Holey Scary Scarves!

Halloween week started on a high note for me. I drove my mother-in-law to the airport on Monday morning after a wonderful visit. She headed back home to the pouting cats and falling leaves, both demanding her attention. There was still fresh apple pie for a few days, but now that’s just a fond memory. I threw myself into scarf-making one more time, bringing my inventory up to forty-two. That’s the good news. The less-good news is that I had to spend a little quality time with the iron to get them pressed into shape. I shipped the first of my babies off to the Holly Market in St. Joseph Michigan midweek. Then I had two patrons stop by, one intending to look at scarves and one just innocently coming by to pick up her son. Five scarves went out the door, so I was back designing and felting a few more this weekend. The sales would have called for a celebration dance all by itself, but I also sold two pieces from the Bloomington Playwright Project show. My ‘Transplant’ and ‘Among the Ferns’ are off to new homes! What a great week for business! There’s still time to see what’s left of the show until Thursday of this week. I’m also going to hang a show at the John Waldron Art Center tomorrow, which you’re welcome to come see. Even better, stop in at the reception this Friday, November 5, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The show is titled: “Fiberology: a Study of Textures and Colors”, and I’d love to see you there. If you can’t make it Friday, I’ll be in Columbus Indiana on Saturday the sixth at the Déjà Vu show at the Yes Cinema on the corner of Fourth and Jackson.

In other art news, this week marked the beginning of the end of an era. The weather turned warm enough to allow urethane varnish to cure, so I finally got to seal the four giant BEAD panels. These are the pieces assembled by the fairgoers at last year’s Fourth Street Festival and have been sitting in my living room all winter, spring and summer. I’ll gave them one more coat of varnish yesterday and will send them off to their new home in City Hall. At least I hope so—I expect I might have to remind them that they agreed to hang the BEAD panels there. You might not be able to fight City Hall, but I think you can persuade them to display art.

I’ve got to run—it’s Halloween day, and there’s lots to sort out. I’ve got the candy hidden (I hope) for tonight and the kids have a friend over. The pumpkins are carved and the costumes are ready, but I need to press more a few more scarves and I hope to lay out a couple more. Can’t. Stop. Working! The boys have been off from school for four straight days thanks to fall break, which means the house is a disaster and I’m feeling the pressure to get everything re-set for a new week of school, meetings and adventures. I also hear it’s traditional to make pumpkin pie—I’ll have to be sure Jim knows!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Scarfing 2.0, but this time without the pie...

I’ve been on a tear this past week, turning out the scarves for my upcoming gallery and exhibit commitments. I think I’ll be able to get everything done as long as no one gets sick. I’m also not allowed to say ‘yes’ to any other requests for two whole weeks!

As I was working, I realized that I’ve been influenced by the changing fall colors as I made scarves. I’ve been exploring oranges, plums and reds, but I did throw in a few blue scarves for good measure. The fun part has been experimenting with the designs that have been coming together in my mind. The great part about making scarves is that they come together fairly quickly compared to a weaving. Even if turn I out the scarf-world equivalent of a klunker, before I can fret about it I’m off to work on the improved version. Of my more experimental pieces, I’m especially pleased with the ones where I’ve slit the roving into what might be called pencil roving and did some swirling patterns. I sandwiched the pencil roving with a shimmery yarn in between gossamer-thin layers of black merino. The pieces are reminiscent of Jackson Pollack paintings, but he didn’t have the foresight to make scarves. Actually, it’s all about playing with colors and textures and it’s a lot of fun.

My other project this week involved starting a commission piece. I was asked to do a new carrot tapestry, similar to the baby carrots I made a couple of years ago. I pulled out all my delightful oranges, which was easy because I’ve been in an orange frame of mind. Then I pulled an organic carrot out of the refrigerator. I mentally mixed the fleece colors I had to get a good carrot match so I’d know which ones to use. I then pulled out the drum carder owned by the Spinners and Weaver’s Guild, did a little carding and voila! I have a delightful wad of baby carrot orange fleece! That’s not a sentence you’ll read every day.

The big finale of the week was seeing Rent. I saw it years ago, and I enjoyed it so much I was thrilled when I saw that the IU Theater Department was including it in this year’s season. The evening started off by shipping the boys next door for a sleepover. Jim and I headed to the Limestone Grille for a delightful dinner of Indian spice-rubbed corvina (a lot like grouper, we were told) on a bed of steamed greens and accompanied by a cheese risotto. Add to that a pleasant glass of pinot noir and we were on our way to a lovely evening. We had just enough time to stop in at Blu Boy on Kirkwood for a decadent brownie, divided in half, and some decaffeinated Brown County coffee. Yum! We made it to the show in plenty of time and sort of melted into the production. It was an incredible performance, and the caliber of the performers was just amazing. It’s easy to forget these are mostly students. Angel was amazingly talented and funny, and the warm bond between Angel and Tom Collins was so loving and perfect. The manipulative Maureen put on a great performance too. She had the crowd mooing right out of her hand. I should have brought her a carrot!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Scarfing down some fresh apple pie...

I found myself in an all-to-familiar predicament this week. Back in the early summer it seemed like a great idea to commit myself to supplying scarves for both local venues and regional shows. You want twelve scarves for the Holly Market fall festival show? I’d love to! How about a nice scarf-as-art display at the Bloomington Bagel location on Morton? Sure thing! And you want them when? Plus a few more scarves for the holiday season art shows I applied to? Yikes! I’ve got a report on the Fourth Street patron survey to assemble and a grant to write to support our requests for advertising money, both due this week! I planned to devote October to scarf making, and I have. It’s just that a lot of other bits of my life have intruded into the process. On the bright side, over the summer and early fall I stocked up on a ton of scarf making supplies. I stopped in at Sheep Street in Morgantown and Yarns Unlimited here in Bloomington and picked up a lovely collection of fleeces across the color range I intended to explore this season. I also pulled together a beautiful set of non-wool yarns to incorporate into the scarves. I’ve been mentally working through some new designs and ideas I’m excited to try. When October came I was ready to hit the ground felting. That means taking over the dining room table, raising it up about six inches to spare my back as I lay out the scarf design and felt the fleece into submission. One of my ideas was to lay out a bunch of single ply merino wool yarn and try to bring it together with a minimal amount of fleece. It worked! Or at least it held together—the color combination isn’t ideal, but it’s a proof-of-concept piece. It kind of reminds me of a cocoon. It’ll probably end up in the collection of some local avant garde diva. Another idea I had was to incorporate many small holes into the body of the scarf. I realized that I could laminate material to create holes in one layer of the scarf on top of a solid layer. When the scarf dried I thought the concept was pretty interesting. My next attempt will be to laminate two layers, both with holes, into different levels of the scarf. Last year I also created a big ruffled edge look on some scarves that were well received, so I’m working on creating some new pieces on that theme. In all these new designs I’m trying to broaden my color palette. I want to incorporate some more oranges and earthy tones into my scarves. That takes me out of my comfort zone of jewel tones and reds, but I think a lot of people are drawn to scarves with an earthier feel. No matter what, I’m having fun creating new things. Now I just need to step up production!

Too much scarf work, with lots of rolling back and forth in the wet felting process, was pretty hard on my back and neck last week. I went through a bit of acetaminophen to try to get my body back on track. On top of my new morning Zumba workouts I’m getting all the exercise I ever wanted. You’d think that would earn me some kind of reward, and it did! It turned into a pie week. We got a batch of giant Mutsu apples at the farmer’s market last Saturday. There’s a lot less peeling if you buy big apples, I’ve learned. I helped peel the apples and Jim mixed them with a few secret spices and sugar and popped them into a delightful crust. On Wednesday evening, a wonderful fall apple pie emerged from the oven! My breakfasts this week have often been a slice of pie, a cup of coffee and a little whipping cream, all in a quiet spot with the morning paper. Who could ask for anything more?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Keeping warm…

What a cold snap we had this week! If you have kids, you know that winter signals a whole new level of complexity in life. You’ve got to break out the warm boots and get them to take their shoes in their backpack for gym class. Or, as we did on Thursday, you have to drop the shoes off at the office to the ever-friendly Binford secretary. Pairs of gloves become singles with maddening frequency, and the cycle of drying them is constant. But the most maddening thing for us is…drum roll please…we have another raccoon in the attic! We thought we had pounded down every entry point, but this guest broke through a different soffit. We know it’s a chunker, because we can hear how hard he has to work to squeeze in. And with the cold weather, this fellow has been up all night, every cold night, rearranging the insulation. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Arrrrgggghhhh! Must. get. more. sleep!

On the brighter side of things, my mannequin arrived this week. I want this for shows, but I also need to document my scarves with high quality pictures before they’re all sold. Just as I was opening the box, my photographer Tom Bertolacini called. I had just finished making two more commissioned scarves and the buyer was coming that afternoon to pick them up, so I asked if Tom was coming into town. He was, so I raced out to my local venues and picked up a selection of scarves to photograph. I stopped in at the Bloomington Bagel Company first, then off to the Wandering Turtle, where I also borrowed my latest turtle piece (Among the Ferns). Tom came with his fancy lights, stands and his camera (mine stayed in its case and whimpered). He makes everything ‘just so’, AND he brought me two dozen eggs. The chickens, either oblivious to the cold snap or lacking anything better to do, have been laying eggs like crazy. Maybe the raccoons just stopped bothering them. Tom also is also a wood worker and builds all the frames for my weavings. His latest venture is making wooden weaving equipment—shuttles, batons and maybe even looms. It will be nice to have them made locally, although I don’t mind shipping a little cash to Canada, the vast and beautiful country of my youth. They know about cold snaps.

The real highlight of the week, though, was our trip to Cirque Dreams: Illuminations at the IU auditorium. The day was hectic enough as it was, since it was my loving spouse’s birthday. That meant baking birthday pizza and making a chocolate cake. Men named ‘Jim’ are so easy to please (yes, he had a beer, too). I must say that the rich butter cream frosting that flowed in thick glaciers down the sides was the best part. I even got cake and espresso for breakfast this morning—wow, can my life get any better! Back to the Cirque—you can’t really call it theatre, ballet, or comedy, but it was all of those together. It’s the creative combination of constant movement and color on the stage that really brings a whole new perspective on the acrobatic techniques. In my own work I try to combine techniques to come up with something new, and at art fairs I get a lot of comments like: ‘what do you call those things you make’? It’s weaving, but a whole lot more. Anyway, we saw things like an amazing trapeze piece where the artist was repeatedly lowered into a large wooden tube of water. As he was lifted out into his gyrations, water flew everywhere. It was like a dance in the air where the light reflected off the arcs of water flying and curling through the air. In the background, people in colorful costumes walked by with umbrellas. The overall effect was just magic. At the end, the trapeze artist was handed an umbrella with the panels removed, which somehow seemed to fit. The show was a dramatic climax to a great, if very cold, week.

Until next week…

The end of one season...

As soon as I finished writing the blog last week I started zipping around town, with art, to see all my local gallery-world friends. I stopped in at the Wandering Turtle to see Jamie and left some scarves with her. They are featured in her cool web feature called, fittingly, ‘New Stuff’. I’m so honored! My friend Amy Brier has some really interesting new work there too. I think of her as an excellent ‘big piece’ limestone carver and artist, but she has some new relief bowls at the Turtle. She also has elaborate carved limestone balls that leave impressions in sand when you roll them. Or in soft chocolate, as my husband suggests. I next popped in at the John Waldron with more scarves and cards for the season, but it’s always fun to chitty-chatty with the folks there and see the latest art. Marcy Neiditz, a local potter, has some really interesting bowls on display. She used to work primarily in black and white, but now she’s introducing some color and they look great. It’s not like Dorothy entering Oz, but it really captures your eye. My next stop was the By Hand Gallery, which is now the last bastion of ‘Shhh… the trees are sleeping’ pieces in Indiana. I’ve stopped making these and they’re slowly finding homes. My last stop was at Bloomingfoods with my holiday cards. I got to see my friend Tom, one of many Toms in my life. He used to be the manager at Pygmalions until he moved to Elletsville. He’s a wonderful artist and a really good person and it made my day. Tom is the one who persuaded me to order a lifetime supply of alligator clips (and I’m glad I did). He was a supporter and advice-giver as I got started in the art world a few years back.

And then on to the Holiday Art Fair at the Unitarian Universalist Church! Thursday night was set-up, which went smoothly, and Friday and Saturday were relaxing days at the show. I really like the ‘UU’ show for a lot of reasons. It’s slower paced than most with smaller crowds, which makes it more comfortable for the artists. The UU organizers go out of their way to make it comfortable for the artists. It’s hard to keep artists nailed in their booths, and I got the chance to walk around and see what else was going on. I also really like my spot, since I get bathed in sunlight from the big windows, and the sun passes through my friend Jacques’ glass art from across the aisle. Cappi and Bud Phillips were kind enough to loan me their mannequin to display my scarves, which really made a big difference for displaying the 3D shape of my newest scarves. But the best part was getting to have Bonnie Gordon-Lucas in the booth next door. She’s a sweet person with a mischievous streak—one minute she’s patiently explaining how to set up my booth, and the next minute she’s armed with an elastic that she’s about to shoot at someone across the building! I think all artists have a crazy streak in there somewhere. Bonnie did give me some excellent ideas about mixing colors, though, which I really appreciated. She pointed out something that I’d heard before but didn’t fully appreciate, which is never to use jet black in an art piece, since it ends up looking flat. Her trick is to use an undercoat of blue and paint the black thinly on top to give depth. She also recommends layering red under gold and blue under silver. I’m definitely going to try some experiments with those ideas in my next round of scarves by layering wool colors.

I guess I should write about the show too. The big thing for me was a red and black scarf with undulating edges. I sold it before the show even started to a local artist whose identity I’ll protect, but she’s a really classy person so I knew I’d done well. She let me leave it on display and I ended up with commissions to make several more like it! I had visualized a red center with a color gradient out to black edges, connected by a squiggly runged pattern arranged randomly. After a couple of rolls in the felting process I pulled on the outside edges, and that created a wonderful ruffled edge texture. I just love the dimensionality of the piece—imagine that! When the dust cleared I’d had another great show and got home in time for a cool but not cold Pilsner Urquel with my sandwich and salty chips for dinner. It couldn’t match the tasty Imam Bayildi my husband brought me for dinner from Anatolia’s on Friday night, but was good. Tonight we celebrate another successful art fair just the way families all over America celebrate, with vegetarian hot dogs roasted over the fire in the living room fireplace, followed by freshly baked blueberry pie. Only a little bit bubbled out of the pie during the baking process and burned in the oven, but the pie itself looks beautiful. And, did I say, my loving husband baked it just for me?

Until next week…

The November Whirlwind

The last two weeks have been an amazing blur of shows, scarves and weaving. I had dropped into one of those wonderful life patterns where I was discovering and developing my own wet felting style by making scarves. It’s really an exploration of a new technique for me that I’ll use in future weaving projects. ‘Creating my own canvas’ has always been a major feature of my work, and I feel like I’m enhancing my repertoire of skills that will make their way into my dimensional weavings. Bluebell (the family car) was packed with 19 new scarves, twelve new wreaths for the season, and all the new ornaments I made over the year. I made the early morning trek over to Columbus Indiana last Saturday to show everything at the Déjà vu recycled art fair. It’s always a little stressful when you put your heart and soul into some technique, then put it on display for everyone to see. Fortunately, I came home with a lighter load and a warm feeling inside. I can do this!

Success, of course, breeds new problems. I didn’t have enough scarves to show at the Spinner’s and Weaver’s guild show this weekend. So I re-converted the dining room table to Scarf Central and geared up to make some more. I had one scarf that was a whole bunch of ribbons and strings and just enough just enough felted wool to hold it all together. It reminded me of my youthful days in a bikini, but that’s another story. It was a glorious week because I got to sift through my thirty or so 20-gallon plastic tubs of yarns and pull out the most delightful colors and textures to incorporate into the scarves. I also had to scamper over to Sheep Street in Morgantown to pick up several more pounds of merino. Of course I couldn’t resist picking up a bunch of new yarns to use, including some delicious jewel tones that I knew I wanted to work with. I especially worked on layering different colors of roving to achieve the depth and color gradients I wanted. The only downside is that my shoulder and arm muscles haven’t quite forgiven me for all the rolling I did to felt the materials.

I did launch into another project on a whim recently. I had collected a bunch of wool sweaters, including some in delightful greens that I knew weren’t going to fit into the color schemes I was using in the scarves. I decided to cut them up to make Christmassy fir trees. Of course it isn’t a tree until it is trimmed, so I used the tiny red felted balls that I had created using the new secret technique I learned. I trimmed them with gold rickrack and set the whole thing on beige fabrics with different textures. I glued them on to a pretty mottled beige card stock and inserted into each a piece of white cotton rag with the texture of vellum. I think they’re fun and perfect for the holidays—check them out at the Wandering Turtle gallery in Bloomington, or stop in and see them at the Unitarian Universalist show this December.

Finally, I put away my scarf-making materials and reclaimed my basement art studio. I picked up all the yellow yarns I had out for making my Autumn Aspens commission piece. I also had to clear away the remnants of my boys’ giant art project. I can’t really describe it except to say that it involves small pieces of electronics, popsicle sticks, fabric scraps and a glue gun. I’m so proud of my creative boys! Anyway, I herded their project into a corner and blocked it off visually with a tower of easels and tools. Out came the vacuum cleaner and once again I had a functional workspace. It’s really great to be back in my weaving space, and this week I’ll finish the autumn aspens piece. After I get some sleep. I’m still recovering from two shows in two weeks. Tonight I sleep; tomorrow I weave!

Until next week…