Eye of newt, wing of butterfly, and petal of flower…

I cooked up a real witches brew of artistic fun this week. First, I stopped in at Wonderlab to see the finished butterfly piece and I think it looks great. Paula Grez, the volunteer who helped so much and took pictures of the project as it came together sent me an image that I’ll share. I’m still waiting for the glue to completely dry, which I expect will take a month or so, and then we’ll give the piece a waterproof seal. The plan is to hang it on the outbuilding so it will be visible from the B-line trail. We’re going to do an experiment to see whether it will attract a giant pixilated bird!

I also finished my ‘Transplant’ piece last week, even though it isn’t really done (hmmm…). I came up with a strategy to make a pretty red cactus dahlia flower for the plant itself. I started by cutting lengths of my precious copper wire from a roll and wrapping them with red yarn until I had a charming little pile. I made a small red felt ball for the center and started attaching the petals to make the corolla. I’ll admit that in the back of my mind I had doubts that it would work, but with great confidence I leaped ahead and glued all the petals on before I turned it over to look. Wow, it worked—what a relief! It matched what I was envisioning, and that pleased me. Brimming with confidence I forged ahead to make the little rootlets for the overgrown root ball of the transplantee. Had a little too much 20-20-20 fertilizer and auxin (a root stimulating hormone) at the greenhouse, didn’tcha little one? Welcome to my garden of Indiana clay and overhanging trees! Anyway, I assembled the whole thing together on the weaving. I still want to add a few things to the soil for a more realistic look, so I picked out some broken terra cotta, a rusty beer cap, nails and a small geode from my extensive collection of soil artifacts. I couldn’t quite convince myself to add them permanently to the piece—I need to be in the right mood to make that happen. So now I’m on pause with the piece as it hangs in my art studio in a place where I can’t help looking at it as I work. After I decide which pieces really work and which start to bug me after a while I’ll whip out my hot glue gun to make it permanent, but I have to be in the right mood.

Lots of new stuff, or should I say newt stuff, is also beginning my studio. I began my salamanders, skinks and newts piece. That means I truck around a bag with needles and fleece in nice skin tones—that is if you’re an amphibian or a reptile with bright colors that scream a warning to predators. I sit and poke during my boys’ Tae Kwon Do class as I watch and chat, or anyplace else that I have a little time on my hands. Soon I will have summoned the creatures from my fleece pile, just like my kids do with their Yu-Gi-Oh decks when they have a little time on their hands. A lot of that has been happening with the snow days last week, and while they waited during the dress rehearsal for the Trashionista show. That was last night, but I’m going to wait to describe my experience until the whole thing settles in. Basically it was a big crowd, a whole lot of fun and a rewarding experience. I also hung a few pieces in the Indiana Fiber Producers show at the Monroe Bank in Bloomington, with a couple of my big pieces on display right behind the tellers. You can also catch the end of my shows at the two Bloomingfoods locations until the end of the month, or catch the last glimpse of my scarves at the Bloomington Bagel Company. If you buy a warm scarf now I will guarantee up to six more weeks of winter to enjoy it. As for me, I’ll be cozied up in my art studio with my new silent space heater, keeping warm until the snow melts and the flowers start popping up in the yard. I can’t wait!

Until next week...



Martina Celerin

Tomatoes, Flowers, and Butterflies...

They all played a big role in my week. This week I finished my ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ piece. I ultimately made 72 felted tomatoes for the piece, finishing with a couple of branching stems of little cherry tomatoes. They ripen from the plant outward, so there’s always a couple of green ones at the end to keep you from harvesting the whole branch too soon. Maybe the new owners will put the piece on a sunny windowsill to let it ripen. As I finished with the painstaking work of creating the five little petioles for each tomato, I thought about how looking closely allows one to appreciate the intricacies of nature. But with that said, I’m sooo looking forward to munching on the little cherry tomatoes that pop up as volunteers all over our garden each summer. My husband has unwittingly carried out my evil plan to get them spread all through the flower beds as he mulches. He can’t begin to weed them all out, as Grandma insists we should, so I always get plenty of little red delights each summer. I love sending out Tommie with a bowl to harvest a few when we have company—nothing beats a just-picked bowl on the table.

Finishing a piece means a new challenge, and this week the weather began sunny and bright. I was just feeling good about feeling firmly planted in this town, thinking what a great community of people I live in. That meant it was time to start my ‘Transplanted’ piece, with a root-bound flower establishing in a new garden bed. I dug into my chocolaty brown yarn box, and the yarns really did look like milk and dark chocolate on my studio floor. I created the base of the weaving using a sumac weave with 10 different yarns blended together. Just when it felt like there’s no more room to expand the sumac weave, I dug the hole by making an indentation and added a tabby weave with fewer yarns mixed together. I ended up with a wonderful cavity to plant my root ball in, and the dirt didn’t keep slipping back in to fill the hole as I did it!

For the root-bound flower I chose a red cactus dahlia. This is a special flower in our garden, since my husband seems to slip them in all around—it’s kind of a defining flower for us. To create all the colors and textures I needed I envisioned a huge project of blending and carding green fleeces ahead of me, which I wasn’t looking forward to at all. I needed a deep, rich red for the flowers and a good match for the dahlia green leaves. That normally means getting out my antique hand carders from Quebec, with handles made like the old mission style furniture that are beautiful but a pain to work with. I don’t think ‘ergonomic’ is a French word, or maybe it didn’t fit on the boat when they came over to settle Quebec. Your hands get pretty achy after you’ve done a lot of carding. To solve my problem I borrowed the drum carder from the local Spinners and Weavers Guild, which looks very medieval and even a little scary. Then it became a matter of finding the six or eight green fleeces to make the perfect dahlia leaf color and turning the handle! I did run the fleece through twice, but out came exactly the color I wanted to create the felted compound leaves of the dahlia. I think I need one of those—hmmm—when’s Mother’s day?

Finally, yesterday marked the culmination of a community art project at Wonderlab. I did the first installment for ‘The Art and Science of Color’, and we made a pixilated Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. The pixels comprised 3500 wine corks that I’ve been collecting from all over town (Yes, it’s a very happy town!). They were painted yellow, blue or black by Wonderlab volunteers, which was a Herculean project—thanks everybody! I had sketched and painted the butterfly on a four feet square panel that Andrea Oeding had built and prepped (great job, Andrea!). From 1:30 to 4:30 Saturday the kids of Wonderlab and I, along with a lot of help from still more volunteers, glued the corks onto the painting. Paula, one of the Wonderlab volunteers and biology grad student, took some great photos. Wow, what a project! We came out a little short on the black and blue corks, but the butterfly emerged nonetheless. The border of the project was intended to be a dark green, but we intentionally didn’t paint any green corks. The plan was to mix visually blue and yellow corks to get a green effect, but the soft tints we used ended up looking more like a bed of flowers. So now the glues are drying, after which we’ll seal it before it goes on display on the workshop building in the Wonder Garden next to Wonderlab. It should be visible from the B-line trail, which of course will now have to be called the butterfly line trail.

To close, I just want to say that it has been an honor to work with Andrea and all the people at Wonderlab. Even though the weather didn’t cooperate, with the big snowstorm that closed schools on Friday and put us off until Saturday, everybody stayed positive and enthusiastic. And the best news after last week: we’re a little closer to summer!

Until next week…