Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I exercise with a bunch of crazy fun people in the wee hours of the morning three days a week.  They’re a terrific lot and we share many stories.  They have embraced me in their group and I love being part of it.  Not only do we exercise, we share stories and bounce ideas and act as each other’s support staff.  Just before Christmas, Cathy Green announced that we all needed to wear our solstice shirts to our exercise class on December 21^st.  Of course the rest of us just looked at each other in a puzzled way and hemmed and hawed.  When I got home I decided that if Cathy said we needed them, I was just the person to make them!  After scrounging for shirts, especially long-sleeved white ones (the sleeves are for yet another project—they’ll be pseudo socks for the Scottish highlanders in the parade in Hello Dolly—more on that later), I brought out my glitter glue, gold fabric and solstice-appropriate embellishments.  I briefly transformed the kitchen island into a craft space and gleefully spent the day on a silly fun project.  Oh, and Mary Madore, yours will be waiting for you when you get back to Bloomington! 

So Christmas—it was wonderful in our house with Grandma and Great Aunt Lois visiting.  On Friday evening before Christmas we ventured out into the rain to see Oliver.  It was wonderful—Cardinal never lets you down, especially for the holiday shows.  The joy pouring out from a stage full of kids singing and dancing is overwhelming and you can’t help but smile.  The costumes were terrific.  The sets were incredibly complex and featured constant rearrangement and reassemblies.  The choreography of the shadowy bodies flitting across the stage to create the sets was a captivating performance hidden inside the play.  I had seen many of the primary actors before, but the undertaker’s daughter was new to me and I thought she was terrific.  Mike Price, the outstanding professional pillar and mooring for all the young actors, was in his element.  He is an amazing character actor—I could watch him on stage all day.  We went home delighted to feast and party until we had to deliver everyone to the airport on Monday.  

On Christmas morning, Jacob received an unexpected present.  He was supposed to be a bad boy in the Sounds of South holiday performance.  It’s part of the newer Christmas song:  “I’m getting nothing for Christmas”.  Unfortunately, Jacob got sick and wasn’t able to perform, so Jim tried to make it up to him.  You have to sing, or at least say, that title line in your head to get the joke, but hopefully you’ll grasp it when you look at the box that Jacob is holding. 

My boys must have heard some running water around Christmas, because they turned into beavers and built a dam around the carport.  Our neighbor, Martha Oakley, had a large tree cut down in her front yard, leaving huge chunks of trunk that needed a new home.  After a large number of treks back and forth to Martha’s house, hauling some ginormous hunks of wood each trip, and a heck of a lot of swinging of the maul, we now have at least a year’s supply of firewood guarding my car.  The only downside to the break is that there Was. No. Pie.  OK, yes, we’ve had cookies, brownies, stollen, chocolate, and rumballs, but no pie.  But I’m hopeful!  The stollen didn’t last long.  The cookie supply is dwindling after giving away many tins and keeping after them after meals.  There are a few rumballs and brownies put away in the freezer for a time when chocolate is needed, but it’s time for a new dessert!  We NEED some of the summer farmer’s market fruit to come forth for a pie! 

Until next week

Martina Celerin

Art and Merry Making Collide in the Holidays

I carved out some time this week to get some work done in my studio while the boys were still in school and the full pressure of the holiday crunch had yet to set in.  My focus was on a willow piece, and I made wonderful progress on needle felting tree trunks.  I wrapped wires to create the branches using a mottled fleece combination of slate brown and cream colors.  The background is now also complete, which features a water structure that I created by crocheting together about twenty different yarns.  I like to use some silvery-sparkly threads to get the glistening effect of the midday sun on the water.  I crocheted a green peninsula into the piece to serve as a base for my willow on its own little patch of land.  Sometimes I feel this way about my more outlandish ideas, like I’m out on my own little peninsula trying to make things work out!  I have attached the willow to the background, but I still have to attach the dangling branches that will flesh out the tree.  The last touch will be to add some weathered rocks that we collected last summer from Topsail Island in North Carolina. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dawn Adams and I went to see the latest exhibits at the Indiana University art museum.  One exhibit (Grand Allusions) was by an emeritus faculty names Robert Barnes.  These were large-scale narrative pieces perhaps four feet square each and loaded with visual information.  I was simply enchanted by the works.  The one striking feature that connected many individual pieces was the use of a brilliant red color.  Earlier in the week Dawn had invited me to go to a noon talk at the art museum where the speaker discussed the idea of amulets created from natural materials, which inspired me to re-imagine my own earth pieces and design a new composition (Amulets for the Earth) for my ‘From the Earth’ exhibition for next year.  But as I sat and listened I kept looking at the artwork around me and was drawn back into the brilliant reds hanging around me.  The color had been haunting me to the point where it had to come out in some form.  I interrupted my willow piece to do something crafty, kind of like eating some salty potato chips when you know you should be eating salad—there was an immediate craving I had to satisfy.  Because I’m also focused on the Christmas season I made two wreaths.  The first included the ‘Barnes’ red, while the second one blazes with it.  Now that I’ve finished the second one I’ll get back to my willow. 

The big family project for the week is home decoration for Christmas.  The boys are hugely enthusiastic to tackle this, having already put a tree and lights around their room.  They put on jingly elf garb, played Christmas carols and started decorating.  The tree was the target for yesterday.  They put up all the ornaments collected over the years, so it’s fun for me to pull them out and remember the stories around them.  Next on the agenda is cookie baking for the boys and stollen for me (yes, spellchecker, I mean stollen—I’d wrest an umlaut from you too if I could, Microsoft!). 

 Grandma tells me every year that she doesn’t care if the house is clean or if anything else is on the menu, but we must have stollen (two kinds) for Christmas morning breakfast.  As I sat and enjoyed my Sunday morning espresso (thanks Jim!) and read the newspaper, I came across a big image of my work from the Convention Center exhibit (thanks Herald Times!).  The only thing that was missing was pie.  I hear raspberry goes well with the holidays!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Santa makes her deliveries!

My art season ran long last week as I finished up all the scarf commissions I had accumulated from late season art shows. I made quite a few red and purple scarves with black ruffled edges, depleting the southern Indiana stocks of merino in those colors in the process. I felt like the UPS delivery person at Christmas, calling up patrons and arranging for drop-offs. This picture may look like me rollerskating with my family, but I’m sure I was just out on a scarf delivery mission. One person was so delighted when she saw the scarf that it ceased to be a Christmas present for her granddaughter. Another friend picked out a scarf and sent her husband to buy it for her as a Christmas present. He said he’d grown tired of getting a blank look when his wife opened his presents, and he knew this was going to be a success.

I made some giant strides forward on my huge commission piece. It’s a five by 2-and-a-half foot weaving, so this week I hand-made a five by three foot loom. I was just about to hammer in all the nails needed to warp the piece, but then I heard the voice of my sweet husband in my ear: “Drill pilot holes! You’ll be happier if you do!” So I did! All the nails went in nice and straight, just like a row of carrots coming up. With a nail every quarter of an inch, well, you do the math—that’s a lot of holes and nails. But I was glad I did it. And I’m not just saying that so he’ll make me coffee and pie! I then warped the loom and it’s ready to receive the weft. After a quick trip out to Sheep Street to pick up all the dirt brown yarns I could find I feel ready to launch on the weaving. I also picked up all the merino roving I could for scarves next year (be prepared, I say). Oh, and I found some really amazing spun silk, which is the waste from weaving Saris. I’ve seen various examples in different yarn shops, but this was so stunning I couldn’t possibly leave it. I ended up buying a couple of skeins. This too will go into scarves next season.

With the holiday season comes family, and that’s a good thing. The first visit started earlier than I would have chosen, when my thoughtful Czech cousin arranged for a 5 a.m. flight to bring her son into Indianapolis. He’s learning English in Los Angeles, and he’ll spend a couple of weeks with us. I consider this his ‘polishing’ phase, where he learns real Midwestern axioms and pronunciation. Actually, I was really delighted to pick up Vojta and bring him home, even if I had to get up at 3:30 a.m. On the bright side, when I got home there was warm blueberry pie and a batch of homemade Kluski ready for dinner that night. And an espresso! The boys were delighted to meet Vojta and show him around the house. The next day he pushed them around in the shopping cart at the grocery store. They had so much fun I couldn’t tell who was the bigger kid. And...if that wasn't enough, my rusty Czech is getting a welcome workout.

The rest of the news is all about getting ready for the holidays. I’m making marzipan for my holiday Stollen. I’m taking over a tradition from Jim’s grandmother, who bought Stollen from the local grocery store for Christmas morning breakfast. I thought that was just the place to buy into a family institution, but of course I had to make my own. Mine is full of dried currants, dried cherries, dried cranberries, slivered almonds, rum, butter, lots of sugar, and it’s all baked into a yeast-risen dough and covered with buttery icing. Yum! More preparations are underway to prepare the house for Grandma and Aunt Lois’ arrival on Wednesday. I’m converting the art studio into a bedroom for Lois, and I’ve got to turn the jungle room into an extra guest bedroom. A full house at the holidays is a very good thing, though. This is especially true if there are good things to eat and lots of laughter. I’ll do my part!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin