Seeing Red: Tomatoes, Tea Towels and IU Basketball Season!

What a wonderful event!  This past weekend marked the first time that all three artisan guilds held their fall shows under one roof.  The Convention Center hosted the event, and I heard nothing but praise and enthusiasm for this new change of venue.  Musicians played in the lobby and the Convention Center set up a café with tables in one of the rooms.  It was just a delightful experience for the patrons.  I was fortunate to have a doorway booth for my art with my own exhibition space (the Roger’s Gallery) across the hallway.   

My ‘Looking atWater’ exhibition was still hanging there.  It was wonderful to have so many people go in and look at the pieces then come across the hallway to talk about the work.  I was also thrilled to have four of the sixteen pieces find new homes before the exhibition came home on Monday morning.  In addition to the weavings, many Re-Shirts, sweater petals with pins and my new headband sweater petals found new homes.   

The headbands are hard plastic that I wrap with black yarn and attach a sweater petal flower and some leaves.  I think they look very cute, and they turned out to be a big hit!  They will be available at Wonderlab if you’re interested in seeing them—check out the new Big-Headed Ants exhibition while you’re there!

To prepare for the Guild show I spent big blocks of time over the past two weeks making twenty-six new Re-shirts.  I found a new source of black double fold bias tape, made in the U.S.A., which was fortunate for me.  

 I went through 130 yards of the material!  I also spent little bits of time here and there over the year collecting bobbins for my sewing machine.  Before I started I wound all of my bobbins.  It is so nice not to have to stop and wind a bobbin before continuing to sew.  Of course I fill in my down time as I watch the boy’s activities with my needle felting.   

This time I finished up some tomato slices for a commission piece I’m trying to finish.  I finished the celery, which means that it is now green.  My finger has healed enough to wet felt a little, so the little while root tails for my radishes are complete too. 

Speaking of needle felting, I had a crazy idea this week.  Since I’m only doing one art fair (and it’s over!) I thought it might be fun to do a workshop to demonstrate how to make felted ornaments.   

I’ll be running at least one workshop through Gather, the new craft shop in Fountain Square Mall here in Bloomington.   

We’re advertising the first one for Saturday, December 6^th from 1-4 p.m.  If you’re interested, please sign up here.  The cost is sixty dollars and includes all materials and plenty of laughs.  I will come with half a dozen ornaments to give people some ideas, but they’ll likely hang on our Christmas tree. 

My personal life is proceeding nicely, with my almost-healed finger back in action.  I picked up some cozy wool socks and pretty red tea towels from Peg Dawson at the show.  In fact, being able to get started with a little Christmas shopping is nice part of the Guild show.  With the snow and cold weather this week past week I made good use of the socks!  

Tommie and I went to both IU men’s basketball exhibition games last week and had a great time cheering.  It’s the closest I’ve come to finding hockey games to attend in Indiana.  I missed Friday’s game due to the show, but now I plan to be in front of the TV rooting for the Hoosiers for the rest of the winter season.  I hope they do well!  And dare I say—there was no pie this week!  Must I wait for pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Re-Shirts re-invade the dining room

I’ve had a busy week, but my efforts have been more practical than artistic. I put on my Fourth Street hat and submitted grant proposals to the CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) and BEAD (the Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District). We’re trying to secure funding to expand advertising "beyond Bloomington" for the show. We get a lot of visitors from Cincinnati, for example, and they tend to spend more at local restaurants and hotels. So now I’ve completed all my administrative tasks except the demographic analysis for this year’s festival.

On the arts front, I’m launching into projects that will support the fall art shows I do. I have that luxury because I’m all sorted, organized and packed for my workshop in Cincinnati this coming weekend. I leave Thursday and leave Jim in charge of the kids for four days. It’s the longest I’ve ever been away from my family, and I’m sure I’ll be ready to come home on Sunday.

On the arts front, I got out my sewing machine and threw myself into making more of my Re-Shirts. I’m excited about showing these at art fairs and Discardia shows. The Discardia movement is picking up steam locally, and they intend to have pop-up events in town this fall so I intend to have some tops to contribute. I began by going through my closets twice, pulling out all the clothing I’m sure I’m finished with. I also went through all my boxes of saved clothes with worn areas or stains that make them unwearable. The piles of clothes and scraps that I cut up threatened to take over the dining room, but by the end of the week I was back in control and had everything sorted and put away. Now the dining room table has been expanded by two extra leaves and raised off the floor by four encyclopedia volumes. Raising my work surface helps my back when I get into wet felting scarves for the fall shows. In between major projects I’ve been plugging away at my needle felted ornaments, finishing one and bringing a second well along the way to completion. I even took advantage of the nice weather to wash some of the fleece I got in the spring of this year. I need to finish this project before the frosts come. There was a little funny whitish stuff on a car in the driveway this morning. I just can’t think what it could be.

Thinking of chilly weather, it was downright cold at the Farmer’s market this Saturday. We were forced to start off (again) with some delightful hot chocolate from Le Petit Café along the B-line trail as we walked in to the market. Spinach is coming back with the cooler weather, so I bought some fresh greens for a salad later today. We also found some Mutzu apples, which I think make the best pies, so I’m looking forward to another fall treat. I’m afraid it will have to wait until after Cincinnati, though—maybe as a welcome home present? The weather inspired me to bake a little, making some foccacia, pizza and a couple of loaves of bread for the week. Jim even put the heating pad back under the mattress in our bed! I’m set for the winter. Wait! I didn’t mean that! I’m really enjoying the beautiful fall weather.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Heading for Cincinnati

My focus this week was on preparing for a three-day workshop I’m giving in Cincinnati, Ohio. Plus I’m giving a talk the evening I arrive. I’m very excited about the whole prospect as I busily prepare to make it as intense and fulfilling as I’ve envisioned. I have an outline set for the three days that has helped guide me in the preparations. In the past I’ve made cardboard looms with bamboo skewers in the top, but because this is going to be so intense I decided to make a class set of wooden loom with nails to hold the warp for each participant. Tommie has been nailing looms to earn a little extra cash and I’ve done the rest. I’ll bring a set of cardboard looms just in case, though. I spent a little time making a full set of shuttles and batons out of yardsticks that I made into footsticks and cut into the appropriate shapes. You might think it was a lot of work, but I got to use a new belt sander from Grandpa’s garage so I had fun. Thanks Grandpa! You know I love power tools.

In between writing grants and reports this week I’ve also been making felted balls for the inside of ornaments. To do this I consumed my entire bag of wool scraps, including pieces of yarn, remnants of felted wool and cut-off pieces of knitted wool. I vowed that I was done with ornaments, but there is a person from Vincennes starting an art-gift shop over the holidays in the visitors center who asked me if I’d contribute some of my work. I’m always up for helping new arts adventures. I ended up agreeing to supply six ornaments and six scarves by the end of October. I’ve completed three ornaments so far… Basically I just keep plugging away as the boys do their Taekwondo or I just have some quiet time.

Speaking of the boys, they have had their own adventures this week. They started their clay class at the John Waldron arts center downtown. I just love the fact that they’re budding artists who use some of their free time to explore their own ideas and create their own pieces. Our house is just full of art, by the way. I’m also grateful to Ivy Tech and the city for bringing this all together and helping the Waldron prosper—it’s such an important community asset. In addition to Taekwondo, sparring and art projects, both at the Waldron and at home, they had a Yugioh tournament at our house on Sunday. It was a rainy weekend, which only deterred them a little from playing outside on Saturday. Badminton was the popular sport until it finally rained just a little too hard. Saturday morning we did get in a trip to the farmer’s market, which translated into the last raspberry pie of the season—yum! We got the last of the basil, some late corn and watermelons, and a big basket of peaches that are either eaten or frozen away as pie filling. They’ll make a delightful memory of summer on some bitter winter day. Or sooner if I can’t wait that long!

Our trip to the farmer’s market now has a new stop at Le Petit Café on the B-line trail for hot chocolate. It’s incredibly rich and dark, and it’s the perfect start-up for a cold morning at the market. All in all, it has been another wonderful and jam-packed week in Bloomington!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Attacked by flying pens and falling dirt.

The whirlwind of holiday activities lessened and the boys went back to school this week. That let me get right back into the art studio and weave like the wind! A big focus this week was my large format commissioned piece. I got out my weaving equivalent of the big shovels and heaped some of dirt and stones into the piece. Now you might imagine that weaving a five-foot wide by three-foot high piece while sitting on the ground would force me to hold up my arms up all day, and you’d be right. In a minor cosmic convergence, my Zumba instructors decided it was time to bring out some new moves that focused on arm strength. It feels like I just flew in from Chicago, and boy are my arms ever tired! I do see the results, though—I’m becoming the new Arnold Schwarzenegger of the Midwest. I just need a couple of rocket launchers and some determined liquid-metal androids to chase me around town. Instead I’ve got baling wire that I’m wrapping to create the carrot stems. I’m using a green wool yarn that I dyed the last time my dye pots were out, bringing back nice memories of summer activities. I still have to leaf them out, but everything seems to be coming together nicely.

In between weaving, wrapping and generally getting buffed up I worked in a few other projects and activities this week. I have a commission to make five round ornamental pieces. I’ve been literally poking away all week in my spare time to move them forward. I also took a little time for catching up this week, doing a little housework and traveling to Indianapolis for lunch with my friend Erin. We worked together in Mimi Zolan’s lab a few years back, and we were both pregnant with our first children together. We were reminiscing about maneuvering ourselves around in restaurants at a time when turning sideways didn’t help you get past obstacles. We had a good chuckle about that. I then met up with Chad, the artistic director at the Bloomington Playwright’s Project to talk about a commission they’d like me to do for them. I’m pretty excited about creating a signature piece for the BPP based on their logo, but the project has to wait until I’ve finished with the other commissions in progress. I have to create some evil flying pens before tax day in April. Somehow that seems fitting.

That covers the big news. I’ll close with a proud moment from the week. I’ve managed to lose fifteen pounds doing Zumba over the past few months. Some of my favorite pants are falling off me, and some of my exercise pants won’t stay up any more. I forced myself to go shopping this week to upgrade my image a little. The BloomZum owners wanted a ‘before’ and ‘after’ set of pictures to show how well the program worked for me. I’ll share the ‘after’ photo here. It has been a lot of fun, and I’ve made new friends along the way.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Holiday week: Art takes a back seat to family and food.

The week has been packed fuller than Santa’s sleigh. I’ll try to hit the highlights, but so much is happening that it’s hard to stop and write much. The biggest news is that the house filled up. Vojta came last week from the Czech Republic via Los Angeles where he’s learning English in a Kaplan school. Grandma and Aunt Lois came on Wednesday in time for dinner, so people are now sleeping on all three levels of the house. That means lots of baking, cooking, eating and generally enjoying each other’s company. I finished my two varieties of stollen for Christmas breakfast, which is traditional. Jim suggested that we try to spread out eating some of the goodies, so we cut one loaf for Christmas Eve breakfast and one for Christmas morning. Brilliant! With all the other goodies, including rumballs, ice cream, and brownies, we’re on holiday eating overload. Thank goodness for Zumba on Monday!

Even with all the family events, my art projects are slowly advancing. I have a commission to make five ornaments, and I’ve managed to finish three of the bases. For my two large commission pieces, I made all the beet root parts and I’m working through a second large carrot. I expect to see giant rabbits peering in through the windows any time now. I packed away all my scarves for the year and transformed my art studio into a bedroom for Aunt Lois. All my art toys, such as looms and tools, are hidden behind a blue curtain…nothing to see here! If I wake up in the middle of the night and listen carefully, though, I can hear them calling to me. Next week will bring a major house clean-up and art studio reclamation project before I launch back into work full time.

Everything else in my life is kind of a blur. Let’s see. We had a big snowfall, and grandma went out and shoveled the sidewalk, driveway and path to the house. If the grass were showing she’d be trying to cut that, too. I had a great Skype conversation with a subset of my family in the Czech Republic. It was good to see their faces and talk as if there were no distance between us. I remember wanting to call my grandmother in Prague, but at two dollars a minute my father wouldn’t let me. It seems like that wasn’t so long ago, back in the late seventies. Thursday we went to the Cardinal Stage Company’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’, by Dickens. That was truly amazing. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it for different reasons. Grandma was touched by the songs, saying it brought back wonderful memories. Lois popped up and gave them a standing ovation at the end. Vojta thought the English accents were amusing. I just love going to the theatre, where I can be transported to a different world. We’re very fortunate in Bloomington to have vibrant theatre groups with high caliber actors. A big cheer and thanks to them!

Christmas dinner was salmon, scalloped potatoes, broccoli and Lois’ famous cranberry salad. Everyone was so full we opted to skip the chocolate pecan pie. That will be dessert for lunch today, after a modest bowl of soup. The boys stayed in their jammies until dinner, building their Legos and Megablock construction projects. They did take a break for lunch and about an hour off for playing with remote-controlled cars. They basically kept themselves busy all day so the grown-ups could have pleasant conversation. My big score at Christmas was a tool kit from Vojta—it’s as though he knows me! I think it’s going to become my art fair traveling toolkit. As well as a lovely bottle of Amarone from my hubby...to be saved for a nice, quiet evening.

It’s just been a wonderful holiday week for us, and I hope you and your family have found some holiday cheer with your family.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Baby Carrots Find a Home

My maternal instinct kicked in this week. I wanted to finish the background for the ‘Baby Carrots’ commissioned piece I’ve been working on so my little friends could have a home. Not only did I finish the weaving, I even stretched it out and stitched it on the frame. After the frantic scarf-making and shows over the last few weeks I decided this was just the right thing to do—get in my art studio and weave! Now I just need to create the carrot tops. The cold weather is upon us, and babies lose most of their heat through their heads, you know. Oh, and I also cleaned up the back of the weaving. That process always brings back warm memories for me. My grandmother always said that a piece of art should look as good from the back as it does from the front. I’ve kept that idea to myself for years. When I first started having my work photographed by Tom Bertolacini, though, I had to laugh out loud at his first effort. He actually photographed the back of one of my abstract pieces, thinking it was the front! In his defense he said that it looked good—how could I be upset?

The events from last weekend spilled over into this week in some unexpected and funny ways. At the Fiber Arts Show I met a delightful woman, originally from Argentina, who was very kind and complimentary toward my work. She asked me if I taught what I do, and I said I really didn’t. I basked in the glow of many similar kindnesses from last weekend as I prepared to do a long-planned workshop in Danville, Indiana. Anyway, I had a beautiful drive through rural Indiana along highway 39. Full disclosure—it isn’t much of a highway. It has wonderful switchbacks through southern Indiana limestone country and lots of cornfields farther north at the southern end of the glacier track. The towns were tiny and quaint and a lot of the barns were leaning to embrace mother earth. I was richly and repeatedly reminded that Bloomington, my little oasis, does not represent Indiana. When I arrived at the highschool in Danville I was greeted by an enthusiastic bunch of people, including—you guessed it—my new friend from Argentina. It turns out she’s a teacher at the school. We laughed and laughed, and I guess I was busted for saying I didn’t teach my craft. The group was delightful and we had fun creating needle felted ornaments. This was actually a repeat visit for me, and Tiffany (the organizer) and her friend (another workshop repeater) had created some truly beautiful patterns on their ornaments. I’m scheduled to go back in the spring to run yet another workshop on whimsical felted turtles. That should be a lot of fun!

This week some of my summer veggies showed their displeasure with being ignored over the summer. In the bottom of the crisper I found half a cabbage from July and couple of old squash that were starting to get a little moldy. I just handed the whole drawer to my husband Jim for a trip to the compost pile. I did feel a little badly about my best-laid (but failed) plans to cook with the squash into soup. To atone for my errant ways, I whipped up some ‘Lois soup’ using kale that came to me from a generous neighbor, Nicola. The soup is named after the boy’s fairy godmother, Lois Graham. She lives an active life of retirement, split between Cross Village Michigan and somewhere in southern Texas, depending on the season. Her soup (in my hands) has greens, black-eyed peas and veggie sausages, plus a little spice to warm it up. It’s tasty and the perfect cold-weather soup. We had some the night I made it, along with fresh focaccia. Yum! The timing was good, because the rosemary plant that lives on my kitchen counter needed a trim.

Now it’s time to get ready for Thanksgiving. I’m planning on doing a little sketching to get some fresh ideas down, and the boys are looking forward to getting some time off from school. The only dark moment from the week came in Jim’s Tae kwon do class Wednesday, when he separated his shoulder on an ill-timed fall. He kept on going until the X-rays Saturday showed what happened, and now he’s a little disappointed about having to cut back his activities for a while. He does look cute in the sling, though!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Holey Nylons!

OK! I’ve had enough with the peppers! With a lot of my pieces, I start off really excited about an idea. It doesn’t always sink in how much work it’s really going to be, even if I’ve done a version of the piece before. It’s a lot like childbirth. When you’re right in the middle of the pushing and the cursing, you swear that’s something you’ll never do again. Then, when you see your little angel sleeping with an expression of the utmost inner peace and security, you think it wasn’t so bad. This week was the childbirth phase of my pepper piece. I was bearing down, pushing them through, doing my best to finish! I put the tops and stems on the last batch last night as the family watched a movie. DVDs haven’t been big in our house lately, which is good, but we needed a quiet evening. Home Alone 3 was the perfect medicine—a little more mature than the first two, but still really funny if you’re a kid. Monday afternoon I plan to attach them to the weaving I created a while ago. Did I say I was delighted to be finished?!

My current project is getting ready for a workshop on Monday. I’m heading over to Stonebelt, where we’ll be wet felting ornaments. I’ve been making the centers this week that my group will be embellishing as their part of the project. The ornaments are all wool, although the centers are wool melting pots. It’s like soup—the kind you make depends on what you happen to have. Some of it is wool fiber that’s been sheared and washed, but has fibers that are too short for spinning. My latest batch of ornament cores is made of chunks of old wool sweaters. Some are scraps that my friend Ruth Rives collected for me, and some are old sweaters that my dear husband unwittingly sent into the dryer. He’s trainable but forgetful, unfortunately. Anyway, I chop them into one-inch squares and pack them into my mother-in-law’s old holey nylons that she saves for me. One trip through the hot cycle in the washer and high heat in the dyer and voila! Felted ball stock. They look good and they’re ready to go into ornaments. Or tomatoes—maybe I could make another tomato piece!

My social calendar has been full this weekend too, which has slowed writing of this week’s essay. We started off at the Edible Lotus fundraiser Friday evening where my jeweled tree on dryer sheets was elegantly twisting above a dinner table. I really love the moment of recognition and disbelief when people realize what they’re looking at. Many thanks to Lee of the Lotus World Music and Art Festival for saving dryer sheets for me! It’s hard to collect enough for a big piece, even if you have a family of four with two (really three) rather messy eaters who inspire lots of laundry. The food was really excellent, and the ability to try all the donated foods was exciting. I loved the spinach paneer from Shanti. The dish can taste like bad seaweed when it isn’t prepared well, but this was great. I came as close as I’ve been to restaurant Tallent when I got to try their feta and red pepper (arrrggghhh, peppers!) creampuffs. They were smooth and delectable. I’ve got to get Jim to open up the wallet and take me there. Oh, and the mousse from Le Petit Café was wonderful, too. We’ll need to stop in for a bit more of that soon!

Saturday started out with the boys at their clay class while Jim and I headed to the Farmer’s Market. Then the boys organized a big Pokemon sale in the front yard that turned into a block party. We had eleven kids ‘running’ the sale at one time or another. That translated into a lot of running around, screaming, lemonade-drinking and fresh-baked cookie consumption. The rascals ate around six dozen cookies. By last night we were ready for the movie, since they had a sleepover at a neighbor’s house the night before and stayed up until eleven talking and poking each other. Today we all dressed up and went to see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, the Cardinal Stage production at the John Waldron Arts Center. Audrey was ferocious, the dentist was appropriately self-centered and evil, and the performance was excellent. Dinner is about to come out of the oven, so it’s time to reclaim the boys from the neighbor’s yard and sit down to dinner!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

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…

My schedule catches up with me.

The weeks leading up to the Fourth Street Festival were unusually hectic for me. I was trying to pull all the pieces together for the Children’s booth project , finish some weavings and helping make sure the show runs smoothly. Last week when my elder son came down with the flu and a respiratory infection I didn’t worry about me beyond, ‘gee, I sure wish he’d be a little better about coughing into his sleeve’. Like the way the picture from the Centers for Disease Control shows at the pharmacy. I know because I was there picking up his antibiotics. Last week the flu visited me, which slowed me down for a day or so. The pneumonia that followed brought me to a full stop, and so my sweet husband got to see the CDC picture at the pharmacy too!

Have I said lately that I love my job? Even when I have no energy and I’m huddled into a tiny corner of the sofa trying to stay warm, I can always work on ornaments! So it’s one more week of ornament blogging. My art studio floor is littered with fleeces of all colors, as if a flock of tie-dyed sheep ran afoul of a frustrated barber. All around my spot on the sofa by a big window are baskets of fleece, needles, scissors and a box of tissues. I’m up to 66 ornaments, with a goal of 100 before the holiday shows come around. Fortunately, ideas for new designs just keep flowing. I’ll finish one with a color or pattern that will remind me of something else, and off I’ll go on that next theme. Sometimes I see a neat design in a magazine or a store flyer and that will spark a new piece. My weavings are just too big a format to allow this kind of stream-of-consciousness piece creation and I really enjoying the process.

My other big art projects are slowly creeping forward. The project to urethane the artwork glued to the BEAD panels slowed down with the heavy rains and cool weather. Two panels are inching toward dryness and two more are waiting their turn for a urethane shower. I also worked on completing the demographic analysis of the fairgoers at this year’s Fourth Street Festival. It’s interesting to see the differences from last year, and I’m heartened again to see how far people came just for the show (one fourth came from more than 50 miles) and how positive the responses were on the surveys. When asked what part about the show they liked best, the participants gave overwhelmingly positive comments about the atmosphere of the fair, the setting in Bloomington, and the terrific artists and the diversity of art. It rained a little on Sunday morning, but we still had more than 42,000 visitors. Just another reason to appreciate the great town we have here in Bloomington.

Until next week…

Raisins on the Stairs

This has been a week to poke ornaments. I’m now in full holiday show mode, with thoughts of sugar plums dancing in my head amid the red, green and white patterns of my latest ornaments. I’m closing in on sixty for the holiday show season, which is good, but now they need names. My family usually helps me with deciding on names, and they have come up with some great material. With that many ornaments though, on top of the hundred or so that I made last year, I need more naming help. I’ve learned that if you want creativity, my seven-year-old’s multiage classroom at Rogers elementary is hard to beat. Some I really like and will use, like “Green Bean Casserole at Night.” Wow! Others didn’t speak to me since we’re not into Sponge Bob or the Transformers, but I still appreciated the effort.

The rains and humidity also let up this past week, and that meant I could get on to my project of urethane treating the Community Art project from the Fourth Street Festival. The fairgoers glued thousands of plastic toys, beads and other treasures onto four panels representing the four panels of the Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District (BEAD) logo. To waterproof the project and help secure the pieces I planned to treat the panels with urethane, but I discovered a new problem. The water-based urethane I chose has a slight pink tinge. I decided it would work on the red panel but not the others, so I set to work pouring the two half-gallon coats of varnish on the red panel and letting them dry. I decided that I would go with the yellow-hued organic based urethane for the yellow panel and just wear my gas mask. I’m a little sensitive to organic solvents, so that wasn’t my first choice, but the art has to come first here. Yep, that’s quite a visual—an earthy artist wearing a gas mask pouring varnish over a bunch of plastic toys glued to plywood in the backyard.

But if you really want the image of the week you’ll have to hear the story of my handy-dandy hand-held sander. This is the time of year when I need to finish frames for the long winter, which means I have to take advantage of the last warm, dry days. I was out sanding frames with a passion last week when it became clear that I had no choice but to install a new piece of sand paper. I had worn the last piece down to the pad in some places. To have any success at all I had to work in specific zones on the surface where any sand was left. It’s kind of like harvesting the zest from a lemon—you get most of it in the first few shaves, then you really have to focus on the little slivers that remain. Anyway, when I took off the paper I unfortunately ripped off the soft underpad. Yikes! Luckily I remembered the HoA (husband of artist) and Grandpa using JB weld to fix the broken faucet. I got it out, carefully mixed it up and splatted it on, and voila! It held tight. I’m so excited to have a big, fresh surface of sandpaper where I don’t have to remember which parts are worn out! That reminded me of a card I got back when I was in graduate school studying fungi. The picture on the card showed a stairway with raisins laid up the center of the walkway. They were there to remind the person to walk up the sides and avoid wearing out the carpet in the middle. I still laugh when I think of that picture.

Until next week…