Looking at more water than I’d care to!

I moved my latest exhibition, entitled “Looking at Water”, to the Bloomington Bagel Company last Monday.  I think it looks wonderful!  There was a nice blurb in the Herald Times over the weekend mentioning the show, so I’m hoping a different set of people will see it during its run to the end of January.  That’s the good news from the past week.  Unfortunately, after I reconstituted my art studio following the Thanksgiving flood, disaster struck again.  Two more inches of rain fell on Friday night into Saturday morning.  Just before bedtime Friday I decided to pop into the studio to check on things.  Lo and behold, the water level was halfway up my window and hissing in through the cracks around the frame.   

I leapt into action moving materials and rolling the carpet back, while Jim jumped into action outside.  He kept baling the window well while intermittently clearing a path for the water to flow around the house.  Fortunately, the rain let up around midnight and we both got to bed around one a.m.  As in the first flood of 2014, no art was damaged in the process, but now I’m back to drying carpet pads outside and the studio is a mess.  The low winter humidity in the house is finally a blessing. 

My life had a few more unexpected twists last weekend.  I was scheduled to do a workshop to create needle felted ornaments on Saturday at Gather, but too few people officially signed up to make it run and we canceled.  I think that the busy Holiday shopping, concerts and family schedules just made the timing too busy for most people.   

I thought by scheduling it early in December we could work around busy schedules, but apparently not.  I made several demonstration ornaments for the workshop and was ready to go, and I feel very badly for those who did sign up and really wanted to participate.   We will try to pick a date in late January or early February to hold a workshop to make felted heart shaped ornaments for Valentine’s Day.  If anyone wants to get a head start on next year’s Christmas ornaments I’ll bring those supplies as well.  It’s really all about the technique, so both will work.  I promise to let everyone know well in advance so you can mark your calendars.  Learning how to successfully coordinate a local workshop is new for me, so next time we’ll do better.  I really hate to disappoint people.

The rest of my news is piecemeal.  I did finish my ‘Summer Salad’ commission, and that will ship today to its new home in New Hampshire.  I'm delighted with how it turned out.  I’ll post pictures after the new owner has a chance to see it in place.  I’ll then launch on my next commission, which involves a river running through a forest of trees.  I have already completed the base structure for the tree trunks out of old wool army blankets.   

I don’t yet have a final sketch for the composition, but I know the trees are a necessary part of it.  You likely didn’t know that December first was also national cake day.  Tommie took it upon himself to make an amazing vanilla cake with butter cream rum frosting.  It really tasted like a traditional European cake that was heavy and not too sweet.   

This weekend the boys and I moved holiday baking into high gear, making several batches of cookies.  I even created a new cookie I’m calling boysenberry moons—they are delightful!    It’s a sandwich cookie featuring toasted pecans and boysenberry jam filling that I decided just needed to be tried.  We also created this year’s version of our annual candy house.  The rule is that no one gets to eat anything off of it until Boxing Day.   

Finally, there has been no pie in my house since well before Thanksgiving, which is very sad.  Even pumpkin pies at the holiday dinner did not satisfy my need for the berry-filled treat.  Helloooo… is anybody listening?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

The house is ready for guests!  It has been a delightful couple of weeks, with Christmas traditions reaching full force.  Last week the boys had two friends over to make our traditional candy house.  This is a tradition that I adopted from Emily, our neighbor, who figured out that making gingerbread houses is just too much work.  Baking gingerbread and trying to assemble it into a house is difficult enough.  After a couple of weeks no one wants to eat it anyway.  Her mom started making structures out of cardboard and then frosting them.  When the boys were little I started making a cute little house out of cardboard to decorate.  Now that they’re full-fledged creative young installation artists they design and build their own elaborate structures.  I made a quintuple batch of frosting just to cover this one, then turned it back over to them and their friends.  We had a bunch of leftover candy from Halloween that ended up back in the mix, plus a few goodies I picked up for color or textural contrast.  I guess I never take off my artist hat!  

Along about mid December comes Jim’s birthday, which is always the marker that we’re allowed to get a Christmas tree.  We feasted on the shoebox of brownies that Grandma always sends Jim for his birthday (three kinds—black forest, caramel, and seven layer brownies!).  Then we popped out to Bloomingfoods and picked out the biggest tree that would fit in the living room and keep the star under the roof.  We got a delightful, full tree that accommodated every single ornament we had.  The boys also took it on themselves to put up some outside lights this year, so we have a really festive house to great our holiday guests.  Jim’s brother Tim and his wife Bobi will be here, as will Jim’s Mom and Aunt Lois.  Will there be pies?  You bet!  I’m in.  And Stollen, of course!!

My artwork generally takes a back seat at Christmas while I feverishly clean the house for guests and make all the holiday magic happen behind the scenes.  I’ve still been making peppers, though.  Now I’m up to forty-five.  I laid them out on the piece and calculated that I’ll need seventy, so I’ll be on the pepper project for a while. 

The house waits in excited expectation for the guests that will arrive in a few hours.  The presents are wrapped, the beds are made, the wine is in the cellar and nice dishes are washed.  

  We have snow on the ground and more on the way.  We’re still hoping for uneventful travels and a full house tonight!  And did I say there’ll be fresh bread this morning and a peach pie tomorrow?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

‘Tis the Season!

I just don’t know which one it is yet! I concluded my fall art fair season this week by throwing myself into wet felting. I finished all six scarf commissions (and one very elegant black shawl) this week. At that point I declared it the holiday season! Things slow down a bit in my art studio, except for wrapping presents. I did manage to make a big carrot and another beet for my giant commission piece, so I felt good about that. This is a project I’ll keep moving forward as I sit in meetings and waiting for the boys at taekwondo. Plus I’ve been buying up all the chocolate-y earth tone yarns I can find on my shopping adventures. Between presents and work I’m a one-woman economic stimulator.

Toward the end of the week I had a nice interview with Lee Hadley. He writes a weekly column for the Bloomington Herald Times and now the accompanying H & L (Home and Living) magazine. He’s also a TKD parent, so I see him regularly. I do so much poking at critters, hands and vegetables that I’m bound to draw attention. He came to interview and we ended up having a delightful conversation. We both came away absolutely certain that we couldn’t live anywhere except Bloomington, Indiana. It’s such a wonderful town. Bloomingtonians are so supportive of creative people and the arts. It’s an open-minded and nurturing community of people and I just feel so at home here. The interview gave me a chance to reflect on how far I’ve come over the years as an artist. I’m still experimenting with new ideas, processes and directions for my career, but my confidence in being able to turn what I visualize into art has never been stronger.

The Christmas season marks the beginning of an important family time for us as well. The official kick-off is December 11^th, Jim’s birthday. It’s also our day to get a Christmas tree, but I’ll come to that event in turn. The first thing Saturday I baked a flourless chocolate cake while the boys were off at TKD. They did the class and sparring sessions, so I had plenty of time to create a chocophile’s delight. Fortunately, Jim-the-chocophile also got a delivery of brownies from his mom the night before, but unfortunately he overdosed a little. He shared them with the family, but I think he must have snuck a bonus piece or two... After pizza and cake for lunch, we all went roller skating. Jacob was eager to go again after learning how last week. He took his share of spills and bumps, but now he zips around the track like a pro. I haven’t been skating since I was a teenager, but it’s just like riding a bike. After a few loops I was having a great time, dancing with Jacob to the music as we skated in the flashing lights of the disco ball. Suddenly I had big blonde hair again! Tommie and Jim were out for their first try at roller skating. Fortunately, Tommie is made of rubber. He started out creeping along the rails and taking quite a few falls. If there’s a word that described him yesterday, though, it was determination. After three hours he was skating the entire loop without falling. Jim picked it up pretty fast, I’m sure because he did plenty of ice skating as a Michigan kid. He did take a nasty fall when he was helping Tommie. And so with his pre-injured shoulder, birthday tummy rumblings and badly bruised hip, he looked a little sad in the rain as we went to get our Christmas tree. Luckily, the boys and I were eager and enthusiastic, and so we took over and brought home a nice tree. Yesterday we trimmed it, put up some decorations outside, and got a load of candy to decorate the traditional candy house. We were settled in before the big snow hit us. On top of everything else I managed to make a huge pot of pumpkin-red pepper soup to keep us going through the winter. On to Christmas!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

… And the goose is getting fat!

Christmas is approaching, and that means family traditions are in full swing. St. Nicholas has already visited and filled stockings, Jezisek is on track, Santa is approaching, and the Cookie Fairies have been working feverishly to satisfy family and friends. The Cookie Patrol team members are keen to start deliveries on Monday. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The holiday fury really begins after Jim’s birthday on the 11^th. The family makes a candy house, which is really a gingerbread house v2.0. Our neighbor Emily persuaded us that gingerbread is over-rated—it’s too stale to eat by the time the holidays are over. Now we both make a cardboard house and cover it with royal icing and transform it into a magical candy house. It’s a little less than romantic on the inside but looks colorful and cool on the outside. We gather all the decadent delectables we can find, including leftover Halloween candy and yellow dye #5-free candy from Bloomingfoods, and put everything in wooden bowls. Each family member picks a side of the house, where the two prime locations include both a side and a roof. The real trick as the project coordinator is to minimize munching on the construction materials—I guess we’re a little like the Fraggles eating the Doozer constructions. After Christmas we rip off whatever hasn’t frozen into the icing over a window of a few days.

Yesterday was supposed to be blog day, but it turned into cookie baking day. The annual cookie fest is Tommie’s favorite part of the holidays, since he’s a big baking fan. Yesterday we made five different kinds of cookies: Zebra cookies, even better than the Scholar’s Inn (and smaller); Vanilkove rohliky (you probably know them as Russian tea cakes, but we Czechs don’t); a thin sandwich cookie with cherry plum filling and rum and almond icing (they’re delicious!); chocolate sugar cookies that we iced and decorated; and my traditional favorite, medvedovy tlapky (bear paws). We mixed and rolled and baked and iced and decorated like crazy all day long. I also made marzipan from scratch and marinated some fruit to put into the Stollen we’ll bake today, plus we’re planning to make some date pinwheels and thumbprint cookies today. Eleven tins are filled and placed out of reach in the pantry.

It’s been a good art week too! Most importantly, I finished my Autumn Aspens commission piece. It has more variation in depth and I’m pleased with how it has turned out. I spent an afternoon with in the Creek-Love Classroom, aka the multiage schoolroom that is the home to my second grader Jacob. This week we worked on a wet felting project using Merino noils. The coveted fibers from combing are the long fibers, or top, and the shorter fibers are called noils. They’re not useful for needle felting, but it turns out they’re great for wet felting. I got these from my friends Nancy and Pat at Sheep Street in Morgantown, where I’ll return later today for more goodies. The kids have been making felt balls that we’re going to use to embellish gourds in a project we’ll do when the weather warms up a little. The kids love to do projects like this, and they enjoy teaching their friends how to do it. It’s cool to them because it’s new, even though a couple of them are from sheep-raising families, and they’ve seen me working on felted ornaments in class. Even some of the parents in the classroom wanted to make one.

But now I have to run! There are presents to wrap, cookies to bake, plans to make and kids to keep half an eye on. If you have kids you know why this season is so full of energy and special. I hope you all have a terrific holiday season!

Until next week…