latest OS update for Mac. All I need is a printer that prints color as well as B&W, and will scan a document. I don’t need, and am not going to pay $200+ for options I’ll never use. So far, I’ve brought home two overpriced doorstops.
I don’t handle frustration well and was screaming (literally) at the inscrutable instructions. Would it kill manufacturers to put some words with those schematic drawings? Canon claims to have 24/7 customer service. It doesn’t. It claims to have a chat function. It doesn’t. I don’t know how to handle situations like this. I don’t want to be screaming at instructions. I did take three klonopin, but it didn’t help. I’m at the point where if I have to try to hook up yet another printer and can’t, I’ll gladly scream (literally) at a customer service rep. If a company puts out useless products, the customer service people deserve what they get. I’ll be discussing calming techniques with my psychologist.
I had never tried binder clips, but after having miserable experience after miserable experience sewing binding on quilts, I bought binder clips. I like them. Not only do that make binding a quilt a stress-free event, they also work better than pins at holding two pieces of heavy fabric together.
After having FMQ misery, I wrote to Superior Thread and asked for help. I bought the needles recommended on the website – 90/14 topstitch. That sort of helped, but the real solution was to use a different quilting foot. Pfaff makes a sensor automatic quilting foot and a spring quilting foot. Superior threads work best with the spring quilting foot.
After five years of making dark quilts about suicide, isolation, sexual assault, and depression, I’m trying to find a happy design I can live with.
I model for the art department and I always pay attention to the critiques because I learn so much from them. One critique was for an assignment to use gray scale for a still life. That got me thinking. We ordinarily think of dark, smaller objects farther away, and lighter, larger objects closer. But what if that were reversed?
I sat down with my sketch book and tried to find something that appealed to me. I like this idea, but I don’t like this sketch. If I changed the shapes into people…..that could be an interesting social commentary.
Usually, the larger objects are in front to show they are closer, but what happens if I put the larger objects in the back? I like this idea as well. I don’t like the sketch.
Right idea, wrong shapes.
Still not right. I’m going to have to give this a rest for a while. Maybe I’m just not ready to leave darkness.
Meanwhile….the cactus are blooming.
The clumps are maybe 10 feet apart, but the colors are different.
I’m not sure when this happened. Used to be, my quilts were pictorial. Now, they are emotional. Apparently, I haven’t been in a happy emotional place in more than four years. During those years, my quilts were about suicide, frustration with neurologists who refused to listen to me, isolation, depression and sexual assault.
Fury.
It’s hard to get everything in one photo. The quilt says: If you touch this without my permission, I will break your fucking arm.
Suicide.
Depression.
Isolation.
Mass shooting.
My quilts went from having beads, buttons, couched fancy threads to unadorned, stark quilts. The one exception is the quilt I made for human physiology.
Lots of beads and lots of whimsy on that quilt. The quilt is about my biology journey starting as an undergrad in 1977 and continuing during the last fall semester.
One happy quilt didn’t stave off a massive, all-encompassing depressive episode that left me so desperate, I considered electric shock treatments which I know are barbaric. During the last three years, my writing has become increasingly depressing. I write about suicide. I write impassioned pieces, which will never be shared while I’m alive, that are an attempt to calm the emotional roiling inside me. I write about the frustrations of having a mental illness in a world that still stigmatizes mental illness – an attitude that should have been dumped at the end of the Dark Ages.
Dark subjects started appearing in my work in 2007. I was going through hell at work – a hell caused by a lunatic supervisor who kept trying to force me to quit. Around that time, I started making dark ceramic art. Bowls with words written on them: I’m a nice person, why don’t they like me? If I stay small and quiet, maybe they won’t hit me. A ceramics classmate looked at the bowls, said they were pretty. Then she looked at what was written on the bowls. And walked away.
Self-portrait ceramic sculpture entitled: Fuck You, I’m Still Alive. Complete with bullet holes.
I tell people that art is a snapshot of a tiny piece of the artist at the time the art was created. Depression, isolation and suicide don’t seem to be tiny pieces of me. I knew that depression was a constant emotion while I was growing up. I didn’t realize, because I chose not to look, how overwhelming depression is now.
I tell people that I frequently don’t understand what I’m feeling until the feelings come out of my hands. When are those feelings going to be happy again? Or were those feelings never happy?
I got a call from the labradoodle breeder this week. I started picking last for this litter. The litter contains six females and two males. I want a female. I’ve talked with people who train police dogs to sniff out drugs, and was told that it’s easier to train a female and females tend to be calmer than males. This week, I learned I’m now picking fifth so there will absolutely be a female puppy when it’s my turn to pick. I’ve ordered books on training puppies and training service dogs. I will be working with a trainer, but he’s currently got a waiting list for puppy training. I will need to start housebreaking and training to walk on a leash immediately.
I had ordered a print of one of my designs and a collection of 42 of my designs from Spoonflower.
Ketamine Brain.
It will be a wall hanging when it’s finished. I still haven ‘t figured out how I want to quilt it. I had thought about using holographic gold thread or using a metallic thread. I’ve started the quilting on Depression, and I’ve got three quilts I need to make binding for. Designs that I print for my quilts are never put in my Spoonflower shop.
I refuse to waste fabric, so I use the design proofs for quilt backing.
I’ve been experimenting with assorted photography techniques. When photographing flowers, it’s best to get the camera on the level of the flower. That’s not always easy. There’s only so far down I can squat, and Jim has filled the yard with cacti. Someone on the Digital Photography School Facebook page suggested getting the camera, rather than me, down to the level of the flower and use live view to see how the composition looks. That’s what I did with our lone iris bloom. Jim dug up some of the rhizomes and planted then in assorted places in the yard.
Next, I experimented with photographing water droplets on leaves.
My store, Deb Thuman Art is here:.http://www.DebThumanArt.com If you want to see more than just a few of the items in my store, you need to click on “shop” at the top left of the home page.
On March 13, 2020, I got an email telling me the university would shut down at noon. Noon was when my geology lab ended. A few days later, the state shut down.
As difficult as this pandemic has been for mentally healthy people, it has been far worse for people who have a mental illness. Pre pandemic, approximately 20% of the adult population of the United States had a diagnosed mental illness (National Institute of Mental Health). Two months into the pandemic, nearly half of Americans report their mental health is deteriorating (Washington Post, May 4, 2020).
I am bipolar.
Before the pandemic, I was well medicated and about as stable as I could manage to be. Each morning, I traded a portion of my brain for the incomplete promise of getting through the day without screaming.
Once the state shut down, my mental health immediately deteriorated and continues to deteriorate.
I don’t mind describing what happens in my brain, but you need to understand that there are no metaphors here. Here is reality as I perceive it.
I’ve had chronic insomnia since last March. I average 4-5 hours sleep a night. Every couple months, I crash and sleep for 8 hours. I have a prescription for sleeping pills, but I don’t like taking them. I get so little sleep that I’m groggy when I wake up if I take a sleeping pill. I want to go to sleep early, but I don’t get tired. Then I get anxious because I’m not getting tired. Then I don’t get tired, and the cycle repeats itself at least until 3 AM.
Before this past November, I had been on the lowest dose of klonopin since August 2007. I took klonopin when I needed it, and didn’t bother when I didn’t need it. In November, I asked my doctor to raise the dose. My current dose is twice what I had been taking. Sometimes, klonopin helps. Frequently, it doesn’t help enough. I have music that’s supposed to trigger specific brain waves. I’ve no idea if any brain waves are triggered, but the music does help me calm down when the anxiety is severe enough that I can’t calm down otherwise.
My temple has services via zoom. While I appreciate that, there’s no real interaction with others. The High Holy Days services were unsatisfying. I was alone. The rabbi was alone. Everyone who attended the services was alone. I’ll skip the Passover Seder via zoom.
My human contact is with my husband and in classes via zoom. I appreciate classes via zoom, but I miss being with other students. I’m nearly 50 years older than traditional students, so there isn’t much to talk about. I miss those tiny conversations. One way for me to combat anxiety is to bake. Baking is fun when I can bring cookies or other goodies to class. I miss the cookie experiments and seeing other students enjoy my baking.
Frequently, I don’t understand what I’m feeling until the feelings come out of my hand. I’m a multi-media artist. Quilts and clay are how my feelings are expressed. Frequently, my emotional art is dark. It’s art no one in her/his right mind (as opposed to left mind) would want to own. It’s art I have to make the same as I have to breathe.
It isn’t easy to have a mental illness. Mental illness hurts, and it hurts worse than any physical illness I’ve had.
When I made this quilt, I was thinking about a man I knew who killed himself and how he is gone from my life forever. When I look at the quilt now, I think about my loss of contact with others. Zoom is better than nothing, but it’s not a substitute for human contact.
Isolation.
I try to climb out of the box, but I’m not successful and there’s nothing outside of the box, so there’s no reason for climbing out of the box. I still try. I still fail. I’m still isolated.
Because of my age, I’m high risk. My risky behavior consists of: standing in line for more than an hour in order to vote, grocery shopping once, eating in a restaurant with friends and discovering a few days later that one friend and her husband had Covid-19 although both were asymptomatic when we met for lunch. I’ve had my hair cut twice by a hairdresser. Now, I cut my bangs and my husband cuts the hair in back so it’s not hanging down my neck. Now, my excursions consist of doctor visits and going to Starbucks, buying a drink, and immediately leaving the store. Although I want to eat in a restaurant, it’s too dangerous so I eat at home. I want to have a hairdresser cut my hair, but it’s too dangerous. I want to go to Barnes & Nobel, but it’s too dangerous.
Leap by leap, I became more depressed. At first, adding an extra half pill of my antidepressant when necessary was enough to get me out of a depressive episode. My doctor knows I tinker with my dose. She also knows why I won’t agree to a permanent increase in dosage.
Most of the time, art heals. Maybe making art is helping me, but I can’t know for sure. I think it would be dangerous if I stopped making art now. I’d have no way to express what’s inside of me. There’s no one to talk to, so I speak in fabric.
I worked on art because maybe it helps. I worked on art because I had to – the same as I have to breathe and eat. I do photography. I edit the photos and manipulate them. I make quilts. I am still depressed.
This is the Buffalo Psychiatric Center. It once contained the best treatment of mental illness. It eventually contained the worst treatment of mental health. Now it contains a defunct hotel and dust bunnies. I could have been a prisoner there.
Sometimes, I manage to make pretty art. I thought if I worked on some pretty art, I would feel better. This is a manipulated photo that I had printed on fabric and then quilted the fabric.
When I figure out how I want to bind the edges, I’ll finish the quilt.
I tried working on another manipulated photo that I had printed on fabric.
I need to finish quilting this one. It’s a manipulated photo from a happy day. A day when we could go to Bosque del Apache and I could photograph sandhill cranes.
Making quilts helped, but not enough.
I photographed whatever looked interesting in my yard.
Photography helped, but not enough.
I still got depressed. I still had to take an extra half pill of my antidepressant sometimes. That helped, but not enough.
This is what depression feels like. I think that maybe the depression is finite, but I can’t find my way out of the dark space.
The depression worsened until I had a mental health crisis. I had a massive, major, all-encompassing depressive episode. I couldn’t stop crying. Oddly, I wasn’t suicidal.
I considered going to Memorial Medical Center, the only hospital in this area with a psychiatric ward. I’m a criminal defense attorney. So many of my clients have mental illnesses. My clients tell me stories of how they were mistreated in hospitals. Similar stories from a multitude of clients about mental hell facilities across the state. Forced medication. Barring visits from family members. Being drugged into oblivion because that made it easier to control the patients. People obviously needing help, but were considered too unpredictable so they were dumped out of a facility. All of it illegal. All of it happening every day.
I was desperate to the point where I was willing to enter the mental hell system.
I discarded the idea of inpatient treatment when I discovered what my insurance, Presbyterian, and Medicare won’t cover. Presbyterian requires prior authorization for inpatient treatment and inpatient treatment must be approached via the emergency room. Apparently, I need to know about six weeks in advance when I’m going to have a mental health crisis.Otherwise, my insurance covers nothing. Because of the pandemic and because I wasn’t suicidal, I doubted I would have been admitted to the psychiatric ward. Even if I were admitted, I wouldn’t be there long. I’m an attorney. You’ve heard of a jailhouse lawyer? I would have been a psych ward lawyer.
Because I couldn’t go to the hospital, I increased the dose of my antidepressant to two pills. That worked. Sort of. After three days, I turned into a zombie. The Zombie Apocalypse is over rated. I tried to find a schedule that would allow me to stop crying but not turn me into a zombie. I took two antidepressants on one day, and then two days with my usual dose, then back to two antidepressants. Repeat until oblivion. I wasn’t a zombie, I was more or less functioning, and I was still severely depressed. Rather than a more or less steady state of mood, I had wild mood swings between all-encompassing depression where I could minimally function and severedepression.
I was in such a deep mental health crisis that I considered electric shock treatment even though I know better than to agree to electric shock treatment. Electric shock is barbaric. The victim is given a sedative so the psychiatrist doesn’t have to hear the victim screaming in pain while the psychiatrist fries the victim’s brain. The victim is given a muscle relaxant so the psychiatrist doesn’t have to watch the victim have a grand mal seizure. The theory is the brain frying must continue until the victim has a seizure for electric shock treatment to be fruitful.Electric shock causes memory loss. Sometimes, the memory loss is permanent. I know of one victim who forgot he was married. I have an Advance Psychiatric Directive. One paragraph states I absolutely do not agree to electric shock treatment.
I watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I almost felt better.
I considered and researched transcranial magnetic stimulation. It’s effective for depression and migraine relief. Because it can also cause worsening of symptoms for people who are bipolar, I rejected that idea.
I considered ketamine infusion. In desperation, I made an appointment to discuss ketamine. I also did research on ketamine infusion. Ketamine blocks the NMDA receptors which, in theory, should reduce brain activity. In real life, ketamine does block NMDA receptors, but it also causes new neural connections to form and increases glutamate. Ketamine is a hallucinogenic and highly addictive. I was warned that the hallucinations might not be pleasant.I’ve had hallucinations during withdrawal from an antidepressant. I learned that if I let myself look at the hallucinations, and recognize the hallucinations weren’t reality, the hallucinationswere enjoyable. Until I kept trying to kill an imaginary spider that was crawling up the bathroom wall. That wasn’t enjoyable.
I agreed to try ketamine.
I watched Easy Rider.
During the infusion I had hallucinations. I saw colors and shapes although the colors and shapes had nothing to do with one another. I heard sounds that no one else could hear. I watched a long, stringy, multi-colored blob come down from the ceiling then recede and melt into the ceiling. I felt that I was turning my head left and right although my husband, who stayed in the room with me, told me I didn’t move my head. When I thought I was looking to my right, the colors were brighter. When I thought I was looking to my left, the colors were darker. The hallucinations were neither pleasant nor unpleasant. They were just interesting. I kept waiting to see purple because when I see purple, I know that healing is happening. I waited to see the brilliant, golden white that I interpret as the presence of the divine. I saw fleeting bits of purple. I didn’t see the brilliant, golden white.
After the infusion, my brain felt full and I could feel something that was almost a buzzing sensation in my brain. I felt almost happy. I also felt a craving for more ketamine. I’ve been through withdrawal from psych meds several times. I’ve had to do a step down to get off some antidepressants. That involved cutting pills into halves or quarters and relieved most of the withdrawal. I had never before experienced a craving. Ketamine works, but it terrifies me.
That’s about how my brain felt. I haven’t had a chance to have this printed on fabric. If I can figure out how to quilt it, I’ll have it printed on fabric. I’m thinking quilting with holographic thread might show what I felt.
The customary protocol for ketamine infusion is two infusions per week for three weeks. I know I cannot tolerate ketamine that often. My brain would explode.
A week after the infusion, the depression is still almost gone, although I can feel the effects of ketamine dissipating. I fear the return of the massive, all consuming depression. I’m considering having an infusion once every two to three weeks.
Right now, people know what it’s like to be depressed. People know what it’s like to have anxiety. People know what isolation feels like. Right now, it’s okay to be depressed, anxious and isolated. Eventually, life will return to what it was before. People will go back to being normal. I will still be bipolar. There will again be people who think they are better than me for no reason other than unlike me, they don’t have a DSM-5 label.
I will remain screaming in silence. My screams cause the air to vibrate, but the vibrations never reach ears.
I started the free motion quilting on a quilt last week. I had all sorts of problems with the thread breaking. I cleaned the machine, which I do every time I sew. I rethreaded the machine. I adjusted the tension. I’m using King Tut thread and I was told that thread is a touch thicker than regular thread and I need to use a topstitch needle with it. I’m using a Klasse 90/14 topstitch needle which is what Superior Threads recommends on their website for quilting with King Tut thread. I watched a video from Pfaff about free motion quilting on the Quilt Expressions 4.2. I searched the manual for any hints. The tension is adjusted properly. I’ve got the machine set for the free motion quilt foot. I’m using a Pfaff foot. I’ve unthreaded the machine, cleaned the machine, put a new needle in the machine, rethreaded. That’s supposed to solve almost all problems and if it doesn’t solve the problem, it won’t make the problem worse. I switched to a regular foot, regular straight stitch, and gave that a test run on the quilt. Works fine, no problems. I give up. I’ve written to Superior Threads and asked what I’m doing wrong.
This is a manipulated photo of a sandhill crane on one of my trips to Bosque del Apache. I had Spoonflower print the photo on cotton. Maybe I’ll play with different quilting in different parts of the sky. I’m not about to rip out all that free motion quilting. I don’t see well enough to be able to do that. I meet with an ophthalmologist to discuss cataract surgery later this month.
I sold one of my designs in Spoonflower. This was the first time anyone had one of my designs printed on wallpaper. My Spoonflower shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
I’ve been working on knitting tube socks using some interesting variegated yarn. Once I figure out how to take decent shots of the socks, I’ll put them in my store, Deb Thuman Art, http://www.DebThumanArt.com I chose tube socks because I don’t need to know how long the customer’s foot is which is what I’d need to know if I were putting heels in these socks. With hand-knit socks, the part that wears out first is the heel.
With other variegated yarns, the color changes are more frequent. This is Lion Mandala yarn and the color changes are far less frequent. I’m assuming I’m not the only person who loves funky socks. And if I am, because they are tube socks, they will fit my feet and I’ll happily wear out 11 pairs of tube socks.
I’m still having problems with depression. I can take a double dose of antidepressant and be fine for a day, but the next day I have to drop back down to my regular dose or I’ll be walking into walls. I have my first ketamine infusion on Tuesday. If it does nothing for my depression, at least I’ll have been able to enjoy the hallucinations. I grew up in the ’60s and never did drugs. Not even pot. Now, I have a medical marijuana card, THC infused chocolate in the refrigerator, and I’m about to embark of a magical mystery tour. I never thought my life would be like this. Becoming a geriatric pothead and taking hallucination-inducing drugs wasn’t on my list of life goals.
March 5 was the nine-year anniversary of finally having an accurate diagnosis – bipolar disorder. I knew from representing clients charged with assorted crimes that I would have considerable misery unless I accepted my diagnosis. Which I did. Right after I stopped crying. Suddenly, my life made sense. Finally, there was an explanation for why antidepressants alone were not solving the problem. I’m on an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer. I discovered I’m a nice person. I discovered I can be happy. It only took 35 years to get an accurate diagnosis and two psychiatrists missed my diagnosis. It’s not as if bipolar disorder were difficult to spot. My experience with psychiatrists is that they don’t listen. Instead, they grab a prescription pad and proceed to overmedicate me. That’s why I refuse to see a psychiatrist.
I watched the inauguration on Wednesday. It was cold, and the women (and some men) wore coats that had the first button around waist level. That’s not a winter coat and it won’t keep anyone warm. Surely there’s a designer out there who can create a warm winter coat that’s also stylish. Bernie Sanders may have had the best idea, and the best mittens. He needed a hat, though.
There are two things Lady Gaga can do very well. She can make an entrance and can make an unsingable Star Spangled Banner sound beautiful. I loved her dress and the dove. Only Lady Gaga could hold her skirt up while walking down stairs, and still look fantastic.
J Lo, if you’re going to sing This Land is Your Land, sing all the verses. Especially the final verse:
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
Woody didn’t write songs to be pretty. He wrote songs to make a point which J Lo clearly missed.
Monday is the yahrzeit of the deputy who killed himself. This year is easier than last year, but it’s still a sad, confusing, emotional time for me. I’ve quilted about his suicide. I’ve written about his suicide. It still tears me apart.
This is the second quilt I made about his suicide. Only the bottom half is quilted. We know what happens when we are alive. We may have beliefs about what happens after we die, but we don’t know what happens.
I’ve been working on two other quilts.
I had a manipulated photo printed by Spoonflower. I’m quilting via machine around the circles, and that’s when I discovered the cataracts have gotten bad enough that I’m limited on what close work I can do. I can’t have cataract surgery because there’s a 25% chance of the retina in my right eye detaching. A souvenir from growing up in a house run by a violent, narcissistic drunk and her violent drunken husband. Once it’s safe to travel again, I’m going to have to start looking for someone who can do high risk cataract surgery.
This is a manipulated photo of a sandhill crane at Bosque del Apache. I had it printed by Spoonflower. I haven’t started to quilt it yet.
Looking for the perfect Valentine’s Day gift? Please visit my store, Deb Thuman Art here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com
I am fighting with quilt batting. Normally, I work with fat-quarter size quilts. This quilt is 30”x45” not huge, but bigger than I’m used to. Because I’m tired of fighting quilt sandwiches, I bought fusible batting. The batting is large enough for a quilt for a queen-size bed. I had to unroll the batting, unfold the batting, and try to cut out a piece the proper size. I tried working on the floor, but that didn’t work. I tried folding the batting so I could cut on the folded edges, but that didn’t work. For so long, I worked on dark, emotional quilts. Now, I have a chance to work on a happy quilt. This one is from one of my manipulated photos that I had printed. I need to make some happy art, and this batting is keeping me from doing that.
I took some photos of jewelry I’ve made so I can put my latest jewelry in my store. Valentine’s Day is coming up and the mail service is still slow in some places. Order now to be sure your jewelry will arrive before Valentine’s Day.
This week wasn’t easy for anyone watching news out of Washington DC. It’s less easy for someone with bipolar disorder.
On Tuesday, I was severely depressed. I know why, but it’s not something I’m comfortable writing about. I took an extra antidepressant. My doctor knows I do this when the depression gets severe and I get close to being suicidal.
On Wednesday, I made the mistake of watching some of the news about a mob storming the Capitol Building. Seeing the horror triggered severe mania and severe anxiety. Working on a quilt helped a bit. I considered taking an extra mood stabilizer but wasn’t sure if that would help.
On Thursday, I was severely depressed after being rejected by a someone who breeds labradoodles. The breeder refuses to sell a puppy to someone who has never had a puppy. That’s like saying you can’t eat green beans because you’ve never eaten green beans. The plan was, work with a trainer on puppy training – don’t pee on the rug, don’t eat the furniture, the cats aren’t chew toys, how to walk on a leash – and when the dog is 18-24 months old, work with the trainer to train the dog to be a psychiatric service dog for me. I have adult cats and they’re not going to accept an adult dog. I think it would be far easier for them to accept a puppy – especially after learning the puppy won’t eat cat food.
Today, I feel….kind of neutral. I don’t feel at center, but I also don’t feel manic or depressed. More like feeling subdued or like being a muted color. I don’t feel energy flows although I know energy flows exist. I see energy flows as colors. Today, muted colors.
Rapid cycling is defined as four or more episodes within a year. I had three major episodes in three days. Maybe my energy is a muted color because I’ve had the emotional equivalent of running a three-day marathon.
I’m at another stopping point with the isolation quilt. I figured out I wanted to do wavy lines that echoed one another. Now, I’m left with bits of unquilted space. I was going to do meandering free motion quilting, but I forgot how to attach that foot to my machine. When frustration, mania, and anxiety reach terminal velocity, it’s time for me to take a break and do something else. I’m considering leaving the empty spaces empty.
I’m working on quilting the isolation quilt, and trying to figure out what I want to do next.
I’ve pretty much figured out how I want to quilt the figure. I’ve outlined the figure inside the box, but not outside the box. I haven’t decided how or if I want to quilt the rest of the box. I’ll make that decision after I get the rest of the piece quilted. I also haven’t decided if I want to quilt around the outside of the part of the figure that’s outside the box.
The hard part is deciding what to do with the quilting for the rest of the quilt. The original idea was to do narrow quilting. Rather than have sharp corners on the quilting, I decided to stagger the lines.
Quilting this narrow is tedious and a PITA. So….. do I keep slogging along hating every stitch? Do I gradually make the lines farther apart? Although it’s hard to see when the lines are this close together, the quilting is a variation on the Log Cabin quilt block. I didn’t have that in mind when I started quilting, but I like the idea now that I see it. Log Cabin and it’s emphasis on the home gives an interesting additional meaning to the quilt. I think lines an inch apart would make the Log Cabin more obvious. It would certainly make the quilting less tedious. Until I figure out how I want to proceed with the rest of the quilting, the quilt will sit quietly.
It’s finished, quilted, and bound.
My Biology Journey. I put the beads on before I started quilting. I thought I’d be okay quilting by hand. While I don’t mind hand quilting, the cataracts make seeing up close difficult. Unfortunately, I kept going until I was too far along to give up and machine quilt the piece. I’ve got some serious retina issues so cataract surgery requires an extremely skilled specialist. Hospitals in New Mexico have gone into crisis mode this week. No elective surgery and we’re about to start rationing medical care. Translated: you get to lie on a gurney gasping for air and dying slowly while others get medical care.
I ordered some Hobbs fusible batting. I had two of my photos printed by Spoonflower. Each photo is centered in a yard of fabric. I’ll be doing the quilting on those by machine and neither lends itself to any kind of beading or other embellishments.
I have one biology teacher who causes quilt designs to dance in my brain. After two years of making quilts about suicide and mass shooting, it’s a relief to work on something fun.
My Biology Journey
My journey started when I was a real college student as opposed to a continuing education student. I took botany to figure out how plants grew. Then, I looked at the other biology courses I wanted to take and the requirements for a degree in biology. All I needed to take was two additional classes. And so I earned two undergraduate degrees – biology and journalism.
I haven’t finished quilting the piece, so there are orange basting threads holding the top, batting and backing together. I’m quilting by hand because I added the beads before making the quilt sandwich. Had I not done that, I could have done the quilting by machine. I have cataracts that can’t be removed because there’s a 25% risk of the retina in my right eye detaching. The cataracts mess with my vision, and I’m having difficulty seeing close up.
I knew there was a molecular overlap between plants and animals. The beads in the lower left corner represent a chlorophyl molecule – magnesium surrounded by four nitrogen molecules, The beads in the upper right corner represent hemoglobin – iron surrounded by four oxygen molecules. The molecules work differently, but I was intrigued by the similarity.
This semester, I learned there’s a structural overlap between plants and animals. The appliqués represent cell-to-cell communications in animals. Some cells are attached. Plant cells have the same structure. This amazed me. The beads represent simple diffusion.
This is a generic cell. The embroidered line with the star bead on one end and white bead on the other end represents a G-coupled protein receptor. It’s one of the ways proteins cross the lipid bilayer membrane. The other beads around the edge represent a trans membrane protein, a protein that is on the outer layer of the lipid bilayer, a protein the rests on the inner layer of the lipid bilayer, an isoform, and a protein that has just been synthesized and is being moved to the cell membrane. While I wasn’t thinking about this when I chose the fabric, the circles can represent various organelles in the cell.
I asked my teacher how proteins get from where they are synthesized to where they need to be. She explained there are transport proteins. And so here’s a transport protein taking a protein where it’s supposed to go. It’s the image I saw in my head when my teacher said transport proteins. This is the kind of imagery that makes me wonder about myself at times.
I have peripheral neuropathy and gave up on useless neurologists a couple years ago. I’d ask questions the neurologists would smile, hand me a prescription, and walk out of the room. I’ve been on a quest to heal my neuropathy. I’m making progress. The bottom appliqués represents a neuron with ion pumps and neurotransmitters. The upper appliqués represents a dendrite. Dendrites are on one end of a nerve cell and the axon is at the other end. The axon spits out neurotransmitters and the dendrite has receptors for neurotransmitters. There’s a neurotransmitter docking with the dendrite. Since I gave up on neurologists, I’ve had less pain and I’m on my way to curing the neuropathy.
Aside from the advantages of living pain free, I want to go to Antarctica. The NSF gives out an artists and writers grant for a nearly all expenses paid trip to Antarctica. There has been some building in the last few years. An engineer came up with a design to allow blowing snow to go under the building rather than burying the building. The new buildings are on stilts and have tiny windows to let in light without letting out heat. I want this grant. But the grant is dependent on me passing a physical – which I can’t do now. Once I cure my neuropathy, I will apply for the grant again. The reason for the physical is in the event of a medical emergency, under ideal weather conditions and assuming a plane is available, the nearest medical care is eight hours away. A couple years ago, a researcher at the South Pole developed pancreatitis and the NSF decreed he must return home. Except it was winter and the continent was dark. This rescue requires a plane equipped to handle extreme cold, and pilots who can fly blind. The only air business with both is based in Canada. There are no visual landmarks to be seen in the winter. The GPS goes a little crazy – longitudinal lines converge at the South Pole. This rescue also required ideal weather conditions – and weather conditions change in a heartbeat on Antarctica. The researcher had to be ready to get on that plane the second it stopped moving. There’s a window of no more than two minutes between touch down and lift off. Any longer on the ground, and the skis freeze to the ice.
The applique represents the new buildings on Antarctica.
The beads represent the Southern Cross. As the Big Dipper, Little Dipper and North Star have been used for navigation in the Northern Hemisphere, both on the sea and traveling the Underground Railroad, the Southern Cross, only visible in the Southern Hemisphere, is used for navigation. I’ve seen the Southern Cross, and I will see it again. I won’t be able to see it when I’m on Antarctica because the grant is only for the summer months. However, there is a requirement to spend a few days before and after being on Antarctica in Christ Church, New Zealand. I will be able to see the Southern Cross there.
90S is the latitude of the geographic South Pole. There are actually three South Poles. A ceremonial South Pole – a frozen place for a spiffy photo op, a geographic South Pole, and a magnetic South Pole located in the ocean. I need to go to the geographic South Pole. I took Jim to the top of the Empire State Building so we could dance on the top of the world. Now, I need to dance on the bottom of the world.
I have proofs of 84 designs and I’m in the process of putting them in my Spoonflower shop here https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman My editing program has some new features and I’ve been playing with geographic when I manipulate my photos. Those manipulated photos are then uploaded to Spoonflower and become my fabric designs.
Jim has made a number of key rings with secret compartments. They are in my store, Deb Thuman Art, here http://www.DebThumanArt.com You need to click on “shop” at the top of the home page in order to see everything that’s in my shop.
Deb's Art 