Fresh Fruit

January 31, 2009

Twelve years is a long time. That’s both how long I’ve been in Bloomington and how long it’s been since we had a snowfall this large. I remember my first winter in town, a fresh face from Canada. I felt right at home helping people free their cars from the snow as I walked in to work. This week we had two big snowfalls that closed the school for three and a third days (a two hour delay for Friday). That meant I had some boisterous company as I worked all week, so not much weaving in the art studio was done. Between hearing about Pokemon character evolutions I did get to bring my felted fruit to colorful fruition (see the January 10th post for the 1950s black and white version). I was really pleased with how the watermelons, oranges, grapes and cherries turned out! Some of my boys play pals were pretending to eat them, but I knew my son wasn’t fooled, even as he chomped—he’d never eat a watermelon with seeds in it. The other exciting thing was that the oranges gave me a great idea for another weaving. I’m envisioning a piece called ‘Sangria’, a pitcher of cold fruit in wine for a hot summer afternoon. The color for the oranges I made was a blend of five wools to get the flesh right, and I used big organic navel oranges from Bloomingfoods as a model. And then I ate them! The watermelon rind is made of wool from New Zealand that a friend brought back for me, and the light green that fades into the rind was a special find. It comes from a dyeing project this summer when I was making verdant greens and I had a tiny bit of a pale green solution left. I dyed and saved the fleece, but I wondered what I would ever use that fleece for. When I needed a perfect light green this week I had it!
This morning I’m packing up my latest projects to show at a felting workshop today. It’s for the AEIA (Art Educators of Indiana Association), organized by Gladys Newsom, and we’re going to make felted hearts. Valentine’s day is coming, and that means love and wool is in the air. For me, anyway—for my husband it’s love and chocolate, and chocolate for the rest of the year.



Until next week…

Fruit Salad

Fruit Salad

The end of the past week was cold in Bloomington Indiana. Chuck Lofton said that it was the coldest day in five years, and the temperatures dropped to the wrong side of -10F. Even for a Canadian that’s cold. Our old house took notice, though. An inaccessible pipe to the upstairs froze Thursday night, cutting off the shower and flooding us with worries of broken pipes. Fortunately, I have a very large hammer and no fear of drywall! A few swift whacks and I found the offending pipe and had my trusty hairdryer on the job, full heat. My male relatives discouraged my use of a blowtorch and soldering iron, which really slowed me down. (Don’t worry; I don’t even have a blowtorch).

That leads me into the activity that you’ll find me doing most of my free time—needle felting. I do it at meetings, while my loving spouse drives the family around town, and while the boys do their Tae Kwon Do at the Monroe County Martial Arts center with Mr. or Mrs. Scott. With time on my hands and the hair dryer in place I was working on this weeks weaving project, a piece called ‘Fruit Salad’. How can you not dream of summer when it’s 14 below zero and your pipes are frozen? So I was making slices of fruit for the piece, which you can see in an unfinished form in the image I included. You’ll see unfinished apples, cherries, watermelon, strawberries and orange slices.

The inspiration for the piece really came last summer when I was dyeing wool using Kool Aid with my kids. I remember pulling fleece out of the dye pot and thinking that the color looked just like watermelon. Then the ‘I love a challenge’ part of me kicked in and I started imagining which fruits I would needle felt, and what the composition might be for a weaving. I decided to make a piece along the lines of ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’ or ‘Some Like it Hot’, my pieces based on tomatoes and peppers. But now I was thinking about picking blueberries at Brays (by the Crane Naval Station), eating apples from Musgrave Orchard that come over several weeks in the Core Farms CSA baskets, and improving the cherry harvest at Grandpa’s house by removing the ones that come ripe a little too soon.

So off I went! I have home-dyed wool from Sheep Street and the Farmer’s Market and a season full of memories of fresh fruits. I have a mental image of the chef (Auguste Gusteau) and the rat (Remy) in the movie ‘Ratatouille’ who liked to blend flavors into new taste experiences. Of course the challenge is to transform a mouthful of wool into a mouthwatering slice of summer. It’s also an attempt to blend the flavors of the fruit and the harvesting seasons across summer and fall into one piece.

Until next week…