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

Snead’s Ferry is the place for fresh fish

We’re back in Indiana after a glorious week on the beach on Topsail Island, North Carolina.  It was awesome!  Though we have traveled to the Outer Banks in the past, this year was a new adventure for us.  We went to southern North Carolina and rented a house on the beach of North Topsail Island.  

 That meant that the ocean temperature was warm enough for even me to venture in several times.  I spent a record amount of time hanging out at the beach, boogie boarding, and collecting treasures that had washed up on shore.  I didn’t take any work with me, as in no fibers except the clothes I wore.  I did take along my pencil crayons and a sketchbook and had some wonderful opportunities for plein air sketching. 

Of course thoughts of art are never far away.  I did find a couple of types of beach rock that are going to be perfect for artwork.  One type is known locally as mother stones.  These are rocks with many smooth holes in them.  We collected them before we knew what they were, but we learned all about them on our visit to the Missiles and More Museum.  We had a delightful and informative chat about the local beach artifacts with the two curators.   

We learned that the stones were revered by ancient cultures as a talisman of fertility.  From my perspective, they’re awesome ‘beads’ to use in weavings.  We also collected Precambrian quartz discs, washed smooth by the ocean like sturdy beach class.  Some of them were almost transparent while some possessed oxidized or reduced iron that tinged them red or grey.   

I’m not sure what I’m going to use these for, but rest assured I’ll find something.  We also learned about fossilized shark’s teeth that are common the island.  They’re black, sharp and shiny.  Once we knew to look for them, though, we found them all over.

One of the things I really looked forward to was being able to buy fish right off the fishing boats in the neighboring town of Snead’s Ferry.  What a great name for a town!  We discovered Mitchell’s, and like the seagulls, we leaned to come when the boats were returning with fresh fish and shrimp around nine in the morning.   

We got to see the shrimp unloaded and learned how to clean and prepare them.  They were amazing sautéed in butter and garlic, tasting more like lobster than shrimp.  We got to pick out the fish we wanted from the laundry baskets full of ice most days.  

 Even when it didn’t come from the boat, we had amazing fresh fish every day!  We tried redfish, mullet, sea trout, pompano, croaker, spot, flounder, bluefish, redfish and a big black drum on the last night that Jacob declared as his favorite.   

The pompano was a huge hit in our only fish fry—mmm, was that ever good!  Jim and Tommie caught spot and croaker off the pier, then bluefish, flounder and sharks in the surf.  If I ever retire from Bloomington I want to move to Snead’s Ferry.  Even the name just says it all.  Our whole north Topsail Island vacation played out at a slower pace than our trips to the Outer Banks around Corolla.  

 The houses don’t have pools and rarely have hot tubs, and the people we interacted with were more down-to-earth than the more tourist-oriented folks on the Outer Banks.   I’d like to say it’s good to be back in Bloomington, but I wouldn’t mind still being in North Carolina! 

Now that I’m back in town and settled in, my focus is on finishing some pieces for the Des Moines show in late June.  High on my list is my large format piece that features a path through the woods piece.  I’ve been crocheting the dimensional portion of the path to create the base, which projects forward about ten inches to support my tree trunks.  

 Next I’ll needle felt the path on top of the base.  At that point I’ll be ready to assemble the piece—I already have the tree trunks, branches and crocheted leaf clumps waiting to become trees.  I’ll be glad to pack that one up for art fairs and ultimately off to a good home. 

This week features more family news than art news.  Still, I need mention a couple of other things.  We did find fresh local blueberries at a roadside farmstand.  That means I got a pie!  There was no pie dish, so it ended up in a small casserole dish.  There was a lot of filling and not so much crust, which I liked.  Jacob got into baking on the trip, thanks to Mrs. Tamborrino’s Emeril cooking project.  Jacob came with a book full of class favorite recipes. 

 He made gulab jamun (little deep fried milk and butter balls, soaked in cardamom-flavoured sugar syrup).  Yum!  At the end of the trip I made ‘Low Tide’ cookies to use up all the left over baking supplies.  They were just perfect as a snack food on our trip home.  All the flights were on time, our luggage followed us, and we got home at a reasonable hour.  Let the summer begin!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Leaf clumps are old, Swuppets are new...

My art focus last week was on my big commission piece.  For a huge landscape piece with lots of trees I needed to make a mountain of leaf clumps for the tree canopy.  I now have enough to fill a salad bowl! 

 I have been making branches to house the leaf clumps - I've made several to get me started and today I'll start attaching them to their trunks.  I never know how many I will need until I see them attached. Creating the giant trees is becoming less of a design and more of a discovery project, which means I’m readily distracted.  Squirrel!  There!   

Actually, what happened was I stopped in at a local business to ask whether she would be interested in carrying my sweater petals.  She hummed and hawed and asked if I had anything new.  Of course I do, I just haven’t invented it yet!  I’m still going to make sweater petals this year, since this is only the second year I’ve made them and I’m still developing ideas for the pieces.  In other words, I haven’t burned out on making them yet.  Along those same lines, this will likely be my last year to make scarves…    

I had been thinking about kids, and puppets came to mind, so I created Swuppets!  They are puppets made out of upcycled wool sweaters.  The creatures are whimsical, silly monsters.  The boys helped me sketch out some ideas for faces that appealed to them, and I’m having a great time making them. 

My life is never as simple as art projects, and this week was no different.  I wrote a grant for the CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) to support advertising for the Fourth Street Art Festival.  Over the past few years we’ve used the monies to support advertising buys in markets well beyond Bloomington.  Our goal is to attract art patrons from markets such as Cincinnati and north of Indy where the drive isn’t excessive, but where people might choose to spend a night in town.  All the stress of gathering data and writing the grant might be one of the reasons I needed to create the Swuppets when I did!  On Friday night my boys passed their red belt test in Taekwondo.  I’m very proud of them all.  They’re talented and cute as bug’s ears.  I continued on my baking binge by making a yeast-raised apple bread and cranberry-orange chocolate chip muffins.  Fall is soup time, so I made Three Sisters soup.  The three sisters are white beans, corn and butternut squash.  The recipe came from a Bloomingfood’s flyer a couple of years ago and has been a staple for winter dinners.  This week I’ll make corn-squash chowder.  Oh, and I wanted to mention that in my travels I dropped off my sweater petals to the new Hidden Closet location, which is now on Kirkwood across from the Buskirk-Chumley theater.  Brynda Forgas is the owner, and now she has a huge space compared to the tiny shop she had in Fountain Square Mall.  I’m delighted for her and wish her well in her new home. 

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Fourth Street Festival is on the horizon…

I did a lot of driving to art fairs this summer.  During my most recent trip to Minneapolis I had some fond memories of the geology I grew up with in northern Ontario.  We drove through some beautiful granite formations, and I even got to see some cool hoodoos.  If you don’t know, these are striking rock spires that improbably narrow and widen as they rise.  Usually the top part is made of more durable rock, standing on a softer rock layers that were eroded.  I had gotten so used to southern Indiana’s limestone structures that it was striking to see the scraped granite outcroppings I remember from northern Ontario, especially on the Bruce Peninsula.  

 I also saw the familiar sycamores of Indiana replaced by the birches of the north.  I found myself missing the birch trees of my youth.  Of course I had to make more birch pieces!  This decision was reinforced by the fact that these pieces have been popular at art fairs this summer.  I have now finished two of these pieces, which will be on display at the Fourth Street Festival.

Another art project that I’m looking forward to seeing in action is the yarn bombing of some local trees.  This is a fundraising project for Middleway House, organized by Mary Ann Gingels of Yarns Unlimited.  There’s a nice story describing the project in Bloom Magazine  if you’d like to read more about it.  I’m sorry I couldn’t be part of it, but my plate is overflowing with preparations for the Fourth Street Festival.  Somewhere in Bloomington there’s probably a tree that’s grateful.  I did donate a bunch of yarn from my stock for the project, so I feel like I’ll be there in spirit. 

When it rains it pours, and this week was the start of school for my boys.  Tommie is starting middle school at Jackson Creek, so he has to be up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the bus.  He comes home exhausted every day.  Jacob is still cruising at Binford.  He’s Mr. Confident and is mature beyond his ten years.  And for those of you keeping track, yes, hubby Jim did make me a peach pie this week. Mmmmm. 

Close to the front door, my squash is thriving.  It has three babies, which I’m starting to suspect are either acorn squash or pumpkins, based on the shape.  I’m still watering the plant regularly with my dehumidifier water.  As it grew, it decided to crawl over the sidewalk, so I had to redirect it.  I love all my boys, but it takes a constant effort to keep them all in line! 

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Arbor Day for Life’s Trail

I spent most of this week working feverishly on Life’s Trail, my commission piece.  Last week I finished weaving the background, and this week I released the whole piece from the loom.  After I attached the piece to its frame, I started using dimensional crochet to build up the path.  The background features a sumac weave structure, which creates the loops I use as the starting point for crocheting.  Did I mention that it was a huge piece?  I literally went through pounds of sand colored yarn in this phase of the project.  I used up close to 20 skeins of yarn remnants building the path that projects a full twelve inches from the frame.  In order to create the smoothness I wanted for the path I needle felted several yarns in the sand/taupe/beige range.  I’m very pleased with how that turned out. 

The next phase of the project involved creating the trees that stand in the foreground.  Basically the trees are solid wool except for the very core, which begins with used baling wire.  I wrap the wire in a couple of layers of grandpa’s old wool army blankets to keep it cozy when it gets cold.  I then needle felted the bark on the surface using bark-colored wool roving.  To create the branches I began with an assortment of thinner wires from several recycled sources.  Some of the branches contain floral wire, while others come from spiral notebook that I took apart.  Some are just wire remnants from Grandpa’s collection.  To turn them into branches I wrapped them with hand-spun wool that matched the bark roving perfectly.  I feel like those trees and branches could have been my kids, because I took them everywhere with me and kept poking at them until I was satisfied. 

With trees and branches in hand it was Arbor Day.  I planted my big brown trees by needle felting them onto the path.  So far I have three trees finished and I’m making progress on the last one.  I’m very excited about how it looks, especially now that I can get a sense of the depth of the piece.  When the last tree is planted I have the leaf clumps at the ready to attach.  I can’t wait to see how it all turns out! 

On a final art note, this weekend is the soft opening of the Discardia store in the Trained Eye Studio.  It’s on the B-line trail at 615 North Fairview close to 11^th Street.  Discardia is a new, cooperative adventure by local artists where all of the items are made from 90% reclaimed and recycled materials.  It’s a project that’s very near and dear to my heart, so I hope you can stop by.  Their full grand opening will happen later in June, so keep an eye open for that as well—it’s a worthwhile adventure that I’d like to see succeed. 

Until next week…

Martina Celerin