Hard to believe, but…

It was ten years ago and I was pregnant with my second son, Jacob. I had just received permanent residency status and I was ready to concede that I might be living in Indiana for a while. Now it’s hard to imagine living anywhere besides Bloomington. So last week I filled out the forms and mailed my application for US citizenship! I’m excited to move through the process, and I’m imagining a big party at the end of the process to celebrate. The food will be catered and Jim will be in charge of organizing it! I’ll let him in on the details when we get a little closer to party time.

I’m on full art creation mode these days, trying to re-stock my studio for summer art fair adventures. The outline of my poppy piece appeared in the blog last week, and more recently I created the leaflets and forty stamens per flower that I needed for accuracy. Each stamen is an individually wrapped copper wire, so they’re pretty energy intensive. I’m really pleased with how the flowers and the elegant seed pods they leave behind have turned out. I also finished my daffodil and the leaves that go with it. To finish them I pressed the leaves in my big steamer. I’m so enjoying using it—it’s such a useful tool, saving me hours of tedious ironing. Soon I’ll start on my next weaving, and I’m channeling the Hilly Hundred bike race. I’m imagining hordes of colorful bicycles rolling through the Indiana countryside. That should be a fun piece to create.

In town, I dropped off two art pieces to Options for Better Living. Next week begins the Art of Chocolate fundraiser for them, which also features a juried art exhibition. Two of my pieces were accepted for display: Six Salamander Salsa and a peacock lattice scarf. I’m looking forward to seeing them at the reception on Sunday the 29^th.

And last, on Friday night my boys tested for their brown belt with a white stripe in Taekwondo at Monroe County Martial arts. They’re moving along! After the test we headed for Mother Bears. They were pretty busy, but they found us a table and we had some great pizza. When we came out the rain was just starting to fall and freeze, which produced a slick Saturday and a lot of ice scraping before the boys could get out to Taekwondo for their classes. Sorry honey, but only one car fits in the carport at a time!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Summer in January…

The weather turned really cold last week, so it was time to think about summer. That means flowers, travel to art fairs and fruit pies. For the flowers I started working on some daffodils for my latest weaving. It’s another piece that features rusty objects in the dirt. This time a daffodil will shine above the cluttered soil. I’ve also been working on a piece I’m calling ‘May’s Poppies’. This brings to mind a spring ritual where we buy red poppy rosettes at May’s Greenhouse in the spring. The plants that establish usually give us several years of grand red displays in the late spring. We’re due for some vibrant color in the garden.

I’ve been working on a big bunch of poppy leaflets and last week I sprinkled them into my new steam presser (it’s used, but it’s new to me). Instead of spending hours ironing individual leaves, I finished the whole job in two pressings. I love it! I combined the leaflets into leaves, which showed me that I was about ten leaflets short. I have a little more work on that project but it’s coming along nicely.

While it may not be summery, I want to say that I did a bunch more fabric printing using the blocks I described last time. I cut up some more of Jim’s pants (hee hee) and pressed them with my new steam presser. If I were a fifties housewife I’d feel badly about only pressing his pants after I surreptitiously pulled them out of the laundry basket and cut them up, but hey, I’m a modern woman. I embellished the printed fabric sections with 3D fabric paint to create some representational objects like flowers. Then I went all Jackson Pollocky on them and drizzled paint on top of the prints. I love projects where you get to play with paint.

So summer means art fairs, and it’s time to start applying to art shows. Jim and I went through all the Midwest shows to see which ones might work for us, and I have a list to apply to. I should also mention that the applications for the Fourth Street Festival are available online (though Zapplications), so apply if you’d like to come to Bloomington this Labor day. Or just come anyway and see the great art! Ohh, and I almost forgot—Jim went into a baking frenzy yesterday and surprised me with two loaves of bread, kluski, and a peach pie. It didn’t fit into our dinner plans last night so I had to wait for breakfast to try a slice. It was a little piece of summer heaven in January! Back to last night—we were scurrying to get to the Ruth N. Halls theatre to see the Contemporary Voices modern dance performance last night. We went with Jacob’s friends Claire and Lara (and Claire’s mom Karen) and everyone had a great time. The boys even put on their "tuxes" for the occasion. The range of performances was awesome, from a troupe of pajama-clad college students sleeping on a couch (performed to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) to a piece performed with only two performers and a mattress.

Next Friday the boys test for their brown belt with a white stripe (the first step on the way to a red belt), and the following week we’ll see Stomp! at the IU Auditorium. I figure if we just keep really busy, summer will be here before we know it!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin