Hard work pays off!

This week was full of weaving like a madwoman, which resulted in a couple of completed pieces.  I have been juggling five ‘in progress’ pieces.  I didn’t have any evening meetings this week, which gave me lots of weaving and needle felting time.  Plus, both boys were healthy, so I really got to focus on my projects in the art studio, pushing projects forward.  I completed the last of my commission pieces, which was a revisitation of ‘Winter Birches’.  That piece is complete and on its way to Chicago.  I turned my attention to my ‘Spring Treasures’ piece.  It features a crocus bulb and a clump of emerging flowers, which are now planted in their new home.  Buoyed by my successes, I put the finishing touches on the feature piece for my upcoming garden walk show. 

As I was working on the piece, I was reminded of some advice I got from Mary Hambly, a local paper quilter I met when I was starting into my art career.  She wanted me to think carefully about the relevance of materials that went into the art, choosing fabrics for their relevance to each piece.  The ‘Garden Walk’ piece features a flagstone path made from fragments of Grandpa’s army blanket.  I needle felted raw washed wool over the blanket to create the stones.  This was my first synthetic stone piece, because I usually enlist my family to find stones for my weavings.  Grandpa’s blanket opened up a whole new path for me, and like so many other materials in my creations, will always have fond memories for me when I think of them in my art.  I also really enjoyed making all the flowers along the path.  I was channeling some of our still-sleeping garden beds, especially the color combinations.  We have some beautiful tradescantia, with their vibrant purples over blue-green foliate.  I was imagining deep red roses, which we don’t have because the Japanese beetles eat them, over intense, dark, rich green foliage.  Nobody eats that, so I have plenty to channel.  The tree in the piece was actually a leftover from a previous commission.  It turned out that I had one too many trunks and it seemed to fit perfectly here.  The whole composition was a very organic process that just came together beautifully at the end. 

I still have some other works that will come along shortly, but the upcoming week is Re-shirt week.  The Bloom artist showcase is coming up on the twenty-fourth of February.  I want to have plenty of shirts for that show, and I promised some new ones to people who said they’d visit the show.  The Garden Walk show, which will hang at the Monroe County History Center, will go up on April first.  That’s my big wall art push, to have all the garden-themed pieces ready.  I also want to give a shout out to my gallery out in Laramie Wyoming.  It’s called JenyOriginals, and they have a new website and will be carrying my Sweater Petals.

The rest of the week’s news is all family-oriented.  The boys earned their red-with-a

-white-stripe belt in Tae Kwon Do on Friday.  I like to think of it as the Canadian belt.  After illnesses the previous week, they puffed a little but got through it just fine.  Oh, and I must be doing something right—a peach pie appeared on Monday and I had slices for breakfast all the way through Friday.  Yippee! 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

When I give life some lemons!

I finished my lemon piece!  I’m very excited about it, and I’m ready to contact the person who commissioned me to make it.  I hope that soon it will be traveling to its new home in Massachusetts.  I’ll post a picture of the finished piece after the new owner has had a chance to see it, which will probably be next week.  There’s just no time to rest, so I launched into my next commission.  The person who bought the original ‘Winter Birches’ asked me to create a similar piece as a graduation present for her daughter.  With the cold snap bearing down on us, this somehow feels like the right piece to focus on right now.  I was delighted to have the original piece hanging on my wall again after many years.  It reminds me of how much I like that original piece, and how much my style has evolved.  

 My first color gradient background was based on over fifty different yarns to create the horizon effect I wanted.  It’s really a mixed gradient of browns, grays and greens to achieve the misty, serene, cold, late afternoon feel in winter.  This original “Winter Birches” is also much flatter than my current tree pieces.  It predates my dimensional crochet tactic for bringing a base away from the background to plant the trees in.  I’m excited that this is my last commission piece for a while because I need to launch into creating pieces for an upcoming show at the History Center.  The plan is to hang it on April first, and it will stay on the walls through the Garden Walk event in late June.  I’ve been thinking a lot about garden-themed compositions that would be appropriate for the show.  I’m envisioning a garden path with felted flagstones, and I have a sketch I’m happy with.   

This morning I came up with another that I’ll call ‘We Three Kings’, which will feature three fat onions (yellow, white and red) growing in the dirt.  I’m also currently working on a piece that features three crocuses I’m calling ‘The Three Sisters’.  I finished the soil background, which is full of treasures long lost in the garden soil.  I’ll add the crocuses shortly.  I cut the flattened crocus petals shapes from commercial felt and stitched wire around each of them.  I’ll needle felt wool onto the petals to create the lenticular shape.  

 I’ve already dug through my boxes of roving to find the colors I want to use.  One of the joys of searching my stores is that I always seem to find just the perfect color.  This time I found a dark purple roving I dyed years ago for a long-forgotten project.  It’s just perfect for one of my crocuses.  It’s fun to be creating something new!

Of course life is never all about art.  We got a rude shock when water started leaking through the roof last Sunday.  We called up the roofing fellow, who diagnosed the problem as failed flashing around the chimney.  This has been a problem before, and the chimney fellow supposedly sealed it up for us.  This is getting really old!  

 I really want to get the ceiling fixed, but I can’t do it until I’m sure we’ve got the water problem sorted out.  I’ve also spent the week trying to dry out the storage areas that got wet to avoid any unwanted molds growing in the bedroom areas.  Of course there’s always a silver lining when problems enter my life.  On Monday I came back from Zumba to find an apple pie on the cutting board and two loaves of bread in the oven!  The pie lasted until breakfast on Thursday.  Is it too early to wonder when the next one will appear?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin