Another Successful Fourth Street!

It has been an extremely busy two weeks, but Fourth Street Festival 2013 is in the rear view mirror.  Life is slowly returning to normal.  I have learned not to try to make any new art pieces the week before the festival, keeping my week open to deal with the last-minute craziness that always seems to happen for which nobody plans.  I keep busy with some puttery things, like painting frames and updating my bookkeeping.  Then the strangest things come up.  

 This year I needed to find a bullhorn at the last minute, because it was part of the emergency plan to notify artists in case something big and unexpected happened.  After a lot of looking I found one at the IU surplus stores, but it turned out to be a piece of junk.  Even though they explicitly say they won’t take refunds, I’m the person who put the ‘fun’ back in refund.  I ended up with an awesome replacement (actually, big thanks to the IU surplus store fellow who gave me his to replace the battery holder shaped like a dented horn). 

My security police friend said it was even better than his!  With the weather extremes of the past two years, I tended to check in to see the forecast every fifteen minutes or so.  Boy, did that ever drive Jim crazy!  He says I shouldn’t worry about weather that’s days away, but I checked anyway.  The first day turned out to be very hot and sticky, but the accompanying thunderstorms held off until after the show and the banquet dinner.  By morning the storms were gone and neither the art nor the artists were any worse for the weather.  Sunday was considerably cooler and a better sales day. 

All tolled, 36,000 people came to the event this year.   Despite running all over Fourth Street (and beyond), the show treated me very well.  I sold several pieces and had a few commissions.  I was also honored with the Best in Show award this year!  For as good as it was, I’m relieved and happy to have it all behind me for another year.  Now I’m working on commissions and taking care of the little business things that come up, like re-stocking my cards and T-shirts around town.  I’ve been making more sweater petals to sell at Bloomingfoods this year, which were very popular in the fall and winter months last season. 

In other fair news, Jacob and Tommie spent a lot of time caring for my booth and talking to patrons when I was off stomping out fires.  When I asked Jacob what his favorite part of the show was, he said it was using the credit card reader!  Many people told me what a wonderful salesman he was for my work, and some of my artist friends want me to rent him out to sell for them.  He does tell good stories about the work and makes a very personal connection to the art, so it’s good to have him in the booth.  I wanted to mention that the first piece to sell this year was my new willow piece called Sitting with Grandpa.  It was kind of hard to part with because I was still pretty emotionally attached to it.  The piece had some of Grandpa’s old army blankets in it, so there was a real connection to him.  In Czech, when you have problems you go and talk to the old willow.  I think Grandpa did that too, since he grew up around some giant willows in his backyard that were a big part of his life.  They were great climbing trees and just good places to hang out.  He liked to be near water, which is where the willows lived. 

When the show was over, I was treated to a delightful celebratory dinner.  After takedown we had Jim’s orange glazed salmon, rice, peaches and a bottle of wine.  For dessert, Jim baked a fresh apple pie using transparent apples from Grandma.  Boy, were they ever flavorful!  Jim, you can make another one any time now!  I know you have more in the freezer!  Which reminds me that I also started back on my Zumba routine.  I’m pretty achy and a little sore, but it feels good to be active again.  Oh, and I also went out on closing night to see “Urinetown” at the Bloomington Playwright’s Project theatre, a play directed by Eric Anderson.  After a delightful dinner at Samira with the boys home playing Minecraft, it turned into a fine evening.  What more could I ask for?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Commissions, cows and candy…

This week it was more commission work for me.  My focus was on my pepper-themed piece.  I need to create my own canvases for each piece, which in this case must support peppers across a range of colors and sizes.  For the background layer I combined lots of fall colors, including red, orange, yellow, purple and plenty of green, which will contribute to making it a vibrant piece.  Most of that layer will be covered underneath the peppers, but patches will slip through and enhance the pepper layer.  Because it’s a custom sized piece, I went to my frame maker Tom Bertolacini to put something together for me.  The frame is now finished and I stretched out the background on the frame before I stitch it on.   

Now I need to felt a flat of finely felted peppers (it was too late in the season to pick a peck).  I have all my colored felts picked out to cover the pepper shapes, which I’ve been making out of old men’s wool suits that I collect in my travels.  People probably think they’re selling me a suit that I’ll bring home and make my long-suffering husband wear, unaware that I’ll carve it into little pieces, run them through the dryer and use needles to jam little pieces of colorful felt onto the shapes until they look like peppers.  Bwa ha ha!

My other project has been making more sweater petals.  I have plenty of time to work as I watch my boys do Taekwondo, so I get a lot done during those times.  I have a new display of them up at Bloomingfoods if you want to check out how they are evolving.  I also set up a scarf display for November at the Bloomington Bagel Company.  I’m low on scarves, so I had to pull all my traditional scarves from By Hand Gallery.  I replaced them with a set of my Lion’s Mane scarves, which is a new line I brought out last fall but haven’t displayed much.  This week I’ll launch into a serious scarf-making frenzy to replenish my stocks, but I’m running low on enthusiasm for making a lot more scarves.  This might be the last year they’ll be on display around town. 

This was the week of Halloween, which means I spent one night handing out candy to all the neighborhood kids in my cow costume.  If you can’t imagine me as a laughing cow (no, not a little triangle of cheese) here I am!  I don’t think I scared a lot of kids but I did have a good time.  Fortunately, there is a modest tax for handing out candy all evening, so I rewarded myself with some hundred thousand dollar ‘fun size’ bars, ad libidum.  On Friday night my family went to see the preview of 39 Steps, the latest Cardinal Stage production.  I bought tickets, but I also found one of the free tickets hidden around town.  That meant we could also invite one of the boy’s friends.  We all went to the Runcible Spoon for dinner, over the Blu Boy for a pre-show cookie, then on to the John Waldron for the performance.  As usual, they did a phenomenal job.  With four actors and a limited but highly creative and ever-changing set, the whole story just flowed beautifully and came to life.  Everybody had heard about the plane crash on stage and it was well done.  The character changes were managed beautifully, so hats off to the cast and Randy White for bringing it all off. 

Finally, last night we had friends over for dinner.  Jim made salmon and boca negra, which is a Julia Childs creation of a flourless chocolate cake.  It was amazing!  The best part, though, is that there’s enough left over for dinner tonight!  I can’t wait!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

The Greens of Summer...

This week I’m back in the art studio and weaving like an artist who sold all the pieces she intended for a gallery show in two weeks. I’m still excited about finishing the ‘river’ piece I wrote about in last week’s blog, but I was short on the right green materials. So out came the dye pots, including the new ones I bought at the Monroe County Historical Society garage sale. Out came the RIT dye (from Indianapolis!) and a pile of materials that I brought home from the Spinners and Weavers Guild auction. Sometimes the wools call out to me, like a high-pitched sound only a dog can hear. Other times the Guild members taunt me when a lot comes up that nobody wants. Martinnnnaaaaa—don’t you need this pretty blue yarn? So of course I buy them all. I pulled out deep blue cottons, golden corn silk and teal boucle wool, some green and yellow dye, my dye pots and I leaped right in! OK, not into the dye pots, but 14 skeins of yarns went into the pots. The process is long and involved, so life went on in between. I got started dyeing, and then the boys and I went to the library to claim their prize for completing 25 books this summer (insert proud mom smile here in your imagination). They each brought home a nice chapter book, which hopefully will be #26. We came home to move the yarns along in the process, then off to Bloomingfoods. We bulked up on fresh fruits and vegetables, and Tommie had to bring home the gnarly carrots he found. We were then off for a bike ride to burn off some summer energy, then on to pick up the CSA vegetables for the week. The greens from the CSA went into chowder that was mostly corn, kale and sweet potatoes, but it also had the vegetable stock I made from the freezer-burned green beans, turnips and other unused delicacies from last summer. I can only slip so many green beans past the HoA (Husband of Artist) before he gets suspicious.
The hectic-running-around pretty much sums up the events of the short week after our return from Madison. I’m still basking in the afterglow of my successes. We drove in to the driveway to see some beautiful flaming orange, yellow and red glads that had just opened, along with a few unopened burgundy racemes that were on the verge of opening. I planned to cut them for a nice welcome-home bouquet the next morning. But during the night the terrors of the town struck. No, it’s not adolescents out of control with scissors, it’s just deer fattened up on flowers. Those rascals mowed the glads down to the quick! If only the HoA were so good with the lawn! Only one bud of burgundy glad survived the nocturnal carnage, and that’s in a vase in the kitchen with a few zinnias. I guess our garden is just a nice buffet, timed to keep the deer happy all summer. Sometimes karma just spills out into the yard.

Until next week…