And the leaves keep falling.

My intensive weaving season continued over the past two weeks as I moved forward on several commissions that came in over the summer.  I completed the background on another piece that features a path through the woods.  I picked out all of the yarn colors for my pepper piece and warped the loom I’ll need.  I also made more felted balls for my ‘lemons’ piece—I feel like all of those projects are moving along nicely.  I also completed a piece that wasn’t a commission, but one that I started just before the Fourth Street Festival.   

The chaos that the weather brought to this year’s event kept me from completing it before the show.  I probably had the time, but I just couldn’t focus on art creation.  Waiting to complete the piece turned out to be a good thing.  When Grandma was here two weeks ago we collected some gravel from a creek bed that turned out to be perfect in the piece.   

The rocks had been beaten up a little and the edges smoothed by running water in the creek.  The smoothness and the weathering made them perfect for the rocky tip of the peninsula in the piece I was finishing.  If you’d like to see some of my most recent work, come to the first fall show of the season, the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show opens on November 9^th. 

The business side of my life kept me busy too.  Toward the end of the week I got Tom Bertolacini, my photographer, to drop by and capture images of many of my newer pieces.  It had been a very busy summer, and I just didn’t have a chance to capture images of many of my newer pieces.  Some of them sold before I could get a picture, but I’ve resigned myself to that eventuality when the crunch before a show comes. 

 I also negotiated with Bloomingfoods East to display my sweater petals.  The barrier to expanding my display there has always been the expanded footprint in an already packed store.  I had an epiphany when I turned the problem over in my brain—I would just extend my card rack up one story!  The lower level will continue to display cards while the upper story will house the sweater petals.  I built the display out of mostly all reclaimed and recycled materials, except for the dowel I bought new at Kleindorfer’s Hardware.  I’m hoping that the weather cooperates just a little bit to give me a window to paint my creation black to match the rack.  With any luck it will be at Bloomingfood’s East early in the week. 

And yes, the season also features Halloween.  This year Tommie wanted to be a Zombie and buy a Zombie costume.  I usually encourage making costumes (I’m pretty handy with fabric, it turns out).  But he really wanted the costume, so I decided it would be a reward for his excellent first term grades.  Jacob also had a clear idea in mind, taken from one of his favorite books.  He wanted to be the Ranger’s Apprentice.  Fortunately or unfortunately, he came with a clear vision of exactly what the costume should look like.   

He rejected all the green materials in my huge collection for the cloak.  We ended up in the fabric store to find just what he needed.  I sewed the material into the cloak, and he found a button that was perfect as a clasp to define the hood.  He needed a quiver and decided that black leather was the way to go.  I’m actually quite proud of what we were able to create together.  For the arrows, Jacob and Jim went into the garden and cut down dried lily stalks.  They needed sharper points, he decided, so he’s been using Sculptey, an oven bakeable clay, to create them.  They also cut down a curved branch from the maple tree in front for the bow.  He’s been doing some whittling to get the shape right.  I, on the other hand, found the perfect costume on a trip to the Recycle Center.  I can’t wait to wear my cow costume!   

Mary at the Recycle Center suggested that I might want to put a ring through one of the teats, but I could see Jim wincing at the visual.  I’ll have my fun on Wednesday and take it back on Thursday.  It was good that I didn’t upset Jim too much, because he made us a fresh raspberry pie this morning!  We found the last of the season’s berries at the Farmer’s Market.  One batch went into the freezer for a winter pie and one went into a crust this morning.  I had fresh, warm pie with a second cup of espresso!  Perfect!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Life’s path finds its home.

My past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride through a series of art and family events.  My big commission piece, ‘Life’s Path,’ is now complete and hanging in its new location, the Like Law Group’s reception area.  I just love how it looks against the orange background.  A lot of long hours went into completing the piece, which makes it all the more satisfying to see it hanging on the wall. 

 I immediately launched into my next commission, which also features a path.  This time the focus will be on the trees rather than the path.  Because my patron wants to hang it in a hallway it will have to be a flatter piece.  My trees can be a little feisty, and I don’t want them accosting anyone as they walk down the hall.  The challenge will be rely more on color to help create the perception of depth.  Of course the size of the objects in the piece conveys depth, so I’ll incorporate different sized elements such as crinoids to contribute to the depth aspect.  Fortunately, I have an extensive collection of found objects, sorted by size, so I’m already working the fossils into my piece.  As I’m moving this project forward, I’m also preparing for the next commissioned piece.  This is the time of year when I can catch up on requests for pieces I’ve received through all the summer art fairs, so you’ll be seeing these pieces come together over the next few weeks.  

 Next up is a version of my ‘Some Like it Hot’ piece that featured dozens of peppers.  The layout will be different, with the new piece a being narrower, taller version of the original.  The patron requested that I include some purple peppers, so I stopped in to visit the pepper lady at the Bloomington Farmer’s market on Saturday.  I bought a few purple peppers to get the color right.  A couple of days later I visited Yarns Unlimited and found some Corriedale fleece that was just the perfect match to my peppers.  

Along with the actual artwork, I’ve had several other projects to keep moving forward.  I’ve been creating felted balls in the dryer to use for fruits and vegetables, such as the larger peppers and some lemons that will appear in another piece down the road.  When the weather turned warm and clear, that was my signal to start finishing frames for the pieces.  I need to have the temperature above and the humidity below certain thresholds to stain or paint.  I need to get a bunch of frames painted before the cooler, wetter weather of fall blows in.  

The big family news of the week was the visit of Grandma (Jim’s mom) for the long weekend.  Friday was fall break for the school system and IU, so Grandma stopped by to play with us.  She told us the story of her family having raspberry pie for New Year’s Day with fresh whipped cream when she was a child.  While there are still raspberries around at the farmer’s market, we weren’t there early enough to claim a pie-worthy number.  Luckily, Jim froze a batch for pie filling a few weeks back and he baked one on Sunday morning.  Yum!  We’re going to need to get up early on Saturday and scavenge enough for another wintertime pie.   

Grandma went everywhere we did on the weekend, including out collecting fossils with the family.  Tommie is working on an independent study project for his science class, where he wanted to collect geodes from two locations and compare the crystal structures inside.  Of course it’s just a lot of fun to collect geodes and smash them open, so it doesn’t feel like work.  The report is written and the powerpoint presentation is done, we’re told, with two weeks to spare.  We’ll have to inspect it for grammar and completeness, but I’m delighted that he took the initiative and did it all on his own.   

On the collecting trip, we all climbed down into the river bottoms, including Jim’s mom at (very close to) 80.  She was a trouper, helping to find crinoids and small, opened geodes for Martina as Tommie did his thing.  We fed her a nice fish dinner for her troubles.  In fact, we ate pretty well while she was here!

Last, I wanted to mention a delightful adults-only date I had last Saturday.  Jim and I went to the Uptown for a nice dinner with a bottle of wine.  After the show we walked up Walnut to the Bloomington Playwright’s Project to see "Rx."  The staging was really impressive (great job again, Chad!).  Many of the actors were from Ivy Tech, so I even knew some of them.  The best performer was the woman who played the drug company manager.  She truly brought the character to life.  In fact, I’m sure I met her at a scientific conference several years back when I was still a scientist.  The whole evening was delightful.   

The only bad news from the week was the realization that summer is giving way to fall.  My first show comes up on November 9^th, which is the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show at the First United Church onThird Street - yup, it's a picture of my piece, Summer Salad in full colour!!  The Déjà vu and Unitarian Universalist Bazaar shows can’t be far behind.  Yikes!  What did happen to summer!

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

Fall is here!

Now that traveling to summer art fairs is behind me and the weather is cooling off, I know it must be fall.  The kids are back in school too!  My art studio is a much quieter place, which means I can put my full energies into weaving again.  Last week I wove and wove and wove on my giant commission piece.  I was able to complete the background weaving and crocheting.  The flat background that fills the frame came first, after which I released the piece from the loom and stretch it into the frame that Tom Bertolacini built for me.  Then I started to build the foreground soil by crocheting forward, building up in layers away from the woven background.  I used my yarns in beige, sand and taupe shades to create the path, and I used random greens that I tend not to use as the base for the forest floor.  It’s a great way to use up the blue-greens and Christmassy greens that rarely work in my pieces.   

They serve as a placeholder yarn that I’ll cover over using my grasses and plant materials.  The goal is to create a realistic forest understory adjacent to the path that moves through the trees.  When I step back and look at it, I realize that the piece that has consumed an amazing amount of yarn.  I’m estimating that I consumed close to a twelve-gallon tub of yarn scraps just to finish the base for the trees.  That’s a good thing, because now I can close the lids on my storage tubs and they fit in my wall racks again!  To finish the base, I picked out the exact sand, taupe and cream colors I wanted to use for the path and layered them on top of the crocheted yarn.  I then needle felted the components together to get the mottled look I wanted.  It was very satisfying to see it all completed.  With the background in the frame, I moved on to creating the tree trunks and forest canopy.  I finished needle felting the free-standing tree trunks, so they’re ready to plant.  This week I’ll extend the trees by constructing the branches and launch into making the leaf clumps.  After my last round of dyeing, I have plenty of the crunchy greens available to create the leaves.  It’s a huge project, but I’m delighted to see it coming together. 

 

My life is never quite as simple as it should be, so lots of other things are going on as I weave.  I’m deep in the throes of writing a grant to help support advertising for the Fourth Street Festival.  It isn’t glamorous work, but it has to get done before the October first deadline.  It helps make the show better by drawing in crowds from accessible markets such as Cincinnatti, so I know it’s worth the effort.  On the home front, Jacob is finally emerging from a long and nasty respiratory illness.  It’s something like whooping cough, but it didn’t test positive for the actual disease.  He sure has the ‘whoop’, though.  After three trips to the doctor and a messed-up digestive system from all the antibiotics he’s finally looking like Jacob again.  It’s so good to have him back!  Friday night turned out to be a big night for the family too.  We left the boys to guard the house (OK, to play Minecraft all evening as their treat) while Jim surprised me with an elegant dinner at Finch’s Brasserie.  I had the grilled swordfish, which was excellent, and a wonderful calamari appetizer. 

 Jim planned it so we could have a bottle of wine and walk over to the opera afterward on a pleasant fall evening.  We had excellent seats, right down in front with all the long-time subscribers, to see DonGiovanni.  I’ve seen it many times, and I really enjoy a lot of the music.  Of course the production was excellent, so it turned out to be a wonderful evening.  It was a dry walk back to the car, but we missed a torrential downpour while we were watching the statue claim Don Giovanni.  The boys were sleeping in bed (for how long I don’t know) when we got home so all turned out perfectly.  Saturday brought the farmer’s market, which meant lots more tomatoes for sauces, cucumbers for lunches, raspberries for pies, and hot chocolate (or espresso for me!) along the way.  I should also mention that with the cooler weather my enthusiasm for baking came back.  I made babovka (a traditional Czech cake), muffins (with healthy stuff packed in) and “co dum da” cookies (which translates into ‘what the house will give’).  This week the house gave a few chocolate chips, white chocolate chunks, some peanuts, oatmeal, wheat germ and ground flax seed.  Fortunately, the kids only noticed the chocolate.  I even made my famous cheese filled slugs on Friday!  All that baking took a lot of effort, but I think I inspired Jim to make another raspberry pie.  Hooray!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

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