Fall is here!

Now that traveling to summer art fairs is behind me and the weather is cooling off, I know it must be fall.  The kids are back in school too!  My art studio is a much quieter place, which means I can put my full energies into weaving again.  Last week I wove and wove and wove on my giant commission piece.  I was able to complete the background weaving and crocheting.  The flat background that fills the frame came first, after which I released the piece from the loom and stretch it into the frame that Tom Bertolacini built for me.  Then I started to build the foreground soil by crocheting forward, building up in layers away from the woven background.  I used my yarns in beige, sand and taupe shades to create the path, and I used random greens that I tend not to use as the base for the forest floor.  It’s a great way to use up the blue-greens and Christmassy greens that rarely work in my pieces.   

They serve as a placeholder yarn that I’ll cover over using my grasses and plant materials.  The goal is to create a realistic forest understory adjacent to the path that moves through the trees.  When I step back and look at it, I realize that the piece that has consumed an amazing amount of yarn.  I’m estimating that I consumed close to a twelve-gallon tub of yarn scraps just to finish the base for the trees.  That’s a good thing, because now I can close the lids on my storage tubs and they fit in my wall racks again!  To finish the base, I picked out the exact sand, taupe and cream colors I wanted to use for the path and layered them on top of the crocheted yarn.  I then needle felted the components together to get the mottled look I wanted.  It was very satisfying to see it all completed.  With the background in the frame, I moved on to creating the tree trunks and forest canopy.  I finished needle felting the free-standing tree trunks, so they’re ready to plant.  This week I’ll extend the trees by constructing the branches and launch into making the leaf clumps.  After my last round of dyeing, I have plenty of the crunchy greens available to create the leaves.  It’s a huge project, but I’m delighted to see it coming together. 

 

My life is never quite as simple as it should be, so lots of other things are going on as I weave.  I’m deep in the throes of writing a grant to help support advertising for the Fourth Street Festival.  It isn’t glamorous work, but it has to get done before the October first deadline.  It helps make the show better by drawing in crowds from accessible markets such as Cincinnatti, so I know it’s worth the effort.  On the home front, Jacob is finally emerging from a long and nasty respiratory illness.  It’s something like whooping cough, but it didn’t test positive for the actual disease.  He sure has the ‘whoop’, though.  After three trips to the doctor and a messed-up digestive system from all the antibiotics he’s finally looking like Jacob again.  It’s so good to have him back!  Friday night turned out to be a big night for the family too.  We left the boys to guard the house (OK, to play Minecraft all evening as their treat) while Jim surprised me with an elegant dinner at Finch’s Brasserie.  I had the grilled swordfish, which was excellent, and a wonderful calamari appetizer. 

 Jim planned it so we could have a bottle of wine and walk over to the opera afterward on a pleasant fall evening.  We had excellent seats, right down in front with all the long-time subscribers, to see DonGiovanni.  I’ve seen it many times, and I really enjoy a lot of the music.  Of course the production was excellent, so it turned out to be a wonderful evening.  It was a dry walk back to the car, but we missed a torrential downpour while we were watching the statue claim Don Giovanni.  The boys were sleeping in bed (for how long I don’t know) when we got home so all turned out perfectly.  Saturday brought the farmer’s market, which meant lots more tomatoes for sauces, cucumbers for lunches, raspberries for pies, and hot chocolate (or espresso for me!) along the way.  I should also mention that with the cooler weather my enthusiasm for baking came back.  I made babovka (a traditional Czech cake), muffins (with healthy stuff packed in) and “co dum da” cookies (which translates into ‘what the house will give’).  This week the house gave a few chocolate chips, white chocolate chunks, some peanuts, oatmeal, wheat germ and ground flax seed.  Fortunately, the kids only noticed the chocolate.  I even made my famous cheese filled slugs on Friday!  All that baking took a lot of effort, but I think I inspired Jim to make another raspberry pie.  Hooray!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Fall is coming!

Now that the Fourth Street Art Festival has past, I’m eager to launch into my fall activities.  Foremost on my list is completing a large-format commission piece, which will be 44 by 24 inches when it is framed.  It’s a huge piece!  It’s going to take an intensive effort to weave the background.  Luckily, I love to weave!  Right now I’m laying down the base yarn colors, although they will not be highly visible in the final piece.  That’s because I use a crocheting technique to build forward a ledge at the bottom of the piece.  That’s where I will “plant” the mature trees.   

Speaking of trees, I’ve been assembling the trunks during my captive times away from home, such as when I watch the boys do their Taekwondo classes.  The trunks are solid wool, but the core is made from my father-in-law’s old wool army blankets.  They were holey and needed a good home.  I also had a good stroke of fortune at Fourth Street when a young girl approached me to see if I wanted to buy wool roving.  She raised Shetland sheep for her 4H project and had just completed the first shearing.  The wool was washed and carded into roving.  I’m always on the lookout for small amounts of various wools so I asked her to sell me eight ounces of each variety she had.  Fortunately, the aunt was coming to Bloomington and was kind enough to deliver the wool after the festival.  I sort of tossed it downstairs to catalog later into my extensive collection.  When I started looking around for tree trunk wool for my commission, I realized the bag of new roving had the perfect deep, rich coffee brown for my tree trunks!  

 I’ll also use many of the green wools I dyed last week to make leaf clumps for the canopy.  I love it when a project comes together!  If that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I took on another commission this week.  I will be a tall, narrow version of ‘Some like it Hot’, my pepper collection piece.  It features red, orange yellow and green peppers of varying sizes and colors.  That will mean a lot of needle felting to create the peppers, but I’m mentally ready to take on the fall color palette.  I think I need to work with a broader range of vibrant colors after making many pieces featuring the crunchy, bright greens of spring and summer. 

And speaking of fall colors, last weekend we launched into our annual bruschetta making project.  We started out at the farmer’s market, buying twenty pounds of tomatoes.  Roma tomatoes make up the base, but the project consumed about eight pounds of heirloom tomatoes of various colors and shapes and several pounds of onions.  Luckily, Jim planted an herb garden this spring and kept it watered through the dry weather.   

That meant we were able to include four kinds of basil (lemon, Thai, globe and Greek) and two kinds of oregano (Italian and spicy).  Jim doesn’t seem to notice that I basically mowed down the patch, but it was all for a good cause.  We spent a day blanching and peeling until our fingers were wrinkled, chopped like crazy and stirred with the greatest of care not to break up the tomatoes or allow material the bottom of the giant stockpot to burn.   

Forty-seven jars later I think we’re set for winter.  Actually, there are only forty-six jars in the freezer while one was left out to test.  Tommie, Jim and I give it a huge thumbs up.  Jacob is still acquiring a taste for such things.  

 I can tell that we’re settling back into a routine, since this week there was no pie for breakfast.  I can either be sad about not having pie or I can look forward to the next one, which I’m sure will be soon.  The second choice always works better!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Fourth street in the rear view mirror

Wow, what an incredibly intense week!  The annual Fourth Street Art Festival was scheduled for last week, but the remnants of Hurricane Isaac threatened the show.  The early weather predictions not only put us in its path, they predicted from 5 to 10 inches of rain for the weekend.  They even called the chance of rain both days around 100%.  As I watched the radar, though, it wasn’t as clear that it was going to hit us.  The system was moving more slowly and more to the west than the predicted path.  Whether or not we should even hold the show became a tough call, with the thoughts of possibly moving it indoors.  If we were clearly going to get hit it would have been an easy call.  The phone was ringing off the hook with calls from people who wanted to know our plans, including area newspapers.  

 My stress level went through the roof!  To make a long story short, we made our best judgment on the storm’s path and decided to hold the show outdoors in its usual place.  The Friday evening set-up went just fine, although you could tell that the weather was unstable with a threat in the air.  The streets were marked in record time as we all raced to get the booths set up and filled with art while it was dry.  When Saturday dawned the rain was still a state away to the east and moving North, not west toward us.  Hooray!  We had an absolutely beautiful Saturday, with just a couple of light sprinkles.  There were even patches of sun!  I couldn’t have asked for a better day.  People came out and bought art and everyone was in a great mood.  The forecast for Sunday was still pretty ominous.  I was still on high alert, but the day turned out to feature light rain, but no real threats.  No tornadoes, no lightning and no flooding came our way.   

In fact, the rain stopped about two hours before the end of the show!  That gave everyone a dry pack-up, which in "artspeak" meant the show was perfect.  I was positively giddy when I got home and had a nice dinner with wine.  Fortunately, Jim kept me from posting all the thoughts that ran through my head on Facebook.  In hindsight, that was probably a good thing.  Oh, and a little known secret—when I got home Saturday night, after handing out all the official awards to participating artists at the ‘official’ dinner, I came home to find that I had won the ‘Best in Show’ award!  There was a freshly-baked raspberry pie with a little ribbon on it for me.  The berries came from the Farmer’s market and the kitchen still smelled like baked pie.  I’m so glad my family thinks I always win the best in show!

Over the past week I’ve been catching up on all the projects I put on hold.  I first had to recover some sense of serenity after dealing with the show.  On top of that, a bad cold had settled into my family (but luckily, not me).  Nobody has slept very well over the past several days.  

 In the art world, I got more serious about my large landscape commission piece targeted for completion by month’s end.  That meant dyeing a bunch of yarn to get the colors I needed.  Fortunately, I just love dyeing yarn! 

 It’s very rewarding, just like picking fungal spores.  At the end of the day you have a whole pile of stuff to show for your work, and you get to build on all your hard work later on.  The spores yield Petri plates with germinated fungal mycelia to do more experiments, while the yarn goes into all sorts of projects, not all of which have even been imagined yet.  Now my yarns are drying on the veranda.  The humidity finally dropped on Saturday so I’m in pretty good 

shape.  I pulled out my enormous loom and I’m about to clamp it onto an easel to warp it.  I can’t tell you how glorious it sounds to have a day when all I have to do is weave, something else I love to do!  And you’re not going to believe this, but after another trip to the Farmer’s market, Jim baked me another raspberry pie!  It was so popular the first time that I didn’t get to enjoy much of it with coffee for breakfast.  And now I have another one!  Oh. My. Gosh.  Can life get any better?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin