Fall is coming!

Now that the Fourth Street Art Festival has past, I’m eager to launch into my fall activities.  Foremost on my list is completing a large-format commission piece, which will be 44 by 24 inches when it is framed.  It’s a huge piece!  It’s going to take an intensive effort to weave the background.  Luckily, I love to weave!  Right now I’m laying down the base yarn colors, although they will not be highly visible in the final piece.  That’s because I use a crocheting technique to build forward a ledge at the bottom of the piece.  That’s where I will “plant” the mature trees.   

Speaking of trees, I’ve been assembling the trunks during my captive times away from home, such as when I watch the boys do their Taekwondo classes.  The trunks are solid wool, but the core is made from my father-in-law’s old wool army blankets.  They were holey and needed a good home.  I also had a good stroke of fortune at Fourth Street when a young girl approached me to see if I wanted to buy wool roving.  She raised Shetland sheep for her 4H project and had just completed the first shearing.  The wool was washed and carded into roving.  I’m always on the lookout for small amounts of various wools so I asked her to sell me eight ounces of each variety she had.  Fortunately, the aunt was coming to Bloomington and was kind enough to deliver the wool after the festival.  I sort of tossed it downstairs to catalog later into my extensive collection.  When I started looking around for tree trunk wool for my commission, I realized the bag of new roving had the perfect deep, rich coffee brown for my tree trunks!  

 I’ll also use many of the green wools I dyed last week to make leaf clumps for the canopy.  I love it when a project comes together!  If that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I took on another commission this week.  I will be a tall, narrow version of ‘Some like it Hot’, my pepper collection piece.  It features red, orange yellow and green peppers of varying sizes and colors.  That will mean a lot of needle felting to create the peppers, but I’m mentally ready to take on the fall color palette.  I think I need to work with a broader range of vibrant colors after making many pieces featuring the crunchy, bright greens of spring and summer. 

And speaking of fall colors, last weekend we launched into our annual bruschetta making project.  We started out at the farmer’s market, buying twenty pounds of tomatoes.  Roma tomatoes make up the base, but the project consumed about eight pounds of heirloom tomatoes of various colors and shapes and several pounds of onions.  Luckily, Jim planted an herb garden this spring and kept it watered through the dry weather.   

That meant we were able to include four kinds of basil (lemon, Thai, globe and Greek) and two kinds of oregano (Italian and spicy).  Jim doesn’t seem to notice that I basically mowed down the patch, but it was all for a good cause.  We spent a day blanching and peeling until our fingers were wrinkled, chopped like crazy and stirred with the greatest of care not to break up the tomatoes or allow material the bottom of the giant stockpot to burn.   

Forty-seven jars later I think we’re set for winter.  Actually, there are only forty-six jars in the freezer while one was left out to test.  Tommie, Jim and I give it a huge thumbs up.  Jacob is still acquiring a taste for such things.  

 I can tell that we’re settling back into a routine, since this week there was no pie for breakfast.  I can either be sad about not having pie or I can look forward to the next one, which I’m sure will be soon.  The second choice always works better!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Fourth street in the rear view mirror

Wow, what an incredibly intense week!  The annual Fourth Street Art Festival was scheduled for last week, but the remnants of Hurricane Isaac threatened the show.  The early weather predictions not only put us in its path, they predicted from 5 to 10 inches of rain for the weekend.  They even called the chance of rain both days around 100%.  As I watched the radar, though, it wasn’t as clear that it was going to hit us.  The system was moving more slowly and more to the west than the predicted path.  Whether or not we should even hold the show became a tough call, with the thoughts of possibly moving it indoors.  If we were clearly going to get hit it would have been an easy call.  The phone was ringing off the hook with calls from people who wanted to know our plans, including area newspapers.  

 My stress level went through the roof!  To make a long story short, we made our best judgment on the storm’s path and decided to hold the show outdoors in its usual place.  The Friday evening set-up went just fine, although you could tell that the weather was unstable with a threat in the air.  The streets were marked in record time as we all raced to get the booths set up and filled with art while it was dry.  When Saturday dawned the rain was still a state away to the east and moving North, not west toward us.  Hooray!  We had an absolutely beautiful Saturday, with just a couple of light sprinkles.  There were even patches of sun!  I couldn’t have asked for a better day.  People came out and bought art and everyone was in a great mood.  The forecast for Sunday was still pretty ominous.  I was still on high alert, but the day turned out to feature light rain, but no real threats.  No tornadoes, no lightning and no flooding came our way.   

In fact, the rain stopped about two hours before the end of the show!  That gave everyone a dry pack-up, which in "artspeak" meant the show was perfect.  I was positively giddy when I got home and had a nice dinner with wine.  Fortunately, Jim kept me from posting all the thoughts that ran through my head on Facebook.  In hindsight, that was probably a good thing.  Oh, and a little known secret—when I got home Saturday night, after handing out all the official awards to participating artists at the ‘official’ dinner, I came home to find that I had won the ‘Best in Show’ award!  There was a freshly-baked raspberry pie with a little ribbon on it for me.  The berries came from the Farmer’s market and the kitchen still smelled like baked pie.  I’m so glad my family thinks I always win the best in show!

Over the past week I’ve been catching up on all the projects I put on hold.  I first had to recover some sense of serenity after dealing with the show.  On top of that, a bad cold had settled into my family (but luckily, not me).  Nobody has slept very well over the past several days.  

 In the art world, I got more serious about my large landscape commission piece targeted for completion by month’s end.  That meant dyeing a bunch of yarn to get the colors I needed.  Fortunately, I just love dyeing yarn! 

 It’s very rewarding, just like picking fungal spores.  At the end of the day you have a whole pile of stuff to show for your work, and you get to build on all your hard work later on.  The spores yield Petri plates with germinated fungal mycelia to do more experiments, while the yarn goes into all sorts of projects, not all of which have even been imagined yet.  Now my yarns are drying on the veranda.  The humidity finally dropped on Saturday so I’m in pretty good 

shape.  I pulled out my enormous loom and I’m about to clamp it onto an easel to warp it.  I can’t tell you how glorious it sounds to have a day when all I have to do is weave, something else I love to do!  And you’re not going to believe this, but after another trip to the Farmer’s market, Jim baked me another raspberry pie!  It was so popular the first time that I didn’t get to enjoy much of it with coffee for breakfast.  And now I have another one!  Oh. My. Gosh.  Can life get any better?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Fourth Street on Labor Day weekend!

Over the past week I’ve been making the final push to create some fresh art pieces for the Fourth Street Festival.  I had a very successful summer of art fair travels, which left my booth looking a little threadbare.  Unfortunately, all of my most recent pieces sold.  I like to have some fresh work to show all my friends, old and new, at the Fair.  That means I had a couple of weeks of pretty intense weaving.  The piece I finished most recently is called Flower Fiesta.  The concept grew out of a piece I did a couple of months ago called Bike Parade.  It featured bike wheels dancing on the horizon between the sky and grass.  This time I wanted flowers instead of wheels.  I decided to try creating flowers based on my sweater petal strategy.  

 I also wanted to take charge of the color palette for my piece, rather than rely on what I can find at my local thrift shops.  I therefore did a little over-dyeing this week.  I took the big circles of felted sweater material and dyed them in purple, red, orange and yellow.  The colors came out beautifully, with one unexpected twist.  The dye wasn’t able to penetrate the entire thickness of the felted fabric, such that the core of the flowers remains the original colors.  It makes perfect sense in hindsight!  When I cut the sweaters to create the shapes I need I get a light colored outline around each swirl of color.  I think the mottled effect just adds to the spontaneity of the piece—there’s a real happiness and lightness to the piece that makes me smile.  Come by my booth at Fourth Street and check it out.  

In local news, the squash that I’ve been babying along (and excited to cook and eat!) is starting to look an awful lot like a decorative gourd.  The fruits are just not getting any bigger—dang!  The boys are getting into the swing of school and Jim is finally back teaching five mornings a week.  I decided that everybody needed a little reward on Friday night.  In my travels I stopped at Angel B’s bakery for some treats.  I learned about Angel B’s during the Art of Chocolate event last year when they produced some amazing confections.  I picked out a delightful selection that we all shared.  I must say that was a great idea!  Because it’s the last week before the Fourth Street festival, my life has been incredibly busy taking care of the last few details. 

Yesterday morning I was interviewed by the Herald Times videographer, as well as the arts writer, but I’ll save that story for next week as part of the Fourth Street Fair report.  You can look for me online on Thursday, if you’re a Herald Times supporter.  All I need now is to have Hurricane Isaac veer a little more to the west so the rains don’t hit us next weekend.  I’d like to have some nice weather for the show!

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

Home from Minnesota…

Today I’m happy to be home from all of my summer travels.  This past week I was hurriedly weaving new pieces featuring birches and water, a genre that has been well received.  I’ve been improving my technique for making the water more realistic and the foreground elements more elaborate and dimensional.  I’m really pleased with all my latest pieces.  I also completed my ‘Eat Your Veggies’ composition.  This is the one that features tomato slices, onions, peas and other vegetables.  The components have been my travel companions as I completed each of the foreground vegetables on my summer travels.  The good news is that all my most recent pieces sold at the Loring Park Art Festival in Minneapolis over the weekend.  The even better news is that I’m safely back home with my family after a very long drive. 

The Loring Park fair itself was a lot of fun to do.  The fair itself is organized around a very pretty lake.  Nearby are fountains, trails, a pool, flower gardens, basketball hoops and more attractions that help bring in people.  From the moment I got there the organizers impressed me as welcoming and efficient.  I (OK, Jim) was able to drive the car and trailer around the pond right to my spot Friday afternoon.  We set up on a beautiful summer afternoon and prepared for the show over the weekend.  A weather front that produced heavy rains and winds moved through the area Friday night, but fortunately my booth and art survived the storm without any problems.  Saturday and Sunday morning the organizers drove around with juice, water, fruit and treats.  

 I liked the fact that they came to me to check in and see how things were going.  I had two beautiful days with sunny skies in the upper seventies, which brought out the friendly art appreciators of Minneapolis.  Takedown was just as easy, and within an hour and a half we were on the road out of town toward Tomah Wisconsin, our waypoint on the long drive home. 

When I got home I stepped back into the home stretch of the Fourth Street Festival here in Bloomington.  A lot still has to happen for the show to come together, but I feel good about the efforts of the organizing committee.  It’s going to be another good year.  This year we’re going to have something new on Dunn Street.  We’re hosting Art Cars, which is really Dawn Adam’s brainchild.  Laura Lane, a writer for the Herald Times, put out the call for the cars.  I don’t know exactly what to expect, but there are likely to be mosaics, painted cars, and other embellishments on vehicles.  I’m looking forward to seeing some fun and funky cars.  These aren’t cars you’ll see at the dealership or the NASCAR track, so plan to be in town Labor Day weekend. 

Did I say I was glad to be home?  I sure am!  I spent the drive crocheting leaf clumps, so I know there’ll be a bunch of trees in my future.  I’m still channeling more birches and lakes, thinking about how we need more rain.  The corn was really painful to see along the expressway all the way to Minnesota.  I do have my own little bright spot in the gardening world, though, which features a volunteer squash in the garden by the front door.   

This is where the hamster bedding and uneaten seeds were used as mulch over the winter, and one little squash plant germinated this summer.  I run a dehumidifier in my art studio, and that leaves me a bucket of water to empty every morning.  My little squash gets all she needs.  I don’t know what kind of a squash it will yield, but I do know I’m planning on eating them!  Maybe if I get a lot I can make a squash pie.  Hmmm, that just gave me an idea, now that peach season is in full swing!  And we’ll get to the farmer’s market on Saturday!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Home from Michigan…

We returned late last night from a weeklong adventure in Michigan visiting with family.  It was a bit of a family reunion, which means Grandma had a full house.  Jim’s brother Tim, his daughter Haley, and her husband Kris were in town for the week.  The boys didn’t remember Haley well and hadn’t met Kris, but the boys took to them right away.  They taught Kris how to play Yu-gi-oh and he taught them how to play blackjack using chocolate coins from St. Laurent Brothers in Bay City.  Jim, Kris and Tommie went fishing one afternoon and ended up getting soaked, but no one seemed to care.  They came back with plenty of stories and a few rock bass.   

Of course when I went out on the bay before the rains came I was able to bring back dinner.  We were doing a lot of fishing and not a lot of catching, so I used my handy iphone to check the fishing reports.  I used the intelligence to direct Jim and the Lila Mae to the hot spot where I promptly caught two dandy walleyes that made a fine dinner.  When the whole family had arrived we had a big fish fry using a bunch of walleyes we had caught in June and frozen (I do remember catching most of those fish too, now that I think about it).  I’m getting pretty good at this fishing thing!  

On our way to Michigan, with relatives from New Mexico on the way, we thought it would be nice to stop in to the farmer’s market and pick up some Midwestern gold to share with our relatives.  That meant corn on the cob and local peaches, which Jim translated into a delightful pie.  He was listening!  Along the way I got a call from Tom my photographer and frame-maker, who couldn’t get oak for frames that were straight enough to satisfy him.  We were able to stop in to Sequin Lumber in Bay City and pick up a bunch of straight, cut-to-order red oak that was kiln dried, so Tom should be back in business soon.  I look out for all my peeps! 

With some time to reflect after the trip, it seems to me that lately my trips are defined by the vegetables I make along the way.  On the way to Madison I made mushrooms; coming home I made carrots.  On the way to Michigan I made cucumber slices, while on the return trip I made onions.  I was intent on completing a piece called ‘Eat your Veggies’ that I want to take to Minneapolis for the Loring Park Art Fair this coming weekend.   

That meant I spent a lot of time in Michigan poking veggies as well, making sliced tomatoes (with seeds) and some snow peas.  I laid out the veggies I had one the piece and it’s clear I’m really close—I really just need one and a half more onions and I’ll be there.  I’ve posted the near-complete piece so you can see how it’s coming together.  The good news is that I have a couple of taekwondo classes this week where I’ll have a chance to finish poking and finish up the work.  I just hope Minneapolisonians like their veggies! 

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Madison sizzles…

Last week was a blur as I frantically prepared for my (fingers crossed!) annual trip to Madison, Wisconsin.  That’s where you would find the Art Fair on the Square and a base of exceptionally knowledgeable, fun and enthusiastic art buyers.  I pushed hard to finish one last piece I’m calling ‘Riding Into the Sunset’.  I’ve been moving that piece along for the past couple of weeks and wanted to take it with me to Madison.  I had laid out the green yarns for the grassy area at the base of the weaving and the gradient to a setting sun in the distance.  I envisioned a winding path through the gradient that flowed from a tangerine orange to a crisp lemon yellow at the top.  When I had the background under control I delved into my container of bangles that I’ve collected at various places around town, including Opportunity House.  I used those as the basic structure to created my bicycle wheels, which I then wrapped with silver cording.  I also used silver yarn that I got from an overstock sale on Etsy (thanks Marilyn Brackney for the heads-up!).  To create the tires I’ve been collecting black shoelaces of different thicknesses.  That let me create different types of tires, ranging from thin racing tires to thick off-roading tires.  Together they just roll off into the sunset. 

When Thursday morning came, the whole family packed up and we headed out to Hollandale, Wisconsin.  Deep in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin, next to the headwaters of the Pecatonica River, we found our friend and host Wendy.  Duane was off at a business trip in Texas, but we were greeted enthusiastically (although with some suspicion) by Jamie and Buddy, the fierce guard dogs.  Along the way we stopped in Champaign, Illinois at Papa Del’s pizza and took three pies on the trip for dinner.  They weren’t as good as the pizza in the restaurant, but they were well received after the long drive from Bloomington.  We sat around and chitty-chatted longer than we should have, then headed for bed to get ready for set-up the next day.  I had been following the weather forecasts with predicted highs over 100 degrees with chances of thunderstorms each weekend day.  Fortunately, the forecast missed the mark and set-up wasn’t too bad with a pleasant breeze under overcast skies.  After fortifying ourselves with frozen yogurt we set up the show without a hitch and headed back to Hollandale.  When I arrived Saturday morning, the crowds were already there an hour early.  They might have been trained to visit the farmer’s market there, or they might have been planning to beat the heat, but the crowds showed up in big numbers.  Better still, I had a lot of fun talking to the show regulars who seem happy to visit with me and talk about my art.   

They tell me about the pieces from last year that they remember and comment on the new pieces—I feel like I’m developing friendships there and the art fair is when we have a chance to catch up.  Some of the new favorites this year included Solitude, which features a bicycle leaning up against a maple tree, and my new turtle piece.  The bad news was that on Sunday the thermometer shot up and the oppressive heat took a lot out of the fairgoers.  I could feel myself fading a little as the temperature approached 100 degrees.  I decided to put some ice in a ziplock back (actually three nested bags) and slip it under my hat to cool my head.  Within five minutes I was feeling spry and chipper.  I’m going to have to remember that trick! 

While we traveled to Wisconsin for the show, it was wonderful to spend time with Wendy and Duane out away from everything.  Wendy made us delicious shish kabobs using fresh marlin and vegetables, which turned out very well.  I really loved the barbecued onion from the grill.  She followed that up with an amazing chocolate cheesecake with a layer of ganache on top—yum!  A nice meal with a glass of wine, followed by something tasty and chocolatey just can’t be beat!  Alas, good things must come to an end, and Monday morning we packed up and drove back home to Bloomington.  It’s good to be back in my cool art studio, but I’m back in frantic mode to create more art for the rest of the summer shows!  It’s a good problem to have.  There’s only one thing that would speed me along, and it has something to do with ripe, juicy yellow-orange summer fruit and a crust.  I’m thinking of a number between three and four—any guesses, Jim?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin