Seems like déjà vu…

This week marked the arrival of my brand new deep dish pie plate! My friend Jan Arbogast, a local clay artist, made us a beautiful replacement for our broken pan. To my great delight, it’s bigger than the last one - I’m telling Jim that means we can have healthier pies—they’ll have more fruit! Jim got right to work and made a mixed apple pie Thursday morning. It was yummy! Everybody got two pieces, and I have enjoyed pie and coffee for breakfast since Thursday. I’m guarding the last slice for tomorrow morning after Zumba.

In the art world, I spent the week preparing for the Déjà Vu art fair. Because the show features art created from reclaimed and recycled materials I decided I couldn’t show my ruffled scarves. They’re made from new merino wool and have no recycled content—unless you consider the sheep are recycling material for their coats. To fill in I launched into another new project that involves up-cycling old sweaters. The project came upon me when Cappi Phillip’s husband Bud had the vision to wash and dry her beautiful alpaca sweater she got on her trip to Peru. Cappi was very sad, but knowing that I could do something nice with it helped ease the pain. At least that’s what she said. I played around a bit cutting up felted sweaters and sewing them on to strips of felt. That wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I came up with the idea of making crocheted noodle scarves. I begin with a sweater, felt it, and then cut it into a continuous strip that I crochet to form the spine. Then I attach strips of felted sweaters onto the crocheted spine and felted the whole thing again. I think the resulting texture is really interesting. It’s a bold statement scarf and I really like them! I made some with black noodles and red spine, then red noodles with black spines before I went off playing with new color combinations. I’m basically riffing on what I learned when I made the ruffled scarves. In some strange way I see them as similar. The only major crash I had came when I tried to felt in the washing machine and the whole project fell apart. By the time I scooped all the tangled fibers out of the machine and onto the basement floor it looked like a giant eagle had swooped in and eaten a huge black sheep, leaving only the scattered coat remnants. That’s probably why we haven’t had mice in the basement this fall.

Saturday morning I packed up all of my latest creations and headed off to the Déjà vu show in Columbus Indiana. It was great fun. The Commons is absolutely the right place to hold the show—it’s airy, spacious and the layout supports a good traffic flow of fairgoers. Plus there’s a huge play space for kids next door, separated by a big, glass. sound-proofing wall. Thanks to Marilyn Brackney who did an amazing job of organizing the event and making it happen. I got to see people in Columbus that don’t make it to the Bloomington shows, including some of my friends from the Cincinnati workshop who made a long drive. Everything new was well received, including the noodle scarves and my line of Re-shirts I’ve been showing at the Discardia events. Next up is the UU show (the Unitarian Universalist Holiday Art Fair and Bazaar) in two weeks where I’ll show all my scarves, shirts, cards and wall art. Stop by(Fee Lane and the bypass) to see what’s new and buy some cookies from the cookie walk! Everyone goes home happy, guaranteed.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin