My Cerulean Warbler Searches for Pie

I have been working full-on to complete my commission piece, punctuated with a few ventures to Sounds of South to keep my costuming project moving forward.  The weaving features an intricate garden scene.  The background is now completed.  It is a lush flower and vegetable garden full of vibrant colors and blooms.  Now I’m working on finishing two songbirds for the weaving intended to be focal points.  They are both warblers and beautiful songbirds, although that decision complicated the piece.  The first warbler I finished is a cerulean warbler.  Cerulean describes the beautiful blue color of the bird, which has a rich song to match.  When I studied the warbler I learned that only the male sings.  That’s perfect, I thought, so I named him Dan.  The problem arose when I realized that I needed to find a female warbler with a beautiful voice too.  My choice of a female Magnolia warbler, based on her colors and feather patterns, failed the biological accuracy test when it turned out she doesn’t sing.  Only a few of the female warblers actually sing so my choices were limited.  Curses!  Shouldn’t all warblers sing?  After an exhaustive image search I settled on a the stunning female yellow warbler.   

Her coloration will bring a warm glow to the piece.  In addition to the birds, I’m having a lot of fun with the composition because there are a lot of family heirlooms incorporated into the piece.  I hope it is both aesthetically appealing and meaningful to the commissioners.  I promise to post a picture of the finished piece after it appears in its new home. 

On the costuming front, the Pippin costumes are moving along beautifully.  Nancy Riggert and Alice Lindeman have been busy bees, especially for creating, assembling and painting the armor for the war scene.  Did I mention that there seventy kids in the production?  That means seventy chest plates, helmets and swords.  I am incredibly grateful to them for their hard work while I was off wearing my art fair hat.

  I designed the armor patterns, but Nancy and Alice and other parents traced and cut the chest plates out of reclaimed insulation foam and carpet under pad.  The complementary shields are cut out of craft foam - leftovers from last year's production of Beauty and the Beast.  The pieces are glued together and painted with silver paint.  They also enhanced the shadows of the three dimensional armor features with black sharpie and added rivets that we created from the filters of Keurig coffee units.  Thanks Dawn Adams for collecting and thanks Dale for drinking much of the coffee. 

For some variety, we’re also using the grey caps from pharmaceutical bottles donated by Cook Pharmica to the Materials for the Arts program at the Recycle Center.  Next week I’ll post a picture of the riveted variety, but for now just admire the shining armor! And the sword blades are done – seventy, cut from recycled corrugated plastic - thanks Bill!! If you want to see the final production in all its glory, Pippin will be presented on the final three Saturdays in October. 

On the home front, Jacob is finally got to have his ‘friends’ birthday party yesterday.  He invited fifteen of his closest teenager friends—OMG!  Jim and I hid downstairs in the art studio until the pizza came.  When it was finally quiet we come up to survey the damage—the house was still intact—and they were outside playing a marshmallow-throwing game – all good.  I think my reward for going through the process of cleaning the house and preparing for the party should be a pie – just sayin’

Until next week, or sometime soon,

Martina Celerin

French Onion Soup and Blackberry Pie

I had a big landmark in my art career this week: my boys went back to school! First there was the mad rush to get all the school supplies together. Then I thought I was going to have big blocks of time to get things done, but somehow a lot of time was consumed doing paperwork. Somewhere in the middle Tommie’s cast came off, his broken arm mended. This week I’m going to park my bottom in my cool art studio and get weaving! Yippee!

I guess I did get a lot of art done this week too. Mostly I worked on my whimsical bird piece. I had been struggling with how to translate my tree sketch into a wire and felt object. The big issue was creating tapered tree branches that were thin at the ends of the curly branches and thick at the base near the trunk. I started with a thin wire core that I bent and wrapped for the curly ends. As I moved from the curly ends to the stout base, I increased the thickness by incorporating some really nice felt wool fabric that I got from Kathey Gibson on a trip to Michigan. I cut it into triangles, pointy ends facing the thin tips, and kept wrapping the branches with these filler pieces to bulk them up. I then used thick strips of the felt to wrap the tree trunk and create the general tree shape I wanted. Finally, I just needle felted on top of the crude trunk to smooth it into the shape and color I wanted. I’m delighted with how it turned out! I’ve propped it together to see how it looks, and next week I’ll “nail” it all down on the woven background.

With all my successes on the stove last week, starting with fresh yummy bruschetta and ending with sumac dyeing, I decided to continue the trend. This week I had tomatoes, tomatillos and cilantro, so of course it was time to make salsa. I also decided it was time to bring out my collection of frozen onion skins. I collect the brown outer layers every time I break into an onion for cooking and store them in a bag in the freezer. This week I got frustrated with the disordered state of the freezer and decided to organize it a bit. I came across the onion skins and decided there were enough for the dye pot, so out they came to make a little space. I cooked them for an hour, steeped them over night, strained the skins the next day, then warmed it back up so it would be cozy for my fleece. Every project is an experiment for me, so I threw in three different kinds of fleece, all white, to see what would happen. I left the fleece in the pot overnight and was surprised and pleased when I saw the three very different caramel colors. I also saw that there was enough color in the pot to try again, so I threw in some more fleece. The materials that spent two nights in the pot were darker still—what a surprise! Next time I need to work with ‘time in the dye pot’ as a variable. This is obvious in hindsight but it never occurred to me until I saw the results of the experiment.

I have a lot on my plate these days, such as the Fourth Street Art Fair coming up on Labor Day weekend. I’m also doing a workshop for teachers in Danville, Indiana, in early October. Last time we made ornaments, but not everyone who wanted to come could make it so we scheduled a second session in October. I proposed that we could make felted hearts or turtles, and we’re likely going with the turtles. I’ve been making demonstration turtles parts so that I can show the pieces in stages—kind of like a cooking show where they have the beautiful torte already baked to pull out at the end. This turtle is more whimsical than my previous ones, when I was trying for accuracy. I like how my prototype came together, and I like his tilted head and the quizzical look that gives him. It’s kind of like the look I get from Jim when I ask him when he’s going to clean the bathroom.

And speaking of my sweet husband, this week’s pie was made from the last of the season blackberries. Mmmmmm…

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

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