My week started off well, but...

This week marked my favorite meeting of the year with the Spinners and Weaver’s Guild. Monday was the auction night, when everybody brings their remnants and out-of-favor materials. Everything is sold in a fun and fast-paced auction. People there know that I’m into greens, and some assume that I’ll take anything green. I’m pretty selective, though. I only want the earthy, natural greens for my pieces, not the hideous synthetic greens that often pop up. This year I ended up buying an eclectic mixture of things, including two books that I’m really enjoying. One is a pictorial history of embroidery, and the other book is from the mid-eighties called ‘Fiber r/evolution’, and it shows a lot of interesting, cutting-edge pieces. I especially enjoy the description of each artist’s history and appreciate having a context for their art. I’m always impressed by the diversity of the materials that are incorporated into art pieces, including a description of a weaving project based on embedding sticks in the earth and weaving around them. That sounds like a great community art project to me. I also bought a whole bunch of fleece at the auction. I found some beautiful blended wool and alpaca roving that will work well in my current pieces, and I even bought some stinky still-to-be-skirted fleece, with untrimmed burrs and poopie remnants still stuck on. That’ll be a fun project for this summer.

Another book that I picked up this week was “Seven Days in the Art World’ by Sarah Thornton. It has a quote from Leslie Dick that resonated with me: “[as artists we] are materializing—taking something from the inside and putting it out into the world so we can be relieved of it.” I can really relate to that, especially with my current body of work. In my own world of art, I had a highly productive week making more abstract tiles. The basic layout and color palette is still the same, with defined zones delineated in black wool and filled with earthy colors. When I looked back at my first piece of the week I decided that I must have been channeling trips to the beach in North Carolina, because I could see a lighthouse, grasses and the beach. It’s fun showing them to my family, since each family member has a different idea about the ‘right’ orientation for the square pieces. Never mind how I laid them out and what I was thinking! The funny thing is, sometimes the pieces do look better, or certainly different, when viewed a different way. A lot of life is like that.

Just when I thought everything was going great this week, WHAM! A nasty stomach flu got through to me. I had stomach cramps and fever that kept me in bed a lot of the time and totally lacking any energy. I ended up having to cancel a workshop scheduled for Thursday, but I’ll make it up sometime in June. I had everything organized, packed and ready to go, and I felt terrible about not being able to do it, but I was still running a fever and having cramps. The good news is that I’m now done with yogurt, toast and chamomile tea as my sole diet. I think I’ll even be ready for coffee by Sunday! I think the hardest part of the whole process has been opening the refrigerator and seeing the last piece of a tasty rhubarb pie sitting there. It was one of Jim’s best efforts, and the rhubarb was grown in the neighborhood by our friend Mary-the-neonate nurse. Don’t worry, and don’t bother coming over--I’m sure it won’t last another day! Take care and enjoy your health!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin