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Y'all I just rotated my cutting mat for maybe the hundredth time and thought about how long I've had this thing. My grandmother gave it to me when she got a new one, must've been 1993, maybe '94. It's got a permanent curve in one corner where my elbow sat for years of late nights, and a cut from a rotary blade I ran across it in 2001 that I can feel every time I press down. I could buy a new one. My granddaughter keeps telling me they make them flat and smooth now. But that mat has seen every quilt I've made in thirty years. Every baby blanket, every wedding gift, every piece I made when I was grieving and didn't know what else to do with my hands. That mat has held it all. I cleaned it this morning and the Lord let me see daylight through that old groove. Felt like a blessing. I don't know, some things just earn their place.

People keep posting clean studio shots and I'm over here with a self-healing mat that stopped healing somewhere around 2019. The cuts are so deep now the blade catches in the old grooves and drags. I know it's time to replace it. I've known for a year. Instead I just rotate the paper 90 degrees and cut around the damage, which is ridiculous because the whole point of the mat was that I didn't have to think about it. There's something almost archaeological about it though. I can trace the exact week I was fighting with a series, the parallel scoring marks where I kept re-cutting the same line because I couldn't get it straight, the angry single gouge from the one time I pushed too hard on a wet day. My practice is supposed to be slow and careful and the mat says otherwise. I'll buy a new one next week. I won't throw this one out though. I'll keep it behind the bench and use it for the messy jobs, the ones where precision doesn't matter. Which means in six months the new mat will be pristine and this one will have absorbed every mistake. Honestly that feels like a fair division of labour.

I've had the same A3 self-healing mat for maybe twelve years and I'll never replace it. The surface is covered in fine scars, blade paths, compass points, a long crescent from when I got careless with a scalpel in 2019. I know exactly where each mark is, the way you know the worn spots on a wooden floor. Started a new piece today and caught myself avoiding the clean areas on purpose. Placing the paper over the old cuts like they're part of the composition somehow. I don't know if that's sensible or sentimental. Probably both.

Somebody at church handed me a grocery bag last Sunday. Turned out it was her mama's housedresses, all them little florals from the sixties, some still with the buttons on. She said she couldn't bear to toss them and didn't know who'd want them. I told her I'd take them home and see. I sat with them on the kitchen table a good long while before I touched the scissors. That's the thing people don't understand about cutting up somebody's clothes. You got to ask permission first, even if they can't hear you. Now I got the pieces laid out on my cutting mat, and that old polyester and cotton is telling me exactly where it wants to go. That rose pattern is going to be the center of a star block, I can feel it. The Lord works in strange ways, honey. That woman's got no idea her mama's dresses are about to live fifty more years in a quilt on my wall.

Okay so I finally caved and paid $60 for a feature from one of those big art accounts that posts "emerging artists" to their 50k followers. Figured it'd be my big break you know, get some eyes on my stuff that aren't just my mom and the same 12 people who like everything I post. The post did get decent likes. My follower count went up maybe 40 people, and I got three follows from accounts that look suspiciously like the same kind of account. And zero actual inquiries about my work. ZERO. Not even a "do you do commissions" message. I spent $60 to get an audience of people who apparently scroll past art the way I scroll past ads. Meanwhile last week I posted a video of me just cutting paper for a frame and that got more actual comments and DMs than anything in months. Like literally cutting paper. Me being mildly annoyed at a crooked mat knife. I'm not saying shoutouts never work for anyone, clearly they do for some people, but I think I finally get that followers aren't the same as people who buy things. The folks who buy my stuff are the ones who've been hanging around my tiny account watching me paint the same window for three months. They feel like they know me. A stranger seeing my work in a feed of 30 other artists is not that. Anyway I'm $60 lighter and slightly humbled. Anyone else had a paid promo flop or is it just me 😭

We got together Tuesday night at Sister Odell's, six of us around the frame, working on the missionary quilt, and one of the younger ladies brought out a rotary cutter and a mat and says we could have all these strips cut in an hour, why do I still use scissors. Now I use scissors because my grandmother used scissors and that's how my hands learned it, and a good pair of shears following a chalk line will curve if the block asks it to. Rotary wants everything square and fast and same. But I sat there with my mouth set and did not say one word, and cut my strips with the scissors the whole night out of pure stubbornness, which I am not proud of. Thing is she's not wrong about the hour. We was there till near ten. I come home and told my granddaughter and she said Miss Gloria you are sixty three years old you can use whatever you want. And I said that's the trouble, baby. I don't know which one I want. I know which one my hands want. There's a strip in that quilt that's crooked because of it. I'm leaving it.

Ach, I'm still buzzing off this. A small gallery up in Sligo got in touch out of nowhere back in February, found me through Instagram, if you can believe it, said they'd been following the work for a while. I thought sure it was one of those scams at first, the ones where they want you to pay to be "featured," but no, genuine people running a proper little space. Sent them a dozen prints this morning, all matted and packed proper. The big heron I've been messing with for months made the cut, and a new hare that finally came together after I ruined about four blocks getting there. Felt strange sealing the box, like sending a bit of yourself off in the post. But good strange. Never had a gallery come to me before. Always been me knocking on doors, standing at markets, sending emails into the void. Nice to be on the other end of it for once. Now I just have to hope they sell and I don't have to pay return postage on twelve unsold prints 😅

I dropped off a completed study at a framer yesterday. Small hawthorn branch, done on 300gsm paper I'd stretched and let dry for the better part of two days. Handed it over with explicit instructions: do not trim, do not crop, mat it as-is. Came back today and he'd taken the tiniest sliver off the bottom edge. A millimeter, maybe less. He was genuinely proud of it, said it "balanced the margins better." I stood there looking at the sheet. The signature. My signature was on that trimmed edge. He had cut through my name. Some people will tell you it's nothing, that a millimeter is nothing, that he was just trying to help. But I drew right up to that edge on purpose. The whole composition depended on that lower margin being what it was. And now the piece isn't what I signed, which means I can't in good conscience call it mine anymore. I took it home and I'll redo the whole study. A day and a half of work, gone, because someone assumed his eye was better than mine. I've learned to check every single thing I hand over to someone else. The collectors who want me to "fix" things, the framers who want to improve them. I am so tired of being the only person in the room who treats my own work as finished.