Always dye with a white shirt on...

This week was brutally hot in southern Indiana, but in the cool morning I pulled out my big dye pot, fired up the stove and tossed in my fresh Michigan sumac for a good boil. The brew had an impressive deep red color. After I filtered the fine particles I threw in some fleece, and to my great delight, out came a beautiful earthy red color. Of course, as I was pulling the fleece out of the pot, I managed to splash some on the white shirt I was wearing. Curses! I quickly grabbed my planet-saving eco-friendly dish soap and went after the stain. To my surprise, the stain turned a pretty blue-green. Thanks to my valuable but little-used scientific background, I recognized that the red color was probably pH dependent. My artist side thought: hey, what a cool color! My scientist came back out and dumped a bunch of baking soda into my scarlet dye pot. I made a glorious volcano (art can be fun!) that barely stayed in the pot, and when it settled down I added more to neutralize all the acid. I read that sumac is rich in vitamin C, which is an organic acid, and that’s what I think I was neutralizing with the baking soda. The native Indians used to make a lemonade-like sumac drink in the winter to get the vitamin C. The red dye itself has to be a pH indicator, so raising the pH brought me to a different color in the dye pot. In went more fleece, and this time I got a pretty sea foam color. And happily, once both are affixed to wool they are colourfast. Love science; love art!

I also started a new piece this week based on one of the sketches I did in Michigan. It’s a very happy piece centered around a whimsical bird in a tree that I felt I needed to start. I needle felted the bird and wove the background, two enterprises I really enjoy. I pulled out some wire I got from the Restore here in Bloomington that supports Habitat for Humanity. I bent the wire into shapes and wrapped each with yarn to meet my color requirements. As I was doing it I realized how much the branches looked like the tree I created for the Lotus festival. Then I realized the shapes of the branches really came from the ornaments I used to make. After I thought about that, I was reminded that they really came from the swirly patterns I used to put on ceramics I painted at the Latest Glaze. My boys and I used to go there to feed our artistic side when they were younger, and I made serving bowls for the family that we still use. It’s fascinating to me to trace progressions in my work to see how artistic ideas came together, tracking back through my mental forest to find the breadcrumbs I left along the way. Luckily there are no crumb-eating-critters allowed in my brain or it wouldn’t be so much fun.

While the oppressive heat of summer is in full force, the season is winding down with school starting next week. Tommie’s current passion is practicing CPR on the butterflies that cross his path (catch, photograph and release). He has a powerpoint presentation with all the butterflies identified and short audio clips identifying them for a slideshow. His cast comes off Tuesday, which I think he’s ready for. It’s the countdown to the Fourth Street Art Festival over the Labor Day weekend, and preparations are in full swing. I made a last attempt to capture a little of summer with my husband Jim, who wanted to make a bruschetta sauce. He and Tommie went to the farmer’s market on Saturday and picked up a big batch of heirloom and grape tomatoes to complement the stack of romas we got from the CSA. A head of garlic came home too, as did a bunch of basil. Oregano came from the backyard garden and some ‘soft’ white wine came from Oliver Winery to make the whole thing a local affair. We had some on baguette slices (from the Bakehouse, of course!) last night with cream havarti or pepper jack cheese, complemented by corn on the cob and local new potatoes. Yum! Everything was great, including the ripe red August watermelon we had for dessert. I guess summer is OK after all. Enjoy the bounty local bounty while it lasts!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The empirical artist

This was an exciting week of experimentation. I stepped out of my comfort zone of weaving and representational art to focus on some new abstract pieces. I generally don’t do abstract pieces, and not all my early abstract weavings came out as well as I’d hoped. It was too much to develop both the weaving style I wanted and the piece composition. Because I’ve done so much lately with ornaments and scarves over the past two years I’ve had a chance to develop both needle and wet felting techniques, and I’ve had a chance to play with some basic designs and patterns. I’ve been eager to take those ideas and really focus on composition of pieces. My plan was to use the soft-frame technique I developed for the ‘Shhhh, the Trees are Sleeping’ series on a wet felted canvas. That would be my blank slate to start developing some pieces. I started out by looking at lot of images on the web to decide on the kinds of things I liked and what I might be able to create. I settled on a color palate that was warm and earthy, which dovetailed nicely with my latest attempts at dyeing with natural materials. In the newest pieces I’ve been playing with repeating colors in different parts of the piece. It’s one of my strategies to tie the zones and design elements of the pieces together. I found that I can get really nice harmonies by layering a second dyed fleece on top of the repeated color so the repeats aren’t exact. I also like creating gradients with a color to extend and blend zones. I think that strategy really helps unify the pieces, and I’m quite proud of my first attempts!

One of the things that makes my latest project especially rewarding is that I get to play with some new dyeing techniques. One of my big successes from last year was the soft yellow I got from dandelion heads I collected with my boys at Bryan Park. Somehow collecting things with my family is a big part of the success of the process. When we were in Michigan last weekend, Tommie and I collected a huge bag full of bright red sumac heads, so this week I got out the dye pots and got to work. I was about to launch into my standard approach to getting colors of out of natural materials, best summarized by my late father-in-law as: “cook ‘em like kidneys”. That translates into boiling them hard for an hour. However, I recently read a great book about dyeing with natural materials (Eco colour - Botanical dyes for beautiful textiles by India Flint) that says that the type of pot (aluminum vs. enamel) and the time of heating could make a big difference in the intensity and exact color. That’s about when I thought: heeyyyy, I love to do experiments! So I clipped the berries from the stems and divided them into small, equal samples, in equal volumes. I boiled some for 15 minutes and others for an hour, and I did it in either aluminum or enamel dye pots. It turns out that with red sumac it just doesn’t matter—you get the same color every time. What I did learn, though, was that including the stems has a big effect on the overall color. Boiling stems and berries leads to a much browner color, but boiling the stems and leaf parts together gave me a wonderful soft yellow green. The berries themselves didn’t give the intense red color I had originally hoped, but they did give a seductive earthy red. I just know both colors are going to find their way into my next piece! I guess the lesson of the story this week is that you can take the scientist out of the lab, but you can take the scientist out of the artist.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Mother's Weekend

My arts and personal experiences were unusually diverse this week. I did a workshop at Stone Belt this week, which was a very enjoyable experience. The clients were willing to try new things, and we had a lot of fun together. We tried wet felting ornaments on wool ball templates that I created, and we felted some small ones from scratch. I also assembled my pepper piece—that brought a big sense of relief and accomplishment. Late in the week we pulled our boys out of school to drive to Michigan to see Grandma for Mother’s day. They were just glowing. They got to walk out of school right after lunch, waving goodbye to their buds who had to stay in school. We had a delightful drive north, although the weather didn’t cooperate. It was rainy, windy and cold the whole weekend, but we didn’t notice. It did squash our planned fishing trip. I was ready to bring home the walleyes for dinner but it didn’t work out. That left me with a lot of free time, which let me get a lot of needle felting done on my latest projects. I have just started a new body of work on a smaller scale, and these pieces are intended to be compositions with earthy tones. Instead of weaving the backgrounds, I started wet-felting canvases using techniques I developed as I wet felted scarves. I’m creating the frames out of thick wool cheneille yarns and needle felting the surface. My goal is to explore some compositional ideas that are rattling around inside my head using needle felting to create the images. I have retired from making ornaments, which was something I needed to do, but I learned a lot about pattern and color in that process that I’m hoping I can transfer to my latest endeavor and do some in depth exploring of composition….more on that as the pieces appear!

Now I’m back from Michigan, trying to get everything unpacked and the boys off to bed, even as I get the blog up. Basically, Jim is in charge of dragging them away from the Cartoon Network and getting them reading in bed. We did have a great trip, with two big highlights. First was the Mother’s day rhubarb pie, a family tradition for decades. I must say, I had no problem marrying into this tradition! Did I say I like pie? It is my honest opinion that this was the best rhubarb pie he’s ever made. It’s been a long evolution, getting the crust just right and the filling consistency a smooth, tart treat. Being a scientist at heart, we’re just going to have to repeat the experiment to see if he can do it. On the way back he took me to a secret sumac stand, since I’ve been looking for sumac heads to do some dyeing. These will go into my newest “compositional” pieces if I can get it right. I’ve heard that the fresh red heads are best for dyeing, but I couldn’t wait and harvested a big bag of last year’s seed heads. Tommie and I picked the heads and took pictures while Jim and Jacob sat in the car and learned how all the buttons, levers and pedals worked. He’s going to be ready to drive early! I’ll just hand off the keys and close my eyes. On the drive back I did some more poking, finishing off the flower heads for my dandelion piece. My goal for this week is to finish that piece. I’m feeling a little pressure with the Columbus (Ohio) Art Festival coming up in a few weeks. It’ll all work out though… it always does!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin