The reality of the big summer art fairs is foremost on my
mind right now. I put most all of
my energies into creating art this week.
It seems as if I was in the studio from the moment I wake up until deep
in the night. I’m making progress
and I’m almost ready to take my art to Des Moines! The first piece that I finished has already traveled
extensively with me. I did the
actual background weaving in my studio a few months ago, but I took the weaving
to Michigan to stretch it out onto its frame. At Grandma’s I crocheted the foreground base for the
peninsula and the water’s edge.
I brought
the piece home and needle felted the tree trunks while watching the boys do
Taekwondo. The rocks in the piece are
mother stones that we collected last year on Topsail Island in North
Carolina. To complete the tree I
used remnant yarn thrums that I got from the Textillery in Bloomington to
create the long branches. The
center of the branches is wire that I repurposed by straightening used spiral
notebook binders. Overall, the
piece has a lot of history and a lot of travel. And I’m delighted with how it turned out!
This week I also worked on my fruit piece, making the apple
slices and grapes while watching the boys teach Taekwondo at MCMA and during
art-related meetings. As I laid
out the piece, I realized I need at least one more kind of fruit to balance
with the dark-purply blueberries.
I’ve settled on plums as the perfect fruit. I know exactly what I’m looking for, but it’s hard to communicate
for me because in Czech there are two different words for plums, depending on
the species. I want to make blumy, which have the right purple and
the right shape.
On the Sounds of South Beauty and the Beast production front, my sewing
faeries have been busy assembling my pinned-together costumes, and they look
absolutely terrific. I’m so
pleased with the progress. Lately I’ve
re-launched into another character, the Enchantress. I envision her as a regal, shimmery, silvery-teal
goddess-like person. I want her
look to be very distinct from the ball gowns that I have been working on. The basic dress for the Enchantress was
a treasure we found on the road trip to West Lafayette. Four of the SOS contributors traveled
to see the touring performance of Beauty and the Beast.
We also planned to make it a
costume-scrounging trip on the way there and back. We found the enchantresses dress in a consignment shop in
small-town Indiana. When Nancy and
I saw it we just knew that it would work as the base of the costume for the
Enchantress. A couple of months
later I was here in Bloomington, visiting My Sister’s Closet, when I found another
version of the dress. It was
slightly greener, but almost identical.
I harvested that fabric to extend the first dress to become a
full-length gown. I embellished
the basic structure by creating sleeves from the skirt of another gown I scavenged
from the Recycle Center – Materials for the Arts.
I added some trim to the sleeves from a roll of Christmas
ribbon that I picked up last weekend from the Monroe County History Center’s annual
fundraiser garage sale. I need to
give a big shout out to them for lending us two mannequins for the year to keep
the costume-making process moving forward. I will reciprocate by lending them my mannequins next year
for their sale.
On the home front it has been a good week for pies. We missed the farmer’s market for a
couple of weeks on our travels, but we returned to cherry season. We’re looking ahead to a visit by
friends from Mississippi who have never had cherry pie beyond the canned
version. They’re coming for one of
the Beauty and the Beast performances and we want to give them the real
farmer’s market item. Jim has been
busy pitting cherries and freezing filling bags to have on hand. He even made two different cherry pies
since I last blogged a week ago in an attempt to perfect his filling. Last Monday he made a tart cherry pie
that was amazing. It was also perfect
with espresso as breakfast for the next couple of days. This past Saturday we picked up ten
more quarts for winter pies, and Jim tried a sweet cherry pie to compare and
work on the filling texture. He
added a few strawberries that were left over, which unfortunately dominated the
flavor of the sweet cherries. I’m
not complaining, though! Maybe we
should try it again to see what it’s like without the strawberries! I feel good knowing that we’ll be ready
for pies this winter to bring back memories of the summer’s farmer’s
market. Let’s do the same for
blueberries and raspberries!
Until next week,
