I finished my lemon piece! I’m very excited about it, and I’m ready to contact the
person who commissioned me to make it.
I hope that soon it will be traveling to its new home in Massachusetts. I’ll post a picture of the finished
piece after the new owner has had a chance to see it, which will probably be
next week. There’s just no time to
rest, so I launched into my next commission. The person who bought the original ‘Winter Birches’ asked me
to create a similar piece as a graduation present for her daughter. With the cold snap bearing down on us,
this somehow feels like the right piece to focus on right now. I was delighted to have the original
piece hanging on my wall again after many years. It reminds me of how much I like that original piece, and
how much my style has evolved.
My
first color gradient background was based on over fifty different yarns to
create the horizon effect I wanted.
It’s really a mixed gradient of browns, grays and greens to achieve the
misty, serene, cold, late afternoon feel in winter. This original “Winter Birches” is also much flatter than my
current tree pieces. It predates
my dimensional crochet tactic for bringing a base away from the background to
plant the trees in. I’m excited that
this is my last commission piece for a while because I need to launch into
creating pieces for an upcoming show at the History Center. The plan is to hang it on April first,
and it will stay on the walls through the Garden Walk event in late June. I’ve been thinking a lot about
garden-themed compositions that would be appropriate for the show. I’m envisioning a garden path with
felted flagstones, and I have a sketch I’m happy with.
This morning I came up with another that I’ll call ‘We Three
Kings’, which will feature three fat onions (yellow, white and red) growing in
the dirt. I’m also currently
working on a piece that features three crocuses I’m calling ‘The Three
Sisters’. I finished the soil
background, which is full of treasures long lost in the garden soil. I’ll add the crocuses shortly. I cut the flattened crocus petals
shapes from commercial felt and stitched wire around each of them. I’ll needle felt wool onto the petals
to create the lenticular shape.
I’ve already dug through my boxes of roving to find the colors I want to
use. One of the joys of searching
my stores is that I always seem to find just the perfect color. This time I found a dark purple roving
I dyed years ago for a long-forgotten project. It’s just perfect for one of my crocuses. It’s fun to be creating something new!
Of course life is never all about art. We got a rude shock when water started
leaking through the roof last Sunday.
We called up the roofing fellow, who diagnosed the problem as failed
flashing around the chimney. This
has been a problem before, and the chimney fellow supposedly sealed it up for
us. This is getting really
old!
I really want to get the
ceiling fixed, but I can’t do it until I’m sure we’ve got the water problem
sorted out. I’ve also spent the
week trying to dry out the storage areas that got wet to avoid any unwanted
molds growing in the bedroom areas.
Of course there’s always a silver lining when
problems enter my life. On Monday
I came back from Zumba to find an apple pie on the cutting board and two loaves
of bread in the oven! The pie
lasted until breakfast on Thursday.
Is it too early to wonder when the next one will appear?
Until next week,
Martina Celerin
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