What planet is this?

I've been frightfully scattered for the past couple of months with the task of caring for our three seriously ill cats while trying to hold body, mind and soul together. It's been one of the biggest challenges of my life, and I'm beginning to feel totally slammed. The Love of My Life, who has been performing the lion's share of the nursing care, has also begun to fray around the edges. The daily grind of co-ordinating six tube-and/or hand-feeding sessions, four fluid therapy events, dosing out 12 or so (lost count) meds, dressing changes, feeding and paying attention to 20 other cats, in combination with keeping ourselves (relatively) well fed and in clean underwear, trying to keep the garden alive (alas, I've already cooked one of my beautiful fuchsias by failing to notice its gasps for water), waging an almost daily war against ants, dealing with a flea problem that's nearly gone over the edge, weekly veterinarian appointments, and the occasional emergency trip to UC Davis when Diana pulls out her esophageal feeding tube... to say it's been a nightmare is a massive understatement.

Creativity, in the form or making art and/or music, has pretty much gone out the window. Last week, in a near-deranged effort to fool my poor, confused muse into thinking I could still make art, I escaped to my studio and started slicing fabric and slapping it together into a "scrumble" - no, Maude, not THAT kind of scrumble - in this case, a scrumble being a small, improvised art quilt. It didn't turn out half bad, though it was thrown together without a moment's thought in an effort to just get SOMETHING done. Since then, I've tried to get to the studio every day - a half hour here, a half hour there - I hate working in such a disjointed way, but if that's the only option, I'll take it. As an indication of my inability to concentrate more than a day or two on a single project, I confess to starting three new projects in the last 10-12 days, all of which, unfortunately, are stalled for one reason or another. The scrumble is pieced and quilted, but on hold in the embellishment phase until I can get to Michael's to replenish my supply of red beads. The second piece is at a standstill because it needs some rather complex machine work, and, at this point in my life, I'm pretty low on tolerance for dealing with dittsy, detail work. The third piece languishes while awaiting the arrival of a fabric shipment after I discovered several fabrics I just HAD to have were in zero supply.

Saturday, my distracted brain felt compelled to start something new once again, and, while scrounging around for something, anything, to work on, I came across these chunks of fabric:


This is yet another version of my absolute favorite fabric from Senegal, which appears in my second most absolute favorite quilt, "Ladies of Senegal":
Here's some early work on the center block:


I appear to be stuck in a black/white/red phase - three of the four new pieces are in that combination. But... if I have to be stuck somewhere, better to be stuck inside the color wheel than in front of the TV.