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 

Home from Minnesota…

Today I’m happy to be home from all of my summer travels.  This past week I was hurriedly weaving new pieces featuring birches and water, a genre that has been well received.  I’ve been improving my technique for making the water more realistic and the foreground elements more elaborate and dimensional.  I’m really pleased with all my latest pieces.  I also completed my ‘Eat Your Veggies’ composition.  This is the one that features tomato slices, onions, peas and other vegetables.  The components have been my travel companions as I completed each of the foreground vegetables on my summer travels.  The good news is that all my most recent pieces sold at the Loring Park Art Festival in Minneapolis over the weekend.  The even better news is that I’m safely back home with my family after a very long drive. 

The Loring Park fair itself was a lot of fun to do.  The fair itself is organized around a very pretty lake.  Nearby are fountains, trails, a pool, flower gardens, basketball hoops and more attractions that help bring in people.  From the moment I got there the organizers impressed me as welcoming and efficient.  I (OK, Jim) was able to drive the car and trailer around the pond right to my spot Friday afternoon.  We set up on a beautiful summer afternoon and prepared for the show over the weekend.  A weather front that produced heavy rains and winds moved through the area Friday night, but fortunately my booth and art survived the storm without any problems.  Saturday and Sunday morning the organizers drove around with juice, water, fruit and treats.  

 I liked the fact that they came to me to check in and see how things were going.  I had two beautiful days with sunny skies in the upper seventies, which brought out the friendly art appreciators of Minneapolis.  Takedown was just as easy, and within an hour and a half we were on the road out of town toward Tomah Wisconsin, our waypoint on the long drive home. 

When I got home I stepped back into the home stretch of the Fourth Street Festival here in Bloomington.  A lot still has to happen for the show to come together, but I feel good about the efforts of the organizing committee.  It’s going to be another good year.  This year we’re going to have something new on Dunn Street.  We’re hosting Art Cars, which is really Dawn Adam’s brainchild.  Laura Lane, a writer for the Herald Times, put out the call for the cars.  I don’t know exactly what to expect, but there are likely to be mosaics, painted cars, and other embellishments on vehicles.  I’m looking forward to seeing some fun and funky cars.  These aren’t cars you’ll see at the dealership or the NASCAR track, so plan to be in town Labor Day weekend. 

Did I say I was glad to be home?  I sure am!  I spent the drive crocheting leaf clumps, so I know there’ll be a bunch of trees in my future.  I’m still channeling more birches and lakes, thinking about how we need more rain.  The corn was really painful to see along the expressway all the way to Minnesota.  I do have my own little bright spot in the gardening world, though, which features a volunteer squash in the garden by the front door.   

This is where the hamster bedding and uneaten seeds were used as mulch over the winter, and one little squash plant germinated this summer.  I run a dehumidifier in my art studio, and that leaves me a bucket of water to empty every morning.  My little squash gets all she needs.  I don’t know what kind of a squash it will yield, but I do know I’m planning on eating them!  Maybe if I get a lot I can make a squash pie.  Hmmm, that just gave me an idea, now that peach season is in full swing!  And we’ll get to the farmer’s market on Saturday!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Mixed Fresh Greens on Mother’s Day.

This week was such a mixed bag—a little of this and a little of that. I was tying up loose ends on a bunch of art projects, not all of which were expected. The most exciting news on the art front was that I was able to re-launch on a weaving I started last fall. It requires beautiful red gum leaves with a deep wine-red color. I had needle felted the leaves months ago, but this week I found just the right yarn and some nice thin steel wire to create the stems. I think they look delightful! Months ago I began to create a toad to live in the piece, but I never gave him any skin. This week I’ll focus on toad skin, trying to resist the temptation to lick it. And even though I spent huge blocks of time and energy on commissions this winter, I still managed to launch on the next request on my list. It’s based on an early piece I did called ‘A Walk in the Woods’. I began a search of my cord boxes to find just the right material. I was looking for some specific thrums that I know work well for the tree trunks, and luckily I found enough of the material. Trunk creation involves twisting one really interesting cord to give the look of bark I want. If you’re a regular blog reader, it may seem as if I always have just the right material for a project. My husband Jim can’t decide whether I’m great at choosing which materials to save (everything) or whether I decide that what I find is just what I needed. The answer is—both! To create my path through the woods I did some digging to find just the right copper and light brown yarns. And yes, I had just the right colors! This week I’ll start the actual weaving, a phase of each project that I really love to do. Because this piece lacks needle felting, I needed something to keep my hands busy while I watch my boys during their Taekwondo and sparring classes. I decided to begin yet another project that does involve a lot of felting. It’s based on a photograph I saw in a Turkish cookbook. The picture shows grouping of vegetables that are being prepared for a salad. Everything looks so crisp and fresh that it makes my mouth water. My version will involve sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, whole carrots and radishes, and chopped broccoli. And whatever else occurs to me that I think would look good! I invested a little time this week putting the outer skins on my cucumbers and tomatoes as the boys trained under the watchful eye of Mr. Scott at Monroe County Martial Arts. This Friday will be a big day for all my boys there as they test to advance in rank. The younger boys will be blue belts with a black stripe, the last belt before brown and Jim will advance to blue belt.

The diversity of my art projects was matched by the diversity of other family events that culminated in a special Mother’s Day. Sunday afternoon was our spring egg hunt, which brought bunch of kids to the house to search for eggs and screech happily as they ran around the back yard. Dinner was Atlantic salmon with a ginger-orange glaze. It has a little balsamic vinegar and a touch of honey and I really like it. We opened a nice bottle of wine, had some red new potatoes boiled to perfection, and topped it off with a rhubarb pie still warm from the oven. I received an elegant watch from Jim and two sweet handmade cards from the boys. It’s good to be a mom!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Ratatouille Arrives!

Finally—‘Ratatouille’ is complete! I’m delighted with how it turned out. I even feel as if I’ve taken the first step toward being a grandma by carrying around pictures of the completed piece and showing the people who have watched me along the way. I received so much support and encouragement as I felted tomato slices, eggplants, zucchini and herb leaves into existence over the past few months that I felt I needed to share the finished product. It has been fun to watch their responses to seeing the finished piece. The people who actually saw the size of the tomatoes have the best sense of the overall magnitude of the finished piece, which is huge 5' X 2 1/2 '—the tomatoes are the size of dinner plates. Even though I like the tomatoes, my favorite part of the piece is the basil leaves. I feel like they really enhance the cohesiveness of the piece, and I just like how they turned out. I can almost smell the piece!

Did I say I was pleased with how it turned out? That’s true, but I am sooo ready to move beyond creating vegetables. At the end of the week I devoted big blocks of time to my next piece, a signature piece for the Bloomington Playwright’s Project. If you’ve seen their aggressive writing tools on the attack you know the basic design. In my version the background is purple and the BPP letters are a bright yellow. That means I spent some time digging through my yarn boxes to find just the colors I needed. I was on a spring and birth mind set (their motto is "where theater is born") and so I chose a purple that reminds me of the Johnny Jump-Up violets in the lawn, mixed in with their shockingly bright yellow dandelion friends. I bought the yellow fleece at the Fiber Arts show from Donna Jo Copeland last November. It was dyed with tumeric to produce a brilliant, almost neon yellow, which is amazing considering that it comes from a natural dye. The yellow letters have a crispness that I’m enjoying, especially after focusing on organic vegetable shapes for the past few months. And weaving, finally weaving, in my art studio has been a delight. While I enjoy needle felting, there’s a certain rhythm to weaving that I’ve missed. The piece will feature a hand, which I’ve completed, holding an angry pen, ready to create a great play. I just need to adjust the length of the wrist, and make the pen.

The fact that it’s officially spring means the dandelions are commandeering the local lawns. I had the boys out collecting dandelion heads for dyeing later this summer. I even spent fifteen minutes this morning mowing down the yellow flowers in the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and road. I should have enough for a good dye pot. I’ve got to replenish some of my color stocks, which also led me to the big Fiber Event in Greencastle this past Friday. It’s one of the highlights of my year. I went with my friend Ruth, which made for a delightful trip. We chitty chatted the whole time, making it feel as if we made it there in ten minutes. I had a wonderful conversation with a weaver and natural material dyer from Nashville who sold fair traded spun banana silk yarn—that will probably make it’s way into a scarf this fall. We talked about some of her recent adventures in dyeing, and she showed me some yarn and fleece that she had dyed with wild rose clippings using iron mordant. It got me eyeing the wild rose in our back yard that I don’t really like because it scratches the whole family as they bring bikes through the gate into the back yard. We talked about using invasive plants for dyeing, which made me wonder about using euonymous as a green dye. That evil vine has taken over big parts of the back garden beds, and it’s heading for a major haircut this summer. I’ll do some experiments with added alum and varying conditions, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for any material that survives the dye pot.

The last bit of news from the week has to do with one of my favorite foods—pie! A rhubarb pie appeared yesterday morning. Although it came from frozen rhubarb because no fresh stalks could be found, it tasted great and the crust came out as a crumbly delight. Yippee! I’ll have pie and espresso for breakfast after Zumba all week!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Summertime tomatoes, sliced and ready

Last week was nothing short of hot in Bloomington, so I knew it was clearly time for tomatoes. The little red fruits just filled my world. I poked and created slice after slice of juicy summertime heaven at every meeting and event I attended, and all day when the boys were in school. My payoff, sadly, wasn’t a fresh tomato sandwich. It was even better! I finished off the last of the tomatoes, and indeed the last of my vegetables, for my ‘Ratatouille’ piece! I can’t tell you how good that feels after months of felting giant carrots, onions, and beets (for the Summer Harvest companion piece) followed by eggplant, onions, herbs, zucchinis and tomatoes for the Ratatouille piece. What a giant relief to have all the pieces (and backgrounds) in my art studio.

My week in tomato town started with buying and slicing open a selection of Roma tomatoes as models. Most artists can’t get away with slicing open their models to get a look at the internal structures, but happily I can. What struck me when I examined the tomatoes was how variable the tomatoes are with respect to the internal chambers. I assumed they would all have the same developmental program that produced the same chamber structure. Then to make the seeds I was looking for some muted earthy yellow color. Fortunately, I came across fleece that I had dyed this summer with goldenrod flowers collected in Michigan. I did one batch with just the flowers and a second with alum added. The former gave a more muted yellow that was perfect for my seeds. I’m always delighted when something I can’t imagine finding a home for turns out to be just the right color for a future project. I needle felted the seeds in place after the tomato slice took shape, then I gave them a light blanket of the slimy tomato chamber material and then felted more seeds on top. I felt the technique gave a sense of depth to the seeds within the seed chamber that I really liked.

Of course finishing the components means it’s time to assemble components onto the weaving background. I stayed up fairly late last night, enjoying the cool of the basement art studio over the stuffy upstairs bedrooms after an eighty-degree day. I decided to put together ‘Summer Harvest’ first. I really like it! I just feels soooo good to have it assembled after months of creating small pieces and working through the doubt of whether it will all work out. I even found a use for the orange thread from Jim’s youth, which he used to tie spawn bags to catch trout. Everything finds a use in my house! As the piece came together we broke out a bottle of wine to celebrate. Now I just need to decide on the exact component layout for ‘Ratatouille’ and assemble that piece.

Everything else in my world took a back seat to art last week, but I did get out a little. The opening reception for “The Art of Re-Use” in celebration of Earth Day in Columbus, IN organized by Marilyn Brackney, was Thursday evening at Hotel Indigo. I left all three boys home and drove over with Cappi Phillips. The trip seemed like it only took ten minutes because we laughed and giggled just about the whole way. The reception was well attended, and I even ran into one of the judges from the first Déjà Vu show. She also happened to have bought a Winter Birches piece. Now she’s doing amazing encaustic pieces. I’ve been oohing and aahhing over the technique ever since we saw a demonstration of the art form at Wonderlab.

Over the weekend the whole crew went out to the African American Dance Company’s spring performance, which was excellent. I loved seeing such immense talent in all the different body shapes and ethnic backgrounds. Some of the movements seemed almost snake-like to me, which got into my head. I tried to think and move like a snake when I was doing Zumba the next day. We also managed to get out to the Sunday matinee performance of Miles Away at the Bloomington Playwrights Project – a date with hubby! The acting was intense and at the end I just sat in sort of a stunned silence for a bit to pull myself back into my own reality. The characters and plot were far removed from what I experience day-to-day, but I felt completely embraced in the experience because of the incredible acting. Thanks to Chad for assembling an amazing out of body experience. Go see it!

This will be another big week—completing ‘Ratatouille’ will certainly be an early major project. I’m a little nervous about it still, but I’m optimistic about the final product. I also noticed, ahem, that our rhubarb was starting to poke up in the garden. Hmmm, let’s see…spring, rhubarb…could a pie be far behind? Check back next week!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The secret to slicing onions

I have the skinny on everything this week. First, it was the week of the onion rings, which I completed by adding the skins. I poked at them all week long without any tears, except when I jammed the felting needle into my finger. Ow! I also added the skin to my tomatoes. There’s still a huge amount of detail work needed to complete them. I have to get all the internal structure right and get the seeds in place, so I’m sure I’ll stop in at Bloomingfoods to pick up a few models. Finally, my epiphany of the week: after hours and hours of felting while the boys were at school taking their ISTEP tests, I’ve concluded that there is absolutely nothing on daytime TV worth watching.

My sense of being locked in the house was amplified this week by the near constant rains. A lake forms in our back yard (Celerin Lake), which is drained through the fence into a small tributary (Drummond Creek) when the rains are heavy. Both sump pumps in the basement were cranking water out to the road. Water even started leaking up through the crack in my art studio floor. I’ve come to accept this as ‘the devil I know’. Instead of trying to repair it and have water come in through some other crack, I just keep a towel system over it that I change regularly. That will dry up soon and stay dry for most of the year, so it’s just another charm to living in our house.

I did give myself permission to leave the house for two trips into the soggy spring. My highlight was going to the Heritage Quilt Show on Thursday. As usual, I really enjoyed seeing all the quilts. Seeing the creative designs and new color combinations always inspires me. My only disappointment this year stemmed from the drop in non-traditional patterns. I’m especially drawn to the free form quilts. During my travels in town I met with Chad, the artistic director for the Bloomington Playwrights Project. He’s going to take over running the Art Fair on the Square, a one-day show in downtown Bloomington. I stopped doing the show a few years ago, but I know Chad is a creative juggernaut and a marketing machine. I feel like it’s going to be well worth participating again this year.

The last thing on my mind is how pleased I am with my new drum carder. I used to borrow the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild carder, but I reached the point where I just needed my own. It’s an expensive tool, so I debated buying it for a long time. I just felt I was being extravagant by wanting to have my own. But as I was cranking out mounds of eggplant purple fleece last night, I realized how much I appreciated having it. I don’t know how I could have completed my giant ratatouille piece without it. And it’s fun to use.

What else is there to say, except for the obvious? When’s the next pie? And what kind will it be?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin