Things are Humming Along!

Birds are flying in and out of my life right now.  I participated in the annual Spinners and Weavers Guild show at the Bloomington Convention Center over the weekend, and I displayed my new whimsical birds and bird-themed weavings created over the summer.  Two of the whimsical birds found their forever homes and I was commissioned to create two more.  They seemed to make a lot of fair-goers very happy, so I’m calling that project a success.  My latest bird piece is ongoing, however, and I devoted a substantial block of time this week to creating a hummingbird.  I’m imagining a full sized weaving featuring three clusters of flowers from a trumpet vine, where the compound leaves cascade forward from the woven background.  I was pretty excited when I created the trumpet flowers about a month ago, and they have patiently waited for a hummingbird to come along to pass some pollen from bloom to bloom.  

The change in weather (and the end of my role in costuming) allowed me the time to bring the hummingbird to life.  I’m pretty excited about the composition as a whole, and I can’t wait to assemble it. 

The end of one project brings another, and I need to set aside my birds for a few days to focus on my upcoming workshop this weekend here in Bloomington.  It has been a long time since I was able to hold a workshop where I can sleep in my own bed!  It will take place on Saturday from 9-4 at the St. Thomas Lutheran Church on Third Street.  If you are interested, there are still three slots open—let me know and I’ll connect you with the organizer.  The workshop focuses on needle felting techniques, and we will create – yup – birds!  

They can be any kind of bird your heart desires, from representational to whimsical, from drab to colorful, and from small to large.  I plan to have a great time, with lots of laughter, enthusiasm, and transfer of information and ideas. 

This week I continued on my quest to create a fun dye pot using natural materials.  Avocado shells and nuts were the featured material, which my son Jacob has been collecting for me.  He likes to make avocado toast for breakfast, and he slips the unwanted materials in a big ziplock bag in the freezer for me.  I scoured the web for tips on how to dye with avocados and I found two important details for creating a nice pinky-brown wool.  The first is to carefully wash the materials to remove any remaining avocado flesh, and the second is to raise the pH of the solution.  I added a half a cup of baking soda to my four gallons of dye and boiled my freshly washed wool for an hour.  

The pot steeped overnight and I pulled the fleece out the next day.  The rainy weather slowed the drying process, but now I have an almost dry wool.  I’ll add it to my stash of wools in the category of ‘this will be just perfect for something, I just don’t know what yet’ in my vast fiber storage area. 

The week ended with a delightful celebratory dinner after the show, where Jim made ginger glazed salmon with fresh ginger from the farmer’s market.  Steamed broccoli and jasmine rice completed the meal, and a beautiful and delicious raspberry pie followed for dessert.  Add a glass of celebratory wine and it’s clear that life is good.  Full, but very good.    

Until next week,

--> Martina Celerin

And I’m back!

Yes, the waters in my art studio have long since receded.  The combination of busy summer art fairs and travel took me out of the blog-writing routine, but I’m going to try my best to get back into a rhythm that lets me write.  I’m also at a point where I’m excited about creating a whole new body of work that I’ll write about here.  First, let’s do a little catching up to set the stage.

Saturday night was the last performance of Sounds of South’s Guys and Dolls.  I did the costumes and props for the show, all while enjoying the efforts of the kids who put together an outstanding set of performances.  I like creating more whimsical costumes, which I got to do in Hello Dolly, Pippin, and Beauty and the Beast, but I pushed myself into a completely different approach for this one.  I decided to do the opening scene, called Runyonland, all in sepia tones to capture a historical feel.  It gave a warm aura to the movement of background actors who set the tone for the play.  I did the male leads in plaids and the females in polka dots and bright colors. 

The kids really embraced their roles and each performance was wonderful—you never would guess it was a high school production.  Several people, including Uncle Tim visiting from New Mexico and Steve Scott, Jacob’s martial arts instructor, proclaimed it to be the best show of the performances I costumed.  Jacob was charming in his dancing and acting roles, so everything came together Nicely Nicely. 

My most recent art directions have developed around transitions in my life and in the world, especially with regard to places and cultures.  My family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968, which brought me to Ontario.  Science brought me to Indiana and the United States, but art and my family have rooted me here. 

I think I’m especially sensitive to migrations and the life transitions they embody, and my latest body of work will be called ‘Where have you been and what have you seen?’  

Some trips are such a part of my being that I can’t imagine not doing it, which makes me think about monarchs and warblers traveling thousands of miles and crossing the international boundaries without noticing or caring.  And of course the human contrast is the single life-changing migrations, such as my family coming here from Europe, or people from South America trying to migrate north to seek asylum.  Each individual has to make a profoundly life-changing decision to commit to uprooting and attempt to re-establish in a completely different environment. 

They each bring their own histories, traditions and experiences to their new home.  

In addition to large scale migrations, I’ve been thinking a lot about the routine travels we make beyond our locale, which might mean our annual vacation to the coast of North Carolina or an unplanned day jaunt to Indianapolis to investigate an art installation site and visit a new restaurant.

I got to thinking about the shorter trips to various places life takes me, such as my trips to art fairs in different states, or just traveling to Indianapolis for a day to explore galleries and restaurants.  Our extreme mobility lets us move hundreds of miles to a place where we don’t know anyone, confident in our security and ability to discover new people and events.  That’s more of a whimsical migration, but we bring our interests and experiences and temporarily plant ourselves in a new place just for fun.  I’m creating work that speaks to each of those ideas about migration, movement, and the transitions that occur along the way. 

Over the past summer I was thinking about the barriers to the life changing single events that exist for humans but not birds or insects. I created a piece called border patrol as I merged the two worlds in my mind.  More recently, having just returned from a day trip to Indianapolis with Dawn Adams, I realized that those shorter, whimsical migrations really make a huge difference in one’s disposition and outlook on life.  A piece that I was working on as individual components suddenly came together as a cohesive composition. 

I’m going to create a piece called Tree Concert Trio.  It touches on the amazing singing that the Sounds of South students have been doing, and I think that somewhere the polka dotted costumes started appearing in the markings for my whimsical bird singers that will populate the piece.  I’m imagining them singing together on purple branches with green leaves.  It’s a happy, feel good piece about my life.   

I have also had some pretty big changes in our family life.  We dropped Tommie off at Oberlin College, or perhaps better said he packed the van, drove us all there, and assumed a new life full of study, Rugby and Aikido in his spare time.  That means the house is a little quieter as we tend to the last bird in the nest.  We did visit him a few weeks ago, and he led me to a big haul of black walnuts on the ground that I scooped up for dyeing.  When I got home, I husked them, broke the husks into one inch pieces and filled my dye pot with them and water to simmer on the veranda.  I didn’t know how the smell would be.  

After an hour boil and overnight steep I pulled out the husks and added a pound of washed, white fleece.  After another boil and steep I pulled out an absolutely scrumptious warm brown fleece, more beautiful than I could have imagined.  I moved on to overdyeing some green, red and teal cottons and wools to great effect, and I’m hoping to do a couple more rounds of dying.  Jim always said you have to embrace the spectrum of browns if you want to be a true Midwesterner!  I’m getting closer.   

I hope you’re not surprised to hear that I’ve had a few pies since I last wrote.  In prime raspberry season, we brought home two pints from Mark at the farmer’s market each week and I had a fresh pie for five straight weeks.  Jim was working on perfecting his tapioca filling technique, and I tried to tell him this was just too many pies for me.  I waited until he was off at work, of course, so he didn’t really hear me....  

We even had a raspberry pie from frozen farmer’s market berries that we got to share with our family members Dave and Martha from Mississippi when they were here for Guys and Dolls last Saturday.  Sadly, the raspberries are now out of season after the frosts, and I’m not much of an apple pie person.  Like in my art career, I guess I just have to wonder what’s coming next!

Until next week, if the creek don’t rise,

--> Martina Celerin

Spring rains like my art studio…

The heavy rain continued this week.  Unfortunately, some of it wanted a tour of my art studio.  This happens all too often for me, usually after the ground is saturated and rain keeps coming down.  I even had rain running in through blocked up windows in my storage area.  That created a whole new problem.  The good news is that none of my weavings were affected.  I like to turn adversity into a positive, so I took the opportunity to review all the treasures in my studio that came upstairs to evade the water and purge the items that have sat around for years.  I’ll find them some new, dry homes. 

Before the rains, I had been making some good progress, finishing the background weaving for my latest commission.  I stretched it out on its frame, and next I’ll launch into the dimensional crochet component where I build the foreground further forward.  I’ve already wrapped a mountain of reeds and cattail leaves while watching the final episode of Face Off, one of my few television guilty pleasures.  The contestants create dimensional make-up, prosthetics and costumes that stretch the imagination.  I love the program because of the creative problem solving and challenges in the art making.  I’m just a sponge for new techniques. You just never know when some technique will be useful, which is how I look at my big supply of yarns and materials. 

The boys have been on their usual after school circuit, so this week I have been needle felting cherry tomatoes.  I think they’re just adorable little plump balls of sugar, and I’m looking forward to completing enough ingredients to create my Salsa weaving.  Speaking of tomatoes, I have been making more beefsteak tomato slices for my felted tiles.  I’m looking forward to showing them for the first time in Madison Wisconsin at the Art Fair on the Square, July 8^th and 9th.  

And speaking of dates, next weekend I will be in Toledo Ohio doing a two-day workshop and giving a talk and trunk show for the Fiber of Our Being felting guild.  I will pack up about a dozen of my weavings, along with a load of my felted tiles, most of my re-shirts, some felted sweater petals, and about a dozen of my costumes from Beauty and the Beast to display at the trunk show.  That will happens on the Monday night, the 15^th of May.  It’s going to be a lot of fun to see all my work displayed together.  I’m especially looking forward to sharing my work with an audience that hasn’t seen my work live. 

I spent a little time this week reorganizing the costume studio at South.  I was ready for a change after finishing up the 34 girls’ chorus costumes.  I gleefully launched into creating the principal’s costumes for Hello Dolly.  At the top of my agenda was creating Dolly’s opening number costume, and so I pulled out all of the clothes, fabric scraps and trims that I had accumulated over this past year in the color story that I was imagining.  

I hung them on the closet doors of the costume studio and just spent a little time taking everything in.  From there I started designing and I have pieced together the design for the dress.  I hope that this week I can pull all the elements together and watch the talented sewing faeries take over and turn it into a beautiful costume.  I really love and depend on my faeries, who bring my costume designs to life and fit them on the cast. 

On the family front, yesterday morning we made a delightful but slightly damp trip to the farmer’s market.  We arrived a little late in the morning, but the weather kept away a lot of people so we got our strawberries.  Poor Tommie missed the trip because he was taking the SAT test, but he got some strawberries at home.  On Friday he took an AP test in US history, and next week are the AP tests in English and calculus.  We are all looking forward to the end of the school year and the start of the family vacation!  

Oh, and my last lonely solitary slice of pie was consumed this morning.  It was a wonderful apple cranberry pie that appeared on Monday, but now it’s gone.  I do hope the next one appears in time for Mother’s day.  If anyone is listening, it would be better for it to appear around Tuesday when I get back! 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin