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
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