Holey Nylons!

OK! I’ve had enough with the peppers! With a lot of my pieces, I start off really excited about an idea. It doesn’t always sink in how much work it’s really going to be, even if I’ve done a version of the piece before. It’s a lot like childbirth. When you’re right in the middle of the pushing and the cursing, you swear that’s something you’ll never do again. Then, when you see your little angel sleeping with an expression of the utmost inner peace and security, you think it wasn’t so bad. This week was the childbirth phase of my pepper piece. I was bearing down, pushing them through, doing my best to finish! I put the tops and stems on the last batch last night as the family watched a movie. DVDs haven’t been big in our house lately, which is good, but we needed a quiet evening. Home Alone 3 was the perfect medicine—a little more mature than the first two, but still really funny if you’re a kid. Monday afternoon I plan to attach them to the weaving I created a while ago. Did I say I was delighted to be finished?!

My current project is getting ready for a workshop on Monday. I’m heading over to Stonebelt, where we’ll be wet felting ornaments. I’ve been making the centers this week that my group will be embellishing as their part of the project. The ornaments are all wool, although the centers are wool melting pots. It’s like soup—the kind you make depends on what you happen to have. Some of it is wool fiber that’s been sheared and washed, but has fibers that are too short for spinning. My latest batch of ornament cores is made of chunks of old wool sweaters. Some are scraps that my friend Ruth Rives collected for me, and some are old sweaters that my dear husband unwittingly sent into the dryer. He’s trainable but forgetful, unfortunately. Anyway, I chop them into one-inch squares and pack them into my mother-in-law’s old holey nylons that she saves for me. One trip through the hot cycle in the washer and high heat in the dyer and voila! Felted ball stock. They look good and they’re ready to go into ornaments. Or tomatoes—maybe I could make another tomato piece!

My social calendar has been full this weekend too, which has slowed writing of this week’s essay. We started off at the Edible Lotus fundraiser Friday evening where my jeweled tree on dryer sheets was elegantly twisting above a dinner table. I really love the moment of recognition and disbelief when people realize what they’re looking at. Many thanks to Lee of the Lotus World Music and Art Festival for saving dryer sheets for me! It’s hard to collect enough for a big piece, even if you have a family of four with two (really three) rather messy eaters who inspire lots of laundry. The food was really excellent, and the ability to try all the donated foods was exciting. I loved the spinach paneer from Shanti. The dish can taste like bad seaweed when it isn’t prepared well, but this was great. I came as close as I’ve been to restaurant Tallent when I got to try their feta and red pepper (arrrggghhh, peppers!) creampuffs. They were smooth and delectable. I’ve got to get Jim to open up the wallet and take me there. Oh, and the mousse from Le Petit Café was wonderful, too. We’ll need to stop in for a bit more of that soon!

Saturday started out with the boys at their clay class while Jim and I headed to the Farmer’s Market. Then the boys organized a big Pokemon sale in the front yard that turned into a block party. We had eleven kids ‘running’ the sale at one time or another. That translated into a lot of running around, screaming, lemonade-drinking and fresh-baked cookie consumption. The rascals ate around six dozen cookies. By last night we were ready for the movie, since they had a sleepover at a neighbor’s house the night before and stayed up until eleven talking and poking each other. Today we all dressed up and went to see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, the Cardinal Stage production at the John Waldron Arts Center. Audrey was ferocious, the dentist was appropriately self-centered and evil, and the performance was excellent. Dinner is about to come out of the oven, so it’s time to reclaim the boys from the neighbor’s yard and sit down to dinner!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin