Trees and tomatoes and no pie, oh my…

It’s been a tree week.  Looking around outside I see a lot of bare branches and snow.  I remember my husband telling me that you have to love browns if you want to live in Indiana.  I do, as long as there is some pop of color associated with it.  Like tomatoes!  After a long couple of weeks of family activities followed by reclaiming the house, I’m finally getting back to work in my art studio.  I’m finishing a piece that I started over a month ago.  I’m creating the grey-brown tree trunk as I look at all the grey-brown trees and brown withered plants with a dusting of snow in the neighborhood.  There is something beautiful about the complexities of the lines of the branches that is now visible with the leaves missing.  With that said, I’m ready for the hints of spring green to give some much needed color to the world.   

My answer to the problem was to make some tomato slices as part of a weaving called ‘Salsa to Go’.  The title might evolve, though, because this week I introduced the boys to home-made guacamole—thanks Kroger for having 88¢ avocados—and they loved it!  My art really does reflect my life, so the art piece might actually become a visual recipe for guacamole. 

Speaking of yummy foods, I put my birthday present from Grandma to the test.  She gave me a new potato ricer and I used it to make butternut squash gnocchi.  I actually used it for the potato portion of it.  I made a ginormous double batch and half went in the freezer.  We topped it off with a garlicy-roasted red pepper sauce and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.   

I filled to capacity two six-foot teenage boys and their parents.  It’s the time of year when the new school year begins and we need quick dinners in the freezer.  The luxury of time over the holiday break allowed us to make slow meals, but that will all change tomorrow when school restarts.  Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of soups, chili and lasagna in the freezer for those crazy packed days that are fast approaching. 

Speaking life getting back into full swing, tomorrow I will launch into costume making for Hello Dolly.  At last count I had over thirty suit coats and pants in watermelon and lemon colors (fuchsia, emerald green, lime green and crisp yellow).  I’ll start fitting the boys with their colorful pre-costumes.  Each of them will wear all of the colors.  No Indiana winter grey-browns in this crowd!  And yes, still no pie, although Jacob has been making Pizelles and Jim’s homemade bread is wonderful, but they’re not pie.  I need fruit to prevent scurvy for my long voyage through winter—just sayin’!

Until next week

Martina Celerin

Commission after commission!

This week brought closure to a delightful project I’ve been working on for some time.  It’s an elaborate, large format commission piece that features an extended path with trees and flowers.  It is personalized with fabric from the owner, including a rich purple cloth from their wedding houpa.  My rule is that I won’t show an image of the completed work until the patron sees it first, so I can only give a sneak peak of a small section with the promise that I’ll post the entire image at a later date when their home renovations are completed and they can accept delivery. 

Bringing that project to a conclusion means I’m putting more energy into the next two commission pieces on my plate.  The first will revisit a favorite piece, “Summer Salad.”  It involves creating a lot of detailed vegetable pieces to scale.  This week was devoted to assembling the sliced tomatoes.  I put the outside skin on the six slices I prepared, leaving the project of layering on the details of the meat and seeds in the cross-section.  The cherry tomatoes for the piece are almost as cute as the ones that are coming off the vines in the garden.   

There aren’t many actual tomatoes as I’d like, since some creature of the night is stealing all the big tomatoes and some of the little ones, but I’m getting a taste.  I’ve built all of the shapes that I need for the mushrooms from felted sweater pieces, over which I’ll needle felt soft grey carded wool to make the surface look realistic.  Ahead of me lie the radishes, celery, onions, broccoli and cucumbers.  I promised to complete the piece by mid December, so I feel like I’m on schedule with all my other responsibilities.  The sliced vegetables seem to have attracted another big-headed ant, though.  They asked me to create one more worker for the exhibit at Wonderlab.  

 The reception for the ant exhibit will be held during First Fridays on November 6^th from 5 to 8:30.  The ants will be provided, but it will be BYOP (bring your own picnic!). 

As I scurry into new projects, my exhibit continues to hang at the Convention Center in the Rogers room.  I realized that I neglected to take a photo of one piece before I hung the show, forcing me to zip back in to grab an image of “Looking at the Water”.  I had so much fun making the lawn chair and posting it on Facebook before I attached it to the piece.  

 So many people thought that I had reclaimed an old seventies-era aluminum lawn chair by replacing the fabric.  When they saw the piece on the kitchen counter top for scale it became clear that it was a miniature.  Still, the piece seems to bring back fond memories for a lot of people. 

Life is building to another crescendo this week.  Monday begins the last week of rehearsals for the “Phantom of the Opera” show that begins on Saturday, October 18^th.  It continues for two more Saturdays, and they’re trying to sell out the shows to help cover the extensive costs for the elaborate falling chandelier and hundreds of costumes, among other investments.  You can see the evil monkey atop the ornate music box and the dead body I created for the show too—it’s incredible how much has gone into this production.   

Tommie is a chorus member and Jacob is in charge of the lighting.  Grandma will come to town for opening night and Jim will watch, cook, and keep everyone calm, so it’s really a family affair.  Oh, and speaking of my sweet husband Jim, he made me two apple pies on Saturday.  One went to a party and was consumed, but the other provided a slice for my Sunday morning breakfast with espresso. 

I should also mention that last week was the public school’s Fall Break.  I needed a break too, so the boys and I drove south west for a day adventure to French Lick.  It started with a beautiful fall drive along winding roads.  The little towns, with their unusual names and cultures seem very different from Bloomington.  We started with go-kart racing followed by a stop in an arcade.  

The boys deftly played a five dollar advance into enough tickets to buy us all tiaras and moustaches, which became the official family attire for the trip.  We found a hole-in-the-wall pizza place where the waitress was a little taken aback by our attire.  Then we played a round of mini golf (still in costume).  We have a family rule that the winner buys the ice cream, which of course turned out to be me.  No ice cream place was in sight, so we decided to venture into the West Baden Springs hotel so the boys could see the grandness of the dome from the inside.  As we approached the front door, a sharply dressed fellow asked how he could help us. 

You might or might not think that tiaras and moustaches were appropriate attire for the fancy hotel, but he let us right in and even became our tour guide.  He gave us lots of details about the history of the place and the renovations that were done.  I’ve seen pictures of the place, but until you’re standing there to experience the scale and the grandiosity of the place it is hard to appreciate.   We ended up having ice cream at a parlor in the hotel before the boys found an ornate chess set and board that was actually an inlaid table.  They played while I wandered the hotel to get a better sense of the space.  All in all it was a perfect day out and a break in our routine.  But now it’s back to art!  And the Phantom!  He says that tickets are available online, so we hope to see you there!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

To the Des Moines Art Festival and back!

The tomatoes are done!  I had a wonderful trip out to Iowa, which gave me lots of time to needle felt the rest of the tomatoes I needed for the piece I’ve been envisioning.  I’m in a hurry to finish up pieces because I had such a great art fair in Des Moines.  Now I need to replace pieces and expand with some new pieces for an exhibition that I’ll describe in a minute.  In Iowa, the weather didn’t cooperate as well as I hoped, punctuating the show with some pop-up thunderstorms.  

 The patrons still came out to support the artists, though, which I appreciate and respect.  Our visit to Iowa began in Iowa City to see friends we haven’t seen in sixteen years.  We stayed with Ute and David, Jim’s friends from a previous life.  Their two boys are the same age as ours, and we all just clicked beautifully as if we’d been visiting for years.  After a delightful dinner, a good night’s sleep, and a wonderful breakfast we were ready to set out for Des Moines.  Setting up the booth took us longer than usual due to frequent interruptions from the rain.  On the bright side, that gave us plenty of chances to stop into our favorite vegetarian coffee shop, the RitualCafé.  

 In spite of the weather, or perhaps highlighted by it, it’s clear that the show is extremely well organized and administered.  It ran like a well-oiled machine with lots of happy volunteers. There were always people ready to help, from directing us through set-up to squeegeeing the streets to help keep a dry surface between rains.  What impressed me most, however, was the reliability of the patrons.  When the rains came they scattered, but they popped right back into place when the skies cleared.  I really like the feeling that my art is well appreciated; I certainly feel that way in Des Moines.  

 In the end, seven pieces found new homes.  I also managed to break into the local television and print media, appearing in three videos that you can access online.  Click here, here, or here for the links!  My sons Jacob and Tommie appeared in some of the videos and were terrific in the booth with explaining my techniques and materials to patrons.  I just love sitting back and listening to Jacob expound on my work, and he seems to love doing it.  We also managed to find some time to walk through the Pappajohn sculpture park, which was the backdrop for the show and very close to my booth.   

My favorite piece there is an amazing sculpture by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa.  It is built from fused metal letters that you may walk into and experience from the inside or outside.  We also experienced the newest sculpture, which looks like a rainbow of panels built into a circle.  I took a nice family portrait from the center of the piece.  While I was busy, my family managed to sneak off to do some sailing on Grays lake close to Des Moines and hit the local water park.  Unfortunately, heavy downpours cut short their adventures.   

The show ended early when the organizers watched severe storms developing in the area.  My crew broke all of our records for both take down and packing the trailer, which was all completed in an hour.  Certain my art was safe, dry and protected for the drive home, I completed my tomato felting project as we drove through the hills of Iowa and the fields of Illinois.  

 Now I'm nestled back in my studio thinking about my upcoming exhibit, “Looking at Water”.  One of the pieces I’m envisioning is a large format beach piece where the sand and shells lie in the foreground, the water and waves fill the mid-ground, and the sky is in the background.  One truth that everyone who has visited the beach knows is that one invariably brings home sand.  To capture that concept in my piece, I’ve spent some time coating the frame for my beach piece in sand.   

We got home from Des Moines on Monday evening, which was just in time for me to slip off to the Tuesday Farmer’s market while the boys did TKD.  I brought home some red raspberries, hoping against hope that they might be transformed into a victory pie.  And sure enough, a pie appeared!  It must have been a good show!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Thyme for Tomatoes

I had my felting needles flying this week as I worked toward completing my two big commission pieces. I continued on my herb mission by creating small thyme leaves, using the fleece I carded together last week. I’m always really busy, but this week I had to make a little thyme for myself. When I had the leaves made, I snipped little 2-4 inch lengths of thin wire that I wrapped with yarn to make the veins for the leaves. When it came to making the stems, I panicked a little when I discovered that I lacked just the right yellowy green yarn. I looked through all my light spring greens, olives and medium green boxes with no success. I was humming and hawing about what to do because I knew thyme was running out. Then the angelic choir sang when I walked around the art studio and saw just the right color material sitting atop my giant pile of yet-to-be-sorted yarns. I guess I need a brief bit of background here (no thyme like the present). When new yarns come into the house they first spend at least two days in the freezer to kill any potential pests or eggs. Then to go into a big pile in the art studio to be sorted into my rows of plastic storage bins. That happens when the pile reaches a critical height and spills over into the walkway, or when the boys need money for the latest toy and they offer to sort yarns for money. Anyway, I finished the three thyme sprigs this week and launched on the tomatoes. I carded together the fleece I need for the fleshy parts of the tomatoes and the seeds. That’s next week’s project, along with doing my business taxes. I’ll hand off the forms to my turbo-taxin’ husband who will put it all together.

The rest of the week mostly involved the usual running around town to support my family. But everywhere I went I was on thyme! I have a piece (Birch at Rocky Point) hanging in Columbus, Indiana at the recycled art show to celebrate Earth Day. Marilyn Brackney organizes the show, and the opening reception is this Thursday from 5 – 7 pm at the Hotel Indigo. I look forward hanging out and chitty-chattying with my recycled artist friends like Cappi Phillips and Chris Gustin.

On the home front, this morning Jacob decided to make scones for breakfast, which I encouraged. He served them in the lovely platter Tommie made in clay class at the Ivy Tech-John Walron Arts Center. Jacob also participated in Crazy Day at his school. He wore his pants inside out (the zipper was a special challenge) and gelled his hair. Actually, his personal stylist Tommie did most of the coiffing. The whole thing was for a fundraiser for Riley Children’s hospital. Now it’s Saturday afternoon but I feel like I’m ahead of the curve. The laundry is done and carried upstairs, two loaves of bread are baked for the week, and a new batch of tomato sauce is ready for pizzas and other Italian dishes.

Whew!

Until next, uhm, thyme…

Martina Celerin

Veggies are high in fiber...

I was in major vegetable construction mode this week. I have been working on the big ratatouille piece this week, and I completed all the structural elements needed for the vegetables. I even laid them out on the woven background. To my great relief I see that the design will work! The scale is right and the number of pieces is right. I still need to create the herbs to season it, which means felting some basil leaves and thyme branches to fill it out. For now, I just feel really good about completing all the ingredients. The art construction parallels preparing ratatouille, where the secret to success is sautéing each of the ingredients separately. Combining them as the final step ensures that the veggies retain their crispness and individual flavors.

My plan for creating the vegetables was based on an art piece I saw on a recycled art website. It was a table made out of cardboard, created by cutting and combining circles with increasing diameters to sculpt the 3D shape. For my vegetables I harvested cereal boxes out of the recycle bin and cut out the shapes I wanted. I used these as templates to cut layers out of wool blankets and old sweaters. These were stacked and stitched together to create the vegetable slices and cubes. I’ve needle felted a skin layer to the zucchini slices and have launched into skinning my tomatoes. The last phase is to get the intricate design and color palette right for the interiors. I’ve gone through three different zucchini models from Bloomingfoods, each of which went into a family meal. I carded and created three different colors of fleece for each of the inner colour regions of the zucchini, and so I’m ready to start needle felting the patterns. A ripe red tomato sits frightened in the fridge, ready to be dissected for its internal color and design.

Monday was the Spinners and Weavers Guild meeting. They’re trying something new, which might become an annual event—the paper bag exchange. Each person puts four ounces of a fiber, yarn, wool or roving into a bag. The bags are exchanged, and you have until September to create something out of the material and return it to its original owner. You can add materials as needed, but the base of the piece is the exchanged fiber. I’m excited to see how the person uses the yarn I contributed, and I’m always up for a challenge to see what I can do with the beautiful deep blue-green roving I received. Unfortunately it’s a superwash material so I can’t wet felt with it, but I like the fact that it pushes me out of comfort zone into new creative directions. I’m thinking a needle felted bowl…

In other news of the week I have a new show going up at the Orchard Gallery in Fort Wayne. It’s called Small Squares, and I contributed some of my felted tile pieces. I’m excited to see all the pieces together. The opening is this Friday, and I’ve heard the opening reception is nice. The postcard for the show makes me think it will be quite eclectic. I love Cappi’s mosaic chicken tile.

In local news, after the warm days this week I’ve noticed that the tulips leaves are peeking out. The first snowdrops and eranthus are appearing in the garden beds, which is a sure sign of spring. As the spring comes on I’m hoping there’s a rhubarb pie in my near future. There’s a tradition that we have rhubarb pie on Mother’s day, but I’ve decided that when you’re a princess and a mom you can have pie when you want it. I’m on the lookout!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Tomatoes, Flowers, and Butterflies...

They all played a big role in my week. This week I finished my ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ piece. I ultimately made 72 felted tomatoes for the piece, finishing with a couple of branching stems of little cherry tomatoes. They ripen from the plant outward, so there’s always a couple of green ones at the end to keep you from harvesting the whole branch too soon. Maybe the new owners will put the piece on a sunny windowsill to let it ripen. As I finished with the painstaking work of creating the five little petioles for each tomato, I thought about how looking closely allows one to appreciate the intricacies of nature. But with that said, I’m sooo looking forward to munching on the little cherry tomatoes that pop up as volunteers all over our garden each summer. My husband has unwittingly carried out my evil plan to get them spread all through the flower beds as he mulches. He can’t begin to weed them all out, as Grandma insists we should, so I always get plenty of little red delights each summer. I love sending out Tommie with a bowl to harvest a few when we have company—nothing beats a just-picked bowl on the table.

Finishing a piece means a new challenge, and this week the weather began sunny and bright. I was just feeling good about feeling firmly planted in this town, thinking what a great community of people I live in. That meant it was time to start my ‘Transplanted’ piece, with a root-bound flower establishing in a new garden bed. I dug into my chocolaty brown yarn box, and the yarns really did look like milk and dark chocolate on my studio floor. I created the base of the weaving using a sumac weave with 10 different yarns blended together. Just when it felt like there’s no more room to expand the sumac weave, I dug the hole by making an indentation and added a tabby weave with fewer yarns mixed together. I ended up with a wonderful cavity to plant my root ball in, and the dirt didn’t keep slipping back in to fill the hole as I did it!

For the root-bound flower I chose a red cactus dahlia. This is a special flower in our garden, since my husband seems to slip them in all around—it’s kind of a defining flower for us. To create all the colors and textures I needed I envisioned a huge project of blending and carding green fleeces ahead of me, which I wasn’t looking forward to at all. I needed a deep, rich red for the flowers and a good match for the dahlia green leaves. That normally means getting out my antique hand carders from Quebec, with handles made like the old mission style furniture that are beautiful but a pain to work with. I don’t think ‘ergonomic’ is a French word, or maybe it didn’t fit on the boat when they came over to settle Quebec. Your hands get pretty achy after you’ve done a lot of carding. To solve my problem I borrowed the drum carder from the local Spinners and Weavers Guild, which looks very medieval and even a little scary. Then it became a matter of finding the six or eight green fleeces to make the perfect dahlia leaf color and turning the handle! I did run the fleece through twice, but out came exactly the color I wanted to create the felted compound leaves of the dahlia. I think I need one of those—hmmm—when’s Mother’s day?

Finally, yesterday marked the culmination of a community art project at Wonderlab. I did the first installment for ‘The Art and Science of Color’, and we made a pixilated Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. The pixels comprised 3500 wine corks that I’ve been collecting from all over town (Yes, it’s a very happy town!). They were painted yellow, blue or black by Wonderlab volunteers, which was a Herculean project—thanks everybody! I had sketched and painted the butterfly on a four feet square panel that Andrea Oeding had built and prepped (great job, Andrea!). From 1:30 to 4:30 Saturday the kids of Wonderlab and I, along with a lot of help from still more volunteers, glued the corks onto the painting. Paula, one of the Wonderlab volunteers and biology grad student, took some great photos. Wow, what a project! We came out a little short on the black and blue corks, but the butterfly emerged nonetheless. The border of the project was intended to be a dark green, but we intentionally didn’t paint any green corks. The plan was to mix visually blue and yellow corks to get a green effect, but the soft tints we used ended up looking more like a bed of flowers. So now the glues are drying, after which we’ll seal it before it goes on display on the workshop building in the Wonder Garden next to Wonderlab. It should be visible from the B-line trail, which of course will now have to be called the butterfly line trail.

To close, I just want to say that it has been an honor to work with Andrea and all the people at Wonderlab. Even though the weather didn’t cooperate, with the big snowstorm that closed schools on Friday and put us off until Saturday, everybody stayed positive and enthusiastic. And the best news after last week: we’re a little closer to summer!

Until next week…

Warm from the dryer…

This has been a good arts week. My inner fashion designer was validated when I got a nice e-mail from the Trashionista show coordinators. Not only was I juried into the show, they asked if I could make a second piece! Of course I couldn’t pass up a challenge like that, so off I went trying to design another ball gown. I was channeling river themes when I started, and the piece ended up blue, silver and black. I started off by repurposing an old blue sundress—the high-waisted variety that was popular back in the eighties. Then I trimmed out a bit of material from a pair of pants that was part of an old Halloween costume. It has a smooth, crushed velvet texture that’s now the waistband. You can’t live in the eighties, I say. I needed some decoration for the waistband, so I went to my collection of silver things and found a bag full of handles from fancy paper shopping bags. I had a vision that involved the bottles of glue left over from last year’s Children’s Booth project at the Fourth Street Festival where they glued all sort of found materials onto large panels in the colors of the BEAD logo. I added water to several of the glue bottles, dunked the bag handles into the diluted glue, then laid them out as a swirly pattern on wax paper to dry. The handles became the little swirly whirlpools on the waistband. Of course I had to maintain a little continuity with the first piece, so I zipped over to Opportunity House and snagged a nice black bathing suit for the top. It also secretly fits into the water theme, although the casual admirer might not notice it. As I was in the process of dress design I stopped in at Yarns Unlimited (celebrating 30 years in business) to see their beaded handbag display and ran into Suzanne Halvorson, which is always a pleasure. I was amazed at the intricate work, and one thing that caught my eye was the dangling triangles on the beaded handbags. I decided that’s what I needed to add some width and flounce to the gown. I achieved this on the dress by cutting slits into the bottom two thirds of the sundress and sewed in triangles of shiny black raincoat material. To top it all off I pulled out some leftover black spray paint. How often do you hear the top fashion designers say that—look for the technique to be big in the spring shows! I realized I could stencil nicely on the blue material, so I introduced a few black swirly patterns to give it a more industrial feel. I can’t make a ball gown with out a dryer sheet shawl, but this time I went with silver and black. The good news is that it looks great, but the bad news is that I ran out of dryer sheets. I’m going to need more for the ‘Edible Lotus’ project that I volunteered to participate in, so I’m on the lookout for more used dryer sheets. Yes, I blend the real and the surreal in ways unimagined by the greats of the renaissance.

While my dressmaking project has taken up a lot of my time, I haven’t lost track of my tomato project. I’ve been poking tomatoes and I’m up to sixty-five, three short my goal for ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’. I’ll need to make a few more stems and hopefully I can begin pulling that piece together this week. To celebrate I bought a single red tomato from Bloomingfoods, which I’ll enjoy on a veggie burger sometime soon. Nobody else in the family likes raw tomatoes, so this one is all mine!

Until next week…

Tomatoes in the snow…

This year Santa Claus brought the boys boogie boards for sledding on the snow. Ever since we’ve been waiting for snow, and not altogether patiently. Finally the snow started falling on Wednesday night, and the few inches we got shut down the schools for two days. The kids loved it, but somewhere in my Canadian hometown they’re laughing at us. We have since made several trips to Bryan Park to challenge the local hill. To get a picture of the fearsome slope, it’s about where the eastern most edge of the Rockies meets the western most edge of the Appalachians. With the steep gradient, and someone to launch you down the hill (thanks Bret!), you can get up a little speed. Somebody must have torn down the little posts with the black diamonds on them, and I think the rescue helicopter teams must have had the day off.

After a couple hours on the slopes, every good sledder needs hot cocoa. But a punishing day on the slopes also means cheese pizza—not all the shredding happens on the slopes. I discovered that I needed to replenish my pizza sauce supply, given the hungry hordes that were swarming the house, so I pulled the last of my frozen CSA tomatoes out of the freezer. They look a little sad, but they make great sauce, and now I’m ready to create all my tomato-based dishes for the rest of the winter. The shriveled little bodies are both the reminder of the riches of last summer and the promise of warmer days ahead.

Tomatoes have been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve steadily been producing needle-felted tomatoes for the commission piece I’m working on. The surface is going to be a collage of all the different tomatoes you might see at a late-summer Farmer’s Market. They don’t freeze well, so I keep them in a bowl to ripen up that last little bit as I make more. I’ve been using all of my tomato-coloured fleece to support the different varieties and shapes, so I’ve got everything from reds to yellows to greens. Then I delved into my tomato-coloured yarns. I even have some old red shoelaces of just the right shade that will end up somewhere in the piece. And so I’ve been joyously weaving a background for the piece this week. If you listen carefully you can almost hear the angelic choir in the background as I think about weaving after months of shows and scarves and ornaments. Have I said lately that I love to weave? Anyway, the background has kind of a smushed-tomato-on-top-of-the-stock pot look, bringing together all the colors of the surface tomatoes. You don’t really see it clearly in the piece, but where the surface tomatoes don’t quite come together you can see it peeking through. People used to say that you can’t see the forest for the trees—we’re going to start saying that you can’t see the weaving for the tomatoes.

This has also been a week of hanging shows, so if you’re out and about Bloomington this week, keep your eyes open. I hung a show with five other artists the John Waldron this week. They’re all fiber artists who clearly love color. They make the show bright and happy, and it’s worth the trip downtown. The opening reception was Friday night, and while the weather limited attendance, the people who came were lively and happy. I also hung my ‘Warm and Cosy: Scarf Art’ show at the Bloomington Bagel Company shop on Dunn Street. Surprisingly, my spell-checker still can’t get it through it’s head that Cosy isn’t spelled with a ‘z’. It’s just too much of an American sacrifice to change it after I’ve given up all the ‘u’s in my favourite words. You can see more scarves at Wonderlab museum if you stop in there. I ran into Andrea from Wonderlab at the John Waldron reception, and now I’m eager to see the display she put together at the museum. Andrea says they used magnets, foam and cord to hang the scarves, and somehow an air vent is breathing some life into them. Hmmm, maybe it’s time to incorporate movement into my pieces! I do love a challenge.

Until next week…