Holiday Season, Here We Are!!

It was a jam-packed week for me, culminating with the Unitarian Universalist Art Fair and Bazaar over the weekend. I had to keep focused all week with meetings planned for Monday through Wednesday. I managed to make a few scarves each day in the days before the show. I was pleased and impressed to see all the yard signs advertising the show and the ads in the Herald Times—the organizers did a great job promoting the show. Thursday evening my set-up crew came to help me at the church. The boys and Jim did a wonderful getting the booth set-up in a new spot this year. Just about everybody was shuffled around, which freshened up the show. My Sweater Petals were a big hit, as were my Re-Shirts. This show was the first chance I really had to display them both. It was good to see people trying them on and moving around, which gives you a much better sense of how the fabric moves when you put on my wearable art. It’s a lot like seeing fashion come down the runway, where the movement of the fabric helps bring each piece to life.

The show ended at 7 on Friday, which let me sneak out to see Jim’s brown belt test at 7:15. I got there just before it started with a package of dark chocolate brownies from Galaxy Gourmet to match the new belt. We usually celebrate with ice cream after a belt test, but this time we went home to have some fresh-baked apple pie. I don’t think anybody minded.

After the show on Saturday we packed up the art and the booth, headed home and collapsed. With each boy doing Taekwondo and sparring back-to-back before the takedown my roadies were ready to relax. We had a fire in the fireplace, a little wine with a Peppered Salmon dish from the freezer, and everybody went to bed tired but satisfied. Of course Sunday just brought a new set of adventures, beginning with St. Nicholas day. On the Bloomington Celerin calendar it falls on the Sunday after the UU show. Each family member found a big stocking stuffed with treasures, ranging from chocolate to toothbrushes and bubble bath. I even got some Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride tea (I’m really tight with the Jolly old fellow). Oh, and when I came downstairs I found a note from St. Nick next to an espresso and a stollen filled with marzipan that I suspect came from Sweet Claire’s bakery! It’s a nice low-key introduction into the holiday season. Now I’m eyeing Christmas trees at Bloomingfoods and planning for the candy house. I just have to remember Jim’s birthday next weekend! Shhh, don’t remind him…

Oh and one more holiday show - next weekend is a Discardia event at the Shalom Multi-Cultural Bazaar (3750 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN) on Sunday from 11 - 3pm

Hope to see you there!!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Transition week

Since my last post I’ve been shifting gears. I’m exiting my summer art fair mode, which is built around traveling to fairs in the Midwest to sell my weavings. I have a few administrative projects to take on, such as documenting the success of the Fourth Street Festival and writing grant proposals to help make it a better show next year. I’ll also be giving a talk and putting on a three-day workshop in Cincinnati in a few weeks, and then I’ll focus on making scarves for the local fall shows. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t time for a new art adventure!

Two years ago I participated in the Trashionista fashion show. I had a lot of fun designing two gowns out of reclaimed materials and some ethereal shawls out of used dryer sheets. I’m excited about contributing to this year’s show at the Buskirk Chumley Theater. In addition to the main show, which is a worthy fundraiser for the Center for Sustainable Living, a smaller group interested in making clothes from recyclable materials appeared this year. They’re called Discardia, and this weekend they held their first show. It was held alongside the Simply Living fair in the Third Street Park behind the police station. I wanted to participate, but with all my responsibilities to the Fourth Street festival I didn’t think I’d have time to make any clothes. Then I realized I still had few days to pull something together—and I love a challenge! I leaped into action and created a pattern for a loose-fitting tank top. My thought was to piece together scraps of fabric from clothing that was popular in a previous incarnation. I decided to call my new line ReShirtz, and off I went picking color and pattern combinations I liked from my collection of retired clothing. My son Tommie loves this sort of project so he picked several combinations for me, including the first one to sell at the Discardia show. It’s been a lot of fun cutting apart beautiful silk dresses and batik pants from dated clothing styles. The change of pace from needle felting vegetables has been nothing short of refreshing! I’ll show the clothes at some of my fall shows, including the upcoming Déjà Vu Art Fair in Columbus.

On the family front, today marks my twelfth wedding anniversary. We celebrated last night with a delightful flatbread dinner and a bottle of Mollydooker Shiraz (our current favorite wine). I was surprised with a beautiful bouquet featuring a dozen red roses when I got home from the show takedown. This morning I smelled the crowning celebratory food, a raspberry pie featuring fresh red raspberries from the farmer’s market. I can’t wait to try it! The top crust is a little funky, as usual, but beauty isn’t the hallmark of a good pie. Even if I overdo it a little bit with pie I know that Zumba starts up again tomorrow at Windfall Dancers—hooray! What more could I ask for?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

My inner fashion designer emerges…

This was a week when, even with two boys to entertain and ferry about to play dates, I was able to keep my nose to the sewing machine and finish my ball gown for the Trashionista fashion show. I’m delighted with how it turned out! I call it ‘Elegance Reclaimed’, and now my budding fashion career is in the hands of the jurors. My inner scientist can handle either outcome, since all my expectations as an artist have pretty much been fulfilled. Still, I think I really met the challenge to reclaim and repurpose materials from the trash flow. The shawl for the gown is made from dryer sheets that I painted gold and black and stitched together. To feed my emerging inner fashionista I discovered a new stitch on my sewing machine—a compact zig zag stitch to fuse the diaphanous material. Wow! Now I’m even talking like a designer—this is great! The top is built from a favorite but failing black bathing suit. I stretched and abraided the bottom beyond the point where my modesty no longer allowed me to wear it. Instead of tossing it I transformed the sturdy part into my elegant gown top. I reshaped the neckline and stitched on a piece of an old black t-shirt, and at the junctions I attached well-worn black leather belts I acquired from the Backstreet Mission here in town. The antique gold trim is from a family friend, Kathey Gibson, and in its former life it was used to decorate Christmas gifts. The swirly doo-dad is a piece of plastic I’ve saved so long I don’t even remember where it came from (but of course I knew I’d need it someday!). The skirt itself is basically a crazy quilt made from old men’s and women’s shirts that I picked up at the recycle center. It’s built from a black leather skirt, bits of black lace bra (no need to go into that here), samples from a discarded upholstery book and animal print scraps. The animal print fabric was in scraps because my son Tommie and I made a shirt where he cut pieces out of the fabric and sewed them on a fading but favored grey fuzzy shirt, and now it’s still one of his favorite winter shirts. Back to the gown—the back is held together by scraps of Velcro and the buckles from the belts keep the whole thing closed. There are also a couple of old eye-and-hook closures that were left on cards priced at 19 cents for 25. That speaks to how old those are, but they still found a purpose.

In other big family news, we went to see the Cardinal Stage Company’s ‘Sound of Music’, featuring a charming neighbor of ours as Gretl. She was great, as was her supporting cast and the production. It’s actually amazing that a town of this size supports such fabulous theater, and we’re very fortunate to have them. They’ve never let us down. My boys really enjoyed the play, but I have to admit to having been jolted a few times with some of the staging devices. When the swastika banners dropped down, and the machine-gun toting Nazis came on stage, I was a little overwhelmed. These cast sinister shadows from my family history, even though my young kids (thankfully) don’t yet appreciate why.

Anyway, I’ve got to run. The phone is ringing, and the caller ID says it from New York City, some fashion design shop. Ah, the life of the nouveau fashion diva!

Until next week…

Tomatoes for Christmas!

At least that’s the way it started. Amid all the cookie baking, present wrapping and packing last week I got a phone call from a new patron who wanted a tomato piece for a Christmas gift. This is a bad news/good news scenario. I sold the ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’ piece I made, and last time the piece required 68 needle-felted tomatoes. That’s the bad news part. The good news was that I’d had some holiday wine and I love a challenge. I pulled out some felted wool balls I’d made and my red fleece and set to work. The first challenge is to create the tomato shape and get the ‘shoulders’ right. Then I start blending the reds to match my memory of September tomatoes. I love the fact that each fruit is a little different, not just among varieties but even on the same vine. Each one has its own special little lumps and bumps, a lot like people. The different varieties remind me of families, too. You’ve always got a few green ones that you know are good inside but haven’t quite made it in life.

Tomato construction didn’t stop as we drove to see the Grandparents for Christmas. My sweet husband drove for most of the trip and I poked tomatoes while the boys listened to books on tape. The seven hours seems a lot shorter when you’ve got a good book. I got a nice digital camera for a present and I’m looking forward to some higher quality images. It was just a lovely time with lots of hugs, food and cookies. Kathey and Ben Gibson hosted a Christmas dinner this year and everyone had a good time next door. There was enough snow for a few boogie-board runs down the hill, and some new records for distance were set. The major disappointment was that Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakwel, was sold out when we wanted to see it. Some among the group were more disappointed than others (hee hee hee). The drive back was slightly more interesting, with snow falling and lots of cars off the road. A jackknifed semi blocked traffic around Muncie for a while, but we pulled off for dinner and the whole thing only slowed us down a little. It was still a long day.

Now that I’m back in the art studio I’m going to re-launch into a project I started last week for the Trashionista fashion show. The challenge, and I do love a challenge, is to make something that’s elegant and formal out of things you’d normally throw away. I’ve put together a skirt made from old shirts, scraps of animal print fabric and the lining from an old leather skirt. I’m going to embellish the piece with gold pulltabs from my collection and bits from a black lace bra. Some things you just have less use for after ten years of marriage and two kids. Plus, I can thank my kids for the torso part of my creation, which will likely be the top of a black bathing suit whose bottom was worn thin on the rough bottom of the Limestone Lagoon at Bryan Park Pool. I’m pleased that I have my display mannequin for the whole process because I’m really making up the whole thing as I go along. Kind of like the rest of my life!

Until next week…