Thoughts of warmer weather…

We’re back in the icebox in southern Indiana after a nice warm-up last week. While my frozen toes understand reality, my mind is off in warmer places. I finished my seashell piece, but with a twist that took even me by surprise. I had very carefully laid out a pattern for the large shells, designed to create clear movement as you visually took in the piece. Then my inner child quickly surveyed the piece and clearly demanded: MORE SHELLS! I watched as she grabbed a handful from my ‘shells with holes’ bag and proceeded to dump them on the piece. I gave her a healthy snack to settle her down a little, and while she was eating I arranged the shells a little. I loved the idea of having a little chaos in the front, and yet if you look carefully you can still see the underlying pattern and flow. Now there’s a metaphor for my life with kids! Or maybe the feel of the piece just captures that little depression in the beach you find where all the shells collect at low tide. There’s usually a cute little beat-up seastar that didn’t handle the surf well. That’s the metaphor for my husband.

A lot of other new or commissioned art is also coming together in my studio, and some of it will unexpectedly be on display around town this month. I got word from Jean Kautt at Bloomingfoods (she organizes the Blooming Arts Series) that the February artist had a family emergency and couldn’t hang a show. I have a few new birch pieces (birches, beaches—I’ve got to branch out), plus a few ‘previously shown’ pieces that I’ll hang at both Bloomingfoods locations. The show will be called “Thoughts of Warmer Weather: Water and Sunshine”. The east side store will feature ‘Water’ and the west side will be ‘Sunshine’ in case you’re wondering. I won’t show my new ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ commission piece, but after adding the last little cluster of tomatoes it looks warm, happy and yummy. This weekend I’ll complete the attaching and call it done. I’ll also be at Wonderlab this Friday as part of their “The Science of Color Series”, doing a kid- and adult-friendly community art project. We’re going to build a large Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mosaic out of wine corks that volunteers have been painting for the project. Stop on by and share in the fun!

Finishing pieces also means new beginnings, and at the moment I’m struggling to decide which piece to launch into next. I have several ideas swirling around in my head, and basically I’ll just wait to see what the weather is like Monday to decide which color palate I need to work with. The first piece will present a chameleon, sitting on a fernlike compound leaf. The second will feature a sand crab on a beach pocked with crab holes. Keeping the sand out of their living room carpets must be quite a task—I’m sure there’s a great market for rugged sand crab vacuum cleaners. The third piece hits a little closer to home, to be called something like ‘The Transplant’. It will show a section of earth with a freshly dug hole, ready to receive a geranium with a severely overgrown root ball. If you’ve ever bought a flower that’s spent a little too much time at the greenhouse with abundant light and fertilizer you know what I mean. It’s going to be a little painful (for everyone involved) to break up the root ball and get started in a new environment, but you know it’s both necessary and the right thing to do. I think about my own transplantations that way, whether it was my move from Ontario to Bloomington, or whether it was my move from world of science into the art community. I owe a lot to the gardeners along the way, and I know that with a little light, water and fertile ground, anyone can blossom!

Until next week…

Warm from the dryer…

This has been a good arts week. My inner fashion designer was validated when I got a nice e-mail from the Trashionista show coordinators. Not only was I juried into the show, they asked if I could make a second piece! Of course I couldn’t pass up a challenge like that, so off I went trying to design another ball gown. I was channeling river themes when I started, and the piece ended up blue, silver and black. I started off by repurposing an old blue sundress—the high-waisted variety that was popular back in the eighties. Then I trimmed out a bit of material from a pair of pants that was part of an old Halloween costume. It has a smooth, crushed velvet texture that’s now the waistband. You can’t live in the eighties, I say. I needed some decoration for the waistband, so I went to my collection of silver things and found a bag full of handles from fancy paper shopping bags. I had a vision that involved the bottles of glue left over from last year’s Children’s Booth project at the Fourth Street Festival where they glued all sort of found materials onto large panels in the colors of the BEAD logo. I added water to several of the glue bottles, dunked the bag handles into the diluted glue, then laid them out as a swirly pattern on wax paper to dry. The handles became the little swirly whirlpools on the waistband. Of course I had to maintain a little continuity with the first piece, so I zipped over to Opportunity House and snagged a nice black bathing suit for the top. It also secretly fits into the water theme, although the casual admirer might not notice it. As I was in the process of dress design I stopped in at Yarns Unlimited (celebrating 30 years in business) to see their beaded handbag display and ran into Suzanne Halvorson, which is always a pleasure. I was amazed at the intricate work, and one thing that caught my eye was the dangling triangles on the beaded handbags. I decided that’s what I needed to add some width and flounce to the gown. I achieved this on the dress by cutting slits into the bottom two thirds of the sundress and sewed in triangles of shiny black raincoat material. To top it all off I pulled out some leftover black spray paint. How often do you hear the top fashion designers say that—look for the technique to be big in the spring shows! I realized I could stencil nicely on the blue material, so I introduced a few black swirly patterns to give it a more industrial feel. I can’t make a ball gown with out a dryer sheet shawl, but this time I went with silver and black. The good news is that it looks great, but the bad news is that I ran out of dryer sheets. I’m going to need more for the ‘Edible Lotus’ project that I volunteered to participate in, so I’m on the lookout for more used dryer sheets. Yes, I blend the real and the surreal in ways unimagined by the greats of the renaissance.

While my dressmaking project has taken up a lot of my time, I haven’t lost track of my tomato project. I’ve been poking tomatoes and I’m up to sixty-five, three short my goal for ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’. I’ll need to make a few more stems and hopefully I can begin pulling that piece together this week. To celebrate I bought a single red tomato from Bloomingfoods, which I’ll enjoy on a veggie burger sometime soon. Nobody else in the family likes raw tomatoes, so this one is all mine!

Until next week…

Hello, it’s the beach calling…

I’m officially jealous this week. I have a few friends who spent part of the holidays much farther south, while I’ve been in Bloomington freezing my toes through a cold snap that finally broke this week. When I hear their wonderful stories about the beach and warmer weather I’m taken back to an earlier life when I spent the school holidays around Christmas in the Bahamas. I got a lot of prime toes-in-the-sand time, a few sunburns, and all the sights and sounds of a different culture. So in a melancholy moment I decided to pull out my box of ‘sand’ yarns and my collection of seashells. I have a ton of shells that I’ve either collected, or that others have collected on their trips and donated to me. It’s fascinating to me how, over and over, I can collect the most amazing shells on a beach trip. Each one seizes your imagination as you hold them, dripping seawater on the beach. They seem like an integral part of how you’re going to remember that moment in time. But, months later, when you view the collection of shells in your living room the moments are lost. You even wonder why you brought so many shells home. Then a little tinkling of sand comes out of the box and you wish you were back at the beach.

Anyway, I started work this week on my latest beach piece. I pulled out my shell collection and realized that I’m a sorter at heart. I like my collections organized, not only to view and admire, but to make some biological sense out of the phyla I collected. I started by laying out the larger shells in a pattern I liked that I thought created some visual movement to the piece. Then I reached for my two big boxes of ‘sand’ colored yarns. Yep, I’ve got a lot of boxes of yarns! Best of all, they’re all packaged in big plastic boxes to keep them dry when the tide comes in. In Bloomington Indiana that translates into when the power goes out during a rainstorm and the sump pumps fail to keep the water out. When I started to weave I incorporated the big ocean pieces into the warp and wove the yarns around them, kind of like the sand filling in around the shells when the tide comes back in. I also decided that every good beach piece needs some real sand, so I decided to make a sand frame. I have a little experience at this when I made the ‘Gold Fish in a Blue Ocean’ piece in the Creek-Love classroom last year and I was pleased with how it came out. Exactly how I do it is a closely guarded secret, but it involves repeated application of diluted wood glue and beach sand.

In Scarf News, I opened up the Herald Times this morning to see the bright red image of one of my scarves. I’ve got a show up called ‘Warm and Cosy: Scarf Art’ at the Bloomington Bagel Company. It’s one of three exhibits that are up around town right now, (the other two are at the Waldron and Wonderlab) and all three are mentioned in the Sunday paper. Take a brief pause and imagine the haughty look I’m putting on for you right now. I managed to sell three scarves this week, and one of them set off an unexpected chain of events. I got a call from someone at BBC that was waiting to buy a scarf. I hopped in Bluebelle (my trusty car) and sped downtown. Did I say sped? Actually, I was going about the speed limit, and I was even using my turn signals. I don’t recommend doing that any more—it just draws attention to you. Anyway, Mr. Policeman noticed that I didn’t come to a complete stop at the deserted four way stop. He asked if I knew that I wasn’t in full compliance with the law, whereupon I launched into a full-bore defense of the arts (and my participation in supporting them in the local community) and he let me off with a warning. If you’re reading this, thank you! I promise I’ll do better. I made it to the sale on time and all was well.

One last note for the week: no one noticed, not even me, but last week was my one-year blogging anniversary. I wrote my first entry on January 10th, 2009, and last week “Tomatoes in the Snow’ was my 52nd entry. I offer my sincere thanks to everyone who reads and follows my work, whims, travels and family exploits.

Until next week…

Tomatoes in the snow…

This year Santa Claus brought the boys boogie boards for sledding on the snow. Ever since we’ve been waiting for snow, and not altogether patiently. Finally the snow started falling on Wednesday night, and the few inches we got shut down the schools for two days. The kids loved it, but somewhere in my Canadian hometown they’re laughing at us. We have since made several trips to Bryan Park to challenge the local hill. To get a picture of the fearsome slope, it’s about where the eastern most edge of the Rockies meets the western most edge of the Appalachians. With the steep gradient, and someone to launch you down the hill (thanks Bret!), you can get up a little speed. Somebody must have torn down the little posts with the black diamonds on them, and I think the rescue helicopter teams must have had the day off.

After a couple hours on the slopes, every good sledder needs hot cocoa. But a punishing day on the slopes also means cheese pizza—not all the shredding happens on the slopes. I discovered that I needed to replenish my pizza sauce supply, given the hungry hordes that were swarming the house, so I pulled the last of my frozen CSA tomatoes out of the freezer. They look a little sad, but they make great sauce, and now I’m ready to create all my tomato-based dishes for the rest of the winter. The shriveled little bodies are both the reminder of the riches of last summer and the promise of warmer days ahead.

Tomatoes have been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve steadily been producing needle-felted tomatoes for the commission piece I’m working on. The surface is going to be a collage of all the different tomatoes you might see at a late-summer Farmer’s Market. They don’t freeze well, so I keep them in a bowl to ripen up that last little bit as I make more. I’ve been using all of my tomato-coloured fleece to support the different varieties and shapes, so I’ve got everything from reds to yellows to greens. Then I delved into my tomato-coloured yarns. I even have some old red shoelaces of just the right shade that will end up somewhere in the piece. And so I’ve been joyously weaving a background for the piece this week. If you listen carefully you can almost hear the angelic choir in the background as I think about weaving after months of shows and scarves and ornaments. Have I said lately that I love to weave? Anyway, the background has kind of a smushed-tomato-on-top-of-the-stock pot look, bringing together all the colors of the surface tomatoes. You don’t really see it clearly in the piece, but where the surface tomatoes don’t quite come together you can see it peeking through. People used to say that you can’t see the forest for the trees—we’re going to start saying that you can’t see the weaving for the tomatoes.

This has also been a week of hanging shows, so if you’re out and about Bloomington this week, keep your eyes open. I hung a show with five other artists the John Waldron this week. They’re all fiber artists who clearly love color. They make the show bright and happy, and it’s worth the trip downtown. The opening reception was Friday night, and while the weather limited attendance, the people who came were lively and happy. I also hung my ‘Warm and Cosy: Scarf Art’ show at the Bloomington Bagel Company shop on Dunn Street. Surprisingly, my spell-checker still can’t get it through it’s head that Cosy isn’t spelled with a ‘z’. It’s just too much of an American sacrifice to change it after I’ve given up all the ‘u’s in my favourite words. You can see more scarves at Wonderlab museum if you stop in there. I ran into Andrea from Wonderlab at the John Waldron reception, and now I’m eager to see the display she put together at the museum. Andrea says they used magnets, foam and cord to hang the scarves, and somehow an air vent is breathing some life into them. Hmmm, maybe it’s time to incorporate movement into my pieces! I do love a challenge.

Until next week…

My inner fashion designer emerges…

This was a week when, even with two boys to entertain and ferry about to play dates, I was able to keep my nose to the sewing machine and finish my ball gown for the Trashionista fashion show. I’m delighted with how it turned out! I call it ‘Elegance Reclaimed’, and now my budding fashion career is in the hands of the jurors. My inner scientist can handle either outcome, since all my expectations as an artist have pretty much been fulfilled. Still, I think I really met the challenge to reclaim and repurpose materials from the trash flow. The shawl for the gown is made from dryer sheets that I painted gold and black and stitched together. To feed my emerging inner fashionista I discovered a new stitch on my sewing machine—a compact zig zag stitch to fuse the diaphanous material. Wow! Now I’m even talking like a designer—this is great! The top is built from a favorite but failing black bathing suit. I stretched and abraided the bottom beyond the point where my modesty no longer allowed me to wear it. Instead of tossing it I transformed the sturdy part into my elegant gown top. I reshaped the neckline and stitched on a piece of an old black t-shirt, and at the junctions I attached well-worn black leather belts I acquired from the Backstreet Mission here in town. The antique gold trim is from a family friend, Kathey Gibson, and in its former life it was used to decorate Christmas gifts. The swirly doo-dad is a piece of plastic I’ve saved so long I don’t even remember where it came from (but of course I knew I’d need it someday!). The skirt itself is basically a crazy quilt made from old men’s and women’s shirts that I picked up at the recycle center. It’s built from a black leather skirt, bits of black lace bra (no need to go into that here), samples from a discarded upholstery book and animal print scraps. The animal print fabric was in scraps because my son Tommie and I made a shirt where he cut pieces out of the fabric and sewed them on a fading but favored grey fuzzy shirt, and now it’s still one of his favorite winter shirts. Back to the gown—the back is held together by scraps of Velcro and the buckles from the belts keep the whole thing closed. There are also a couple of old eye-and-hook closures that were left on cards priced at 19 cents for 25. That speaks to how old those are, but they still found a purpose.

In other big family news, we went to see the Cardinal Stage Company’s ‘Sound of Music’, featuring a charming neighbor of ours as Gretl. She was great, as was her supporting cast and the production. It’s actually amazing that a town of this size supports such fabulous theater, and we’re very fortunate to have them. They’ve never let us down. My boys really enjoyed the play, but I have to admit to having been jolted a few times with some of the staging devices. When the swastika banners dropped down, and the machine-gun toting Nazis came on stage, I was a little overwhelmed. These cast sinister shadows from my family history, even though my young kids (thankfully) don’t yet appreciate why.

Anyway, I’ve got to run. The phone is ringing, and the caller ID says it from New York City, some fashion design shop. Ah, the life of the nouveau fashion diva!

Until next week…