What happened to autumn?

The first snows fell this week, bringing a cold and calming sense of closure to my summer art season.  Now I will transition into my winter hibernation mode of creation in my art studio.  I completed the last of my scheduled events by running a workshop on felting techniques for my local guild.  While I really love traveling to workshops, where I can meet new people and enjoy different parts of the country, it was nice to just melt back into my home after the workshop, knowing that I could sleep in my own bed last night. 

Yesterday’s workshop featured an enthusiastic bunch of felters, from absolute beginners to highly skilled fiber artists.  We focused on creating birds, from vibrantly colorful birds of whimsy to highly detailed and accurate creations.  It was such fun to see the excitement and intensity brought to the workshop, which, like the birds themselves, was manifest in the diversity of the personalities and styles present.  I have great fun teaching, and I always come away with lots of new ideas and a renewed drive to create my own art.  

The next question is always ‘When is the next workshop’, and I’ve been communicating with artists in Canada, Alabama and Florida, so I’ll let you know when there are firm dates. 

We’re coming to the end of an era this coming week, with Jacob expected to get his driving license on Thursday.  Then he can drive himself to each of his activities.  For now, though, I still get to sit and watch him, even if he is behind the wheel there and back as a student driver.  

Lately he has been doing Muay Thai kickboxing, which leaves me time to work on willow leaves for my next piece in the migration series.  When I was in California for a conference at Asilomar many years ago I took a side trip to a site where monarch butterflies congregate for a rest on their migration to Mexico.  I imagined what the trees must look like when the butterflies land en masse—the intricate wings clustered together must have looked like draped flower petals.  I decided to create a weaving to show the scene that I imagined I would have seen.  

I have the green gradient background woven and stretched out in a frame, and the cascading willow leaves will drape forward from the background.  I have also created the butterfly wing blanks, so now I need to embellish them with the monarch patterns.  The good news is that I learned a lot from my costume design experience creating checkered men’s suits from plain and striped materials and drawing in the patterns I imagined.  I experimented with different kinds of art markers and I’ve settled in some that work really well on fabric.  Imagining all the butterflies I’ll need for the weaving means there is a lot of drawing patterns in my future!

I also did some puttering this week with natural dyeing.  I have to say it was a lot of fun to share my fleeces in the the bird workshop, where I shared my black walnut, avocado, onion skin and maple bark dyed fleeces.  My latest experiment wasn’t yet dry, though, so it stayed home.  Last weekend, after the Spinners and Weaver’s guild show at the Convention Center, I noticed a spruce tree that had dropped a carpet of pine cones—so I knew what I had to do!  The next day Jacob and I went out and collected what turned out to be 156 pine cones, because that’s how many fit into my dye pot. 

I did my usual technique of boiling them for an hour followed by an overnight steep.  I strained out the woody solids the next day.  I reheated the dye pot and added a pound of freshly washed fleece, boiled that mixture for an hour and let it steep overnight.  I pulled out a yummy beige caramel that resembles the color of eggplant flesh after it has been salted for about an hour.  I don’t know what I need it for yet, but I know that everything will find its purpose. 

Finally, yes, it was a pie week.  Plus, there’s a video showing how it was made!  Several people have asked for Jim’s pie crust recipe, in part because it uses oil instead of butter or shortening - that makes it a little healthier, and I’m sticking with that answer because I love pie.  Jacob was a wizard at filming and editing the video to make it clean and sharp.  The pie was a pumpkin spiced apple creation, which was an awesome treat after our celebratory dinner! 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

The fall show season begins…

I promised myself that before the fall show season began I’d complete the two commissions I agreed to do at the Fourth Street show. I just finished the second piece, called ‘Low Tide’, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. I was channeling the beach, specifically the receding surf as it deposits little pools full of shell fragments, drift wood, and other treasures. There’s always something for an explorer to find, which is why the beach is so great for kids and artists. The whole process of sorting shells takes me to a special place, and this time I remembered sharing my hunts for sand dollars with Tommie on the beach. Between a powerful surf and a parade of collectors what we found was more like sand quarters and dimes, but we snatched them out of the surf with gusto and glee. I’ll probably have to make another beach piece when the snow starts to fly and I feel cold again.

This year I added the Chamber of Commerce show at the convention center to my fall circuit. It was combined with a runway show, which was fun. One highlight of the show was when the sweet little boy, who couldn’t have been more than five, came down the runway dressed in a stylish vest. He was moving and posing and the crowd went wild. His mom had to come on the stage to give him the hook. The best part of the art show was sharing a booth with Terry Taylor-Norbu, one of my Fourth Street friends. She does beautiful dichroic glass jewelry. She let me have half her booth and together we kept the show lively all evening. It was nice to interact with a different group of people.

This coming weekend is the Fiber Arts Show and Sale put on by the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild. It will be at the First United Church here in Bloomington on Friday from 5-9 pm, then Saturday from 10-5—twenty four hours of pure fiber fun! It will be nice to seeing some old friends at a show that’s so close to home. Stop in if you’ll be around Bloomington. And if you're around town, stop in at the Bloomigton Bagel Co on Dunn street and see my ArtScarves exhibit - it'll be up until the end of November.

The family news this week begins with putting Halloween to bed for another year—we picked up all the decorations from the front yard. We even put a few more display things in the closet when they went on big discount the following week. I finally got a window to get the boys room clean (they did most of the work and all the complaining) and then I vacuumed the house. That’s a sign for me that the seasons are changing. Then we all went to the African American Arts Potpourri show on Saturday night. We really enjoyed the dance group segment and the boys really liked the chorale ensemble, and the soul review segment was fun and full of energy. The shows are always very well done, and I enjoy the diversity you see in the performers. They come on stage big and small, tall and short, hailing from countries and cultures all over the world. What they share is talent and a passion for performance, which is what makes the shows special. Now we’re looking forward to the spring show. I guess that means it’s time to get busy making more scarves for the fall shows and start some new weavings for next summer!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

A quiet week

I’ve had a bag of unused wool in the back of my mind for a while. Actually, it lived in my art studio in a brown bag, and this week it needed some attention. The Spinners and Weaver’s Guild members held a secret fiber exchange at a meeting before summer break. Each recipient was tasked with making something out of their secret material. I received a bag of superwash wool in a beautiful blue color with hints of purple and green. The premise behind superwash wool is that it can be put through the washer and dryer because it doesn’t felt (and therefore won’t shrink). I didn’t know if I could needle felt with it but I wanted to try. I decided to try to make an object I’ve never done before, so I set off to make a bowl. I began with an old blanket and cut it in the shape of a doughnut, two layers thick. If you imagine the doughnut as a pie (I think of everything as pie) and cut out a generous slice, that’s what I did to the material. I stitched the edges back together to create the basic bowl shape and started to needle felt the wool. It worked out surprisingly well. I did the inner surface first, then I needle felted a swirly pattern on the surface using a soft lavender yarn. I’ll be working on coating the outer surface last so that I don’t have the pattern showing through. I’ll see if I can complete it before the first guild meeting of the fall on Monday.

The weather was just gorgeous this week in Bloomington, so I took the opportunity to do a little work outside. That meant puttying, sanding and painting the oak frames that my friend Tom Bertolacini builds for me. It’s nice to be outside when it isn’t too hot (most of the summer), or too cold (a few days the week before), or too wet. Now I have twelve black frames ready to be filled. I know it’s time to start weaving again, but I need a break after a long summer of creating, traveling and selling. My family and I went to the farmer’s market Saturday for our usual stock-up on fruit and veggies, which was also a nice break. It’s a great time for the market with all the late-season goodies. We found watermelon, corn, raspberries, cucumbers, apples and a big bag of peppers for a peppered salmon dish. I also got an inspiration for a new piece when I chatted with Sarah at the volunteer fair. She is involved with the Bloomington orchard project. I thought they had mainly apple trees, but I learned that they have a huge variety of fruits. I’m excited to tour the grove and see what’s going on. I did learn that they’ve been preventing the trees from bearing fruit until they become bigger and well established. The concept of a huge new harvest of all different kind of fruits got me thinking about and sketching a whimsical tree covered with all the fruits in the orchard. I need to think a little about the structure to get the scale right, but now I’m excited again to start a new piece.

I went on lots of little forays this week—I went back to Auto Heaven to forage for rusty car parts and came back with a big bucket of stuff. Tommie and I went to the train racks by the B-line trail and came home with a big bag of treasures, including some old spark plugs, which I think are cool. Everything is carefully washed and dried and waiting in a big plastic jar and so I’m ready to begin a commission similar to my ‘Tread Lightly’ composition that sold quickly at Fourth Street.

On Thursday the boys and I went to an exhibit at the John Waldron arts center to see an exhibit of Turkish textiles put on by George Malacinski. The exhibit, entitled "Woven Treasures: Near- and Middle-Eastern Textiles" was amazing, featuring a combination of interesting techniques, materials, colors and effects. Perhaps the most amazing was a horse bridle that had a felted structure stitched onto a woven fabric with an embroidered surface. I saw a wedding dress that was both beautiful and sad. It featured an extraordinary silk fabric embroidered with silk—you could see that it represented a phenomenal amount of work. The mixed feelings come from the knowledge that the marriage was arranged for a young girl whose body was not allowed to show. Her arms were bound underneath and covered with the beautiful dress, and she was married as a commodity and not a person.

Oh, a couple of quick final notes. My two big commission pieces were shown in Saturday’s Herald Times Homes section when Carol Krause wrote a piece and photographed them for an article about the homeowners renovations. That was nice to see. And even though we got raspberries, there won’t be enough for a pie this week. I’m still optimistic that something with a crust will turn up soon! It’s fall apple time, and there are still plenty of peaches around! Is anybody listening? Jim?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The Big Fiber Art Fair

The calendar might say it’s mid-November, but the weatherperson had other ideas last week. We had some delightful sunny days with days in the mid seventies. Normal people think of raking leaves or going for a nice walk, but not me. I took the unexpected opportunity to finish four wood frames for weavings. Just like rodents putting away nuts for the winter, I store away finished frames for those long winter days when I’m cozied up in my art studio weaving and it’s too cold outside to use putty or stains. Of course that got me excited about weaving, so I spent some time working on my Baby Carrots commission. I wove a little dirt and remembered just how much I enjoy weaving. Luckily I snapped out of my reverie in time to get ready for the Bloomington Spinners and Weaver’s Guild Fiber Art Fair on Friday and Saturday. It was wonderful to catch up with people I only see once or twice a year. It was especially nice to finally cross paths with a woman who’s been looking for me for five years. I did a show in Sellersburg, a small town in southeastern Indiana not too far from Louisville. I haven’t done the show since, mostly because Sellersburg isn’t an apt name. I even read the papers the next day, thinking that the bridges between Indiana and Louisville must have washed out, keeping all my potential patrons south of the Ohio River...

The thing that struck me about this weekend’s show was the number of people who not only recognize my art, but can also point out the pieces that represent my new directions and ideas. This year the big hit for me was the ruffled scarves. I sold every one I had, which has sent me into a frenzy to find more merino. I try to buy all my stuff locally, but I've exhausted the supply of merino fleece for fifty miles. I ultimately ordered some from a web source in Portland, Oregon, but I ended up buying them out too. I’m patiently waiting for the delivery and a refund for the rest of the incomplete order. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m anticipating making more ruffled scarves and a black shawl, all before the next show, the UU Art Fair and Bazaar on December 3 & 4.

Doing the show this weekend made me appreciate my support crew. I got a delightful breakfast of toast, sausages and eggs. OK, the eggs were egg beaters and the sausages were the veggie version, but they were just what I wanted. They brought me food at the show when I needed it, including a delightful sandwich from Panera for lunch Saturday. When the show was over they packed me up in the rain and drove me home, smiling the whole time. I’m very lucky. My security translates into warm fuzzy art and new challenges.

A next step for me came to pass over the past few weeks, with David Goodrum stepping down as the president of the Fourth Street Art Fair executive committee. I tried to bribe him with some old champagne. Actually, I gave him a bottle to congratulate him and a second bottle to bribe him to say on. It didn’t work. When the committee reconvened and had elections to replace the executive committee, I threw my hat into the ring. Now I’m the new Fourth Street Fair president. I’m a little nervous about the enormity of the task but I’m looking forward to the challenge. The show has been a big success for 35 years, so I have big shoes to fill and long shadows to grow beyond. The good news is that the hard working crew of volunteer artists that make it happen is still in place. They make it fun and worthwhile.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin