Green Yarns and Rainy Skies…

I’m a big believer in the axiom that if you keep working away at the little things, in the end your efforts all add up to something bigger.  I’m often sitting at MonroeCounty Martial Arts in the afternoons, which now means four times a week as the boys are trading off teaching an hour of kids classes Monday through Thursday.  That falls after an hour of training on Tuesday and Thursday, so my afternoons are booked.  I am delighted that they negotiate who teaches which class based on who has the most homework scheduled for that day.  Teaching and training still all gets packed in around Hip Hop practice and ultimate Frisbee workouts.  During my sitting and waiting hours I need something to work on, so I needle felt.  I’ve been working on a Salsa weaving, which means I’m now creating the individual vegetables.  

I just finished the cayenne peppers, because of course my salsa is spicy.  Next up are the cherry tomatoes.  As my friend Dan Maillet used to say, they’re the candy of vegetables--so sweet and a burst of flavor in your mouth.  And when I run out of steam on vegetables, I manage to play the next cycle of Words with Friends with my peeps. 

While last week was a beautiful, warm spring preview, this week we’ve had rain—and lots of it, followed by more rain.  It’s hard to focus on anything else besides water pieces.  That works out well, because I have been working on a commission that will feature a lot of water.  I’ve been pulling out all my sparkly yarns and watery blues.  I find that creating a water gradient is a little trickier than the land version, because there are still some dark blues in the distance and light blues in the foreground needed to get the effect I want.  I’ve just finished the first stage in the process, which is creating the background canvas by weaving the water.  Next I will weave the blue skies (hint, hint local sky!) and then release the weaving from the loom, stretch it out in a frame and then build up the foreground.  Stay tuned… 

Of course my work depends on having lots of greens in all the glorious variations one finds in Nature.  Last week I started winding yarn balls from the skeins that I dyed in my ginormous dyeing fest on sunny days.  When it was sunny I could work outside or on the veranda, but the damp weather made it so wet that I had to set up a temporary studio in the living room beside the big door to the veranda.  With the door open it almost feels like I’m a plein air artist.  I’m off to a good start at re-stocking my stores, which means I should have about fifty balls of new green yarns in my stash.  I pulled out my my beautiful birch-wood hand-made ball winder from Woolhouse Tools to transform skeins into balls, only to discover that the drive train was beginning to sag.  That’s what happen when you age, I guess.  After a little detective work and finding the right helpful person, a new drive cord should be coming from the company in British Columbia sometime this week.  I’m not a patient person when there is a job to do, so I will just work with the old one as long as I can.  It slips and then periodically catches, but I can still move the process forward. 

Saturday dawned too rainy for our usual trip to the Farmer’s market.  We headed out on a shopping mission instead, but by late morning the weather broke and we were able to slip over to the market get a few things.  We didn’t get coffee or breakfast there, but we did score two quarts of strawberries, spinach we need for our weekly deep-dish pizza dinner, and fresh eggs for kluski.  Oh, and some lettuce, because one always needs fresh lettuce.  Oh, and like the dark skies on the horizon, today marked the last day of last week’s blueberry pie for breakfast.  The countdown begins to the next pie!  I wonder what, and more importantly when, it will be?

Until next week,

--> Martina Celerin