Ratatouille Arrives!

Finally—‘Ratatouille’ is complete! I’m delighted with how it turned out. I even feel as if I’ve taken the first step toward being a grandma by carrying around pictures of the completed piece and showing the people who have watched me along the way. I received so much support and encouragement as I felted tomato slices, eggplants, zucchini and herb leaves into existence over the past few months that I felt I needed to share the finished product. It has been fun to watch their responses to seeing the finished piece. The people who actually saw the size of the tomatoes have the best sense of the overall magnitude of the finished piece, which is huge 5' X 2 1/2 '—the tomatoes are the size of dinner plates. Even though I like the tomatoes, my favorite part of the piece is the basil leaves. I feel like they really enhance the cohesiveness of the piece, and I just like how they turned out. I can almost smell the piece!

Did I say I was pleased with how it turned out? That’s true, but I am sooo ready to move beyond creating vegetables. At the end of the week I devoted big blocks of time to my next piece, a signature piece for the Bloomington Playwright’s Project. If you’ve seen their aggressive writing tools on the attack you know the basic design. In my version the background is purple and the BPP letters are a bright yellow. That means I spent some time digging through my yarn boxes to find just the colors I needed. I was on a spring and birth mind set (their motto is "where theater is born") and so I chose a purple that reminds me of the Johnny Jump-Up violets in the lawn, mixed in with their shockingly bright yellow dandelion friends. I bought the yellow fleece at the Fiber Arts show from Donna Jo Copeland last November. It was dyed with tumeric to produce a brilliant, almost neon yellow, which is amazing considering that it comes from a natural dye. The yellow letters have a crispness that I’m enjoying, especially after focusing on organic vegetable shapes for the past few months. And weaving, finally weaving, in my art studio has been a delight. While I enjoy needle felting, there’s a certain rhythm to weaving that I’ve missed. The piece will feature a hand, which I’ve completed, holding an angry pen, ready to create a great play. I just need to adjust the length of the wrist, and make the pen.

The fact that it’s officially spring means the dandelions are commandeering the local lawns. I had the boys out collecting dandelion heads for dyeing later this summer. I even spent fifteen minutes this morning mowing down the yellow flowers in the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and road. I should have enough for a good dye pot. I’ve got to replenish some of my color stocks, which also led me to the big Fiber Event in Greencastle this past Friday. It’s one of the highlights of my year. I went with my friend Ruth, which made for a delightful trip. We chitty chatted the whole time, making it feel as if we made it there in ten minutes. I had a wonderful conversation with a weaver and natural material dyer from Nashville who sold fair traded spun banana silk yarn—that will probably make it’s way into a scarf this fall. We talked about some of her recent adventures in dyeing, and she showed me some yarn and fleece that she had dyed with wild rose clippings using iron mordant. It got me eyeing the wild rose in our back yard that I don’t really like because it scratches the whole family as they bring bikes through the gate into the back yard. We talked about using invasive plants for dyeing, which made me wonder about using euonymous as a green dye. That evil vine has taken over big parts of the back garden beds, and it’s heading for a major haircut this summer. I’ll do some experiments with added alum and varying conditions, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for any material that survives the dye pot.

The last bit of news from the week has to do with one of my favorite foods—pie! A rhubarb pie appeared yesterday morning. Although it came from frozen rhubarb because no fresh stalks could be found, it tasted great and the crust came out as a crumbly delight. Yippee! I’ll have pie and espresso for breakfast after Zumba all week!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The secret to slicing onions

I have the skinny on everything this week. First, it was the week of the onion rings, which I completed by adding the skins. I poked at them all week long without any tears, except when I jammed the felting needle into my finger. Ow! I also added the skin to my tomatoes. There’s still a huge amount of detail work needed to complete them. I have to get all the internal structure right and get the seeds in place, so I’m sure I’ll stop in at Bloomingfoods to pick up a few models. Finally, my epiphany of the week: after hours and hours of felting while the boys were at school taking their ISTEP tests, I’ve concluded that there is absolutely nothing on daytime TV worth watching.

My sense of being locked in the house was amplified this week by the near constant rains. A lake forms in our back yard (Celerin Lake), which is drained through the fence into a small tributary (Drummond Creek) when the rains are heavy. Both sump pumps in the basement were cranking water out to the road. Water even started leaking up through the crack in my art studio floor. I’ve come to accept this as ‘the devil I know’. Instead of trying to repair it and have water come in through some other crack, I just keep a towel system over it that I change regularly. That will dry up soon and stay dry for most of the year, so it’s just another charm to living in our house.

I did give myself permission to leave the house for two trips into the soggy spring. My highlight was going to the Heritage Quilt Show on Thursday. As usual, I really enjoyed seeing all the quilts. Seeing the creative designs and new color combinations always inspires me. My only disappointment this year stemmed from the drop in non-traditional patterns. I’m especially drawn to the free form quilts. During my travels in town I met with Chad, the artistic director for the Bloomington Playwrights Project. He’s going to take over running the Art Fair on the Square, a one-day show in downtown Bloomington. I stopped doing the show a few years ago, but I know Chad is a creative juggernaut and a marketing machine. I feel like it’s going to be well worth participating again this year.

The last thing on my mind is how pleased I am with my new drum carder. I used to borrow the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild carder, but I reached the point where I just needed my own. It’s an expensive tool, so I debated buying it for a long time. I just felt I was being extravagant by wanting to have my own. But as I was cranking out mounds of eggplant purple fleece last night, I realized how much I appreciated having it. I don’t know how I could have completed my giant ratatouille piece without it. And it’s fun to use.

What else is there to say, except for the obvious? When’s the next pie? And what kind will it be?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Red and blue with a white stripe

It was a busy week of good things in Bloomington. First, I received the good news that my t-shirt design for the 35^th annual Fourth Street Festival was selected by a close vote of the Fourth Street committee. The image is one of the abstract designs in the series that came from my vacation sketches last May on the Outer Banks. Along with the selection comes some responsibilities, and I have to choose the background color that best suits the design. I’m considering brick, soft yellow or a sky blue. If you like the image, pick up a t-shirt this Labor Day weekend!

Then, my Valentine pie wish came true—a warm cherry pie greeted me when I came back from Zumba on Monday morning. I didn’t even know we had cherries! I’ve had some delightful espresso and pie breakfasts this week. And for Valentine's dinner I baked two heart-shaped pizzas that were demolished in record time.

In the art studio I’ve been on fire. I completed the background for my Ratatouille piece. I posted an image of the piece in progress on Facebook and received a number of comments, including one from my friend Sonia. She thinks it looks rich and red, warm and inviting—and it reminds her of a womb. I even managed to stitch the background onto the second large frame from my personal frame builder and organic egg supplier, Tom Bertolacini. He nailed it again for me and I’m grateful for it. At the same time as I’ve been working on the background I managed to make progress on the foreground. I’ve come up with a way to create the vegetable slices that gives them crisp edges. For a fiber artist, that can be a challenge. I zipped all over town to consignment shops and resale stores picked up all the well-worn wool sweaters I could find. I felted them, then cut and stacked the pieces into multiple layers to make the zucchini and tomato slices and eggplant cubes needed for the design of the piece. I pulled out my long needles and stitched them all together, and I’ll complete them by felting the colors and veggie patterns on the surface. I’m excited because I have the proof-of-concept that my vegetable design will come together for the piece. I’m adding the skin to the first zucchini pieces and I’m pleased with the recycled-sweaters-as-veggie-art concept.

Friday turned out to be the day of six tests for my son Tommie. He and Jacob shared the last one, as they tested for their blue-with-a-white-stripe belts in Taekwondo. It’s the first step on the way to their brown belt, and they’re both doing very well at it. Their friend Jonathan came with us to the test and came out to Bucchetos for pizza with us afterward. That wasn’t the end to the week, though, as Saturday we got up and headed out for a combination bike ride (Tommie) skateboard ride (Jacob) and walk (Jim and I). We spent an hour and a half on the Clear Creek trail seeing the birds and horses along the trail. It was a winner of a trip, as judged by the fact that there were no injuries and Jim remembered to bring a snack for the halfway point.

The conclusion to the week came Saturday evening when we attended the ‘Day of Writing and Art’ at the Lodge downtown. I didn’t really know what it was about, but I was asked to contribute a piece for the show; I chose “Fruit Salad.” A group of local girls were participating in an ArtsWeek program called ‘Women Writing for a Change.’ A group of local artists contributed perhaps 25 art pieces to hang on the wall. As part of a much longer day of activities, a group of girls carefully viewed the pieces and wrote out what the pieces communicated to them. The process is called Ekphrasis, which roughly translates to ‘speak out’, or call an inanimate object by it’s name. We saw a parade of talented girls reading aloud their imagining of what the pieces might mean. The beautiful coda to the event was when the audience members took turns speaking out loud phrases or sentences from the poetry that touched them. It’s just like having a nice dessert after an elegant meal. It’s another reason that Bloomington is so great—I was again exposed to some unexpectedly wonderful art.

And the week finally ended with my sweet husband making a giant bowl of kluski for dinner Saturday night...yum!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Seeing red as Valentine’s Day approaches

I’ve been seeing red all week long. Unfortunately, instead of red wine and red boxes of chocolates, it has all been tomato sauce for my Ratatouille piece. I started off with a huge pile of red yarns on my art studio floor and I’ve watched them simmer into the background of the piece. I need to create about thirty vertical inches by five feet wide. So far I’ve managed eighteen inches and burned out every red light receptor I ever had. I have a sudden urge to run down a matador and gore him. On the bright side, I love to weave, so it’s still been great to be in the art studio all week.

Of course ratatouille requires lots of fresh vegetables. I started creating some giant onion slices out of some little felted rectangles I got from my friend Cappi. We think they’re rejected brake pads for some device. Cappi picked up a huge box of them at the recycle center a few years back and they’ve been searching for just the right project ever since. It came to me that by connecting them I could create onion rings. They project is still at a stage where the untrained eye might not see them as onion rings, but I know it’s going to work out. I stitched them together on a skeleton of remnant baling wire scraps. It’s all I can do to keep from crying.

As I’ve zoomed ahead on my second commission piece, I’ve still been working on completing the first piece. I finished the last of the vegetables – the three onions – and with three art-related evening meetings this week I’ve had plenty of time to needle felt the oversize hand I’ll add that’s pulling out the Alice in Wonderland-sized carrot. I’m delighted with how that’s coming along, although I need to lay it out on the piece to make sure the scale is right. The size is based on sketches done on grid paper so it should be good. Still, it has to look good in place or it isn’t right. Tomorrow is the day I finally take a deep breath and lay out all the elements together on the background.

My social schedule this week was overwhelmed by meetings, but Wednesday at noon I did go to the SOFA gallery with Cappi and Dawn to see the current MFA/BFA exhibits. I even managed to avoid getting a ticket this time! I really love going to these events with my artist friends because they can recognize and articulate elements in the work that I can’t. I love being able to compare it to what I see and feel about each piece. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces really lets you appreciate your own weaknesses as an artist. We saw one piece that was incredible structured and detailed with orange geometric shapes on a gray background. The crisp shapes were twisted into an extended structure that had a very organic feel. But then the artist put a layer on top that felt like graffiti. I just couldn’t imagine having the strength to invest all the time needed to create the beautiful, detailed work and then cover it with graffiti. Still, it was very powerful. I also got to see some of Sara Nordling’s woven pieces, which I thought were very striking. The most powerful piece had three long horizontal stripes with structures that looked like translucent mushroom gills along the length. The viewer’s eyes just roll back and forth along the gills, bringing a three dimensional aspect to a two dimensional weaving. It was a beautiful, powerful and captivating piece.

That’s probably enough for one week. It will be Valentine’s Day soon, though. What kind of pie is red? Hmmmmm, cherry?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

A Record Fourth Street Festival!

Wow, what I weekend I just had! Last week was a blur, with my efforts focused on getting ready for the big Fourth Street Festival of Art and Craft in Bloomington. I stopped weaving and started to focus on getting my card stocks in order and doing my part to make the show run smoothly. Friday evening was the show set-up, so I packed up bluebell (my trusty electric blue Matrix) and headed downtown to help mark the streets and get the 121 artists settled in. Jim unpacked the car and had everything staged by the curb while I worked and the boys played. Set-up went smoothly, and all was ready for Saturday morning. The day dawned very cool and clear, with a temperature somewhere in the mid forties (~7 degrees C). I set up my merino scarf display, which turned out to be a good idea, since I ended up selling a bunch of scarves before the temperatures climbed. Fall only lasted until around noon. When summer came back the scarf sales plummeted. On the bright side, the show drew an estimated 48 thousand visitors this year, an all time record! We bested last year’s number by six thousand. I’m sure pleasant temperatures and sunny days played a big part in the success.

This was a year when everything just went swimmingly! I owe a big thanks to people such as Officer Jeff Aldwine from the Bloomington police department and his cohort of badged wonders. They kept away the non-juried hawkers and unsanctioned buskers and were such a joy to work with. Jean Kautt did a great job again as show manager, sorting out the problems when the porta-potties overflowed and ran short of toilet paper (not in that order). I don’t know if it was the cool weather or the big turnout, but a lot of people did their business at the show.

As always, my support crew came through this year, bringing me a wonderful lunches from the area restaurants. Yum! But the food highlight was the fresh-baked peach pie that greeted me Sunday morning before the show. It was built from eight cups of blemished peaches from the farmer’s market, with several different varieties mixed together, and it was scrumptious.

Of course the show was about art! Several of my pieces found new and happy homes, which always makes me feel good. My new abstract pieces were well received. I was amazed at how many artists recognized that the abstract tiles represented a new body of work for me, and they gave me lots of compliments. Of all the shows I do, the Fourth Street Festival is my favorite for personal reasons too. I get to catch up and chitty-chat with all my friends, fellow parents, other artists and acquaintances from all my Bloomington circles. My husband thinks it’s funny to keep asking me if I had any nice conversations or got any compliments at the show, but it never gets old. Maybe I should be trying to sell more, but the chitty-chat and catch-up aspect of the show is the most important part to me. What’s funny is that while I’m talking to one person, another person I know want to talk to will be waiting in the wings or outside the booth. While that’s happening I usually see other people I know walk by and wave. I just feel so connected here, and that’s what makes the show so wonderful. Or maybe it’s the peach pie! Did I say I like pie?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Madison, WI 2010

I just got back from a fabulous long weekend in Madison, WI. It would all feel like a dream if I didn’t have the booth walls laid all around the house to dry out. On Thursday afternoon I packed up all my available art into the 15 passenger gray rental van that the boys named the Stardust Dragon. We sped off to a motel in Urbana with an outdoor pool to spend the night, and the boys and I happily splashed around there as the sun set. Friday we stopped in at the Bradley Art Gallery in Stoughton Wisconsin to check the place out and visit some of my pieces. Stoughton is a quaint and friendly town on the outskirts of Madison, and Laura the charming owner gave us the tour. It truly is a wonderful gallery with an eclectic collection that includes lots of fiber, which I found welcoming and inspiring. It’s definitely a good place to visit if you’re in the Madison area. We left the gallery in the early afternoon and positioned the van for rapid art deployment when the square closed down and they let in the artists. My block captain and her helpers, whom I remember well from last year, were friendly, thoughtful and capable. We whisked the art and booth into place and the show was set up in no time. The boys scootered around the area to entertain themselves, while Wendy and Duane, our hosts for the weekend, helped us set up. So far so good! Then we drove out to the secret location in Hollandale, about a 40-minute drive from the show. It’s a beautiful trip through the country at sunset, and we were greeted by Bear and Jamie. They’d like to be guard dogs, but the house is just too remote for anybody bad to find it.

The show, and my weekend, started with a bang on Saturday morning. Jim deposited me at the fair a little later than I’d like, since the streets were already bustling half an hour before the official show start. Saturday was an intense day, and eager fairgoers and art buyers filled my booth. I sold eleven pieces, which is a record for me, and I had to endure praise from friendly and engaged fairgoers just about the whole day! I even got a Teddy Wedger veggie sandwich for lunch that the support crew brought me around noon. I met too many wonderful people to begin to mention, like the family with the young boy who sketches all the time according to his mother. He spent a huge amount of time in the booth, made a second visit, and decided that he wanted one of my weavings for a Christmas present. I’m so honored!

After a long day in the booth, my boys, along with Wendy and Duane, rescued me and took me to their remote hideaway for a lovely grilled salmon and fresh-picked greens dinner. I even celebrated with a local beer and a glass of wine, which is normally off limits during a fair. The meal concluded with a fresh pie from hand picked berries from the yard—what a treat! We enjoyed the utter darkness and quiet to be found in the wilds of Wisconsin, where they seem to have extra stars out night and no streetlights. That takes some getting used to, because when it’s dark at night here, it means that there’s no power and the basement is probably filling with water because the sump pump isn’t running. Anyway, big thanks to Wendy and Duane for keeping all my boys happy and entertained over the weekend.


Sunday was a totally different day, with one weaving sale, but still plenty of the warmth of the Madison art fair crowd. I was a little shocked when fair officials came by and gave me an invitational award for next year. Hooray! That means I get to come back near year. In the late afternoon, rain did come to the parade, so I slowly started taking down a few things before the close of the show. My roadies came a few minutes late, but we were picked up and on the road by 6:30. We headed south to Rockford to spend the night, then on toward home. We made a couple of stops, first at Papa Del's in Champaign for world famous pizza. From there we stopped in at a wine shop to pick up a few new wines to try that we can’t find around home. Then we headed straight for home and had frozen but homemade kluski for dinner. It felt really good to be home and sleep in my own bed. It was a memorable trip, made possible by a lot of good people that I care about.

And Madison, I’ll see you next year!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Can you patch me through?

My highlight this week was the Heritage Quilt Show. I was recovering from a particularly nasty bout of the flu that my younger son generously shared with me. My best art buds were either out of town or unavailable, so I headed over to the Bloomington Convention Center all by myself. I quickly got lost in my own thoughts as I enjoyed the pieces, until I ran into Monika Bonner. Monika is a fellow Spinners and Weaver’s Guild member, and she had on an extremely cool jacket. The latest trend in the quilting world is to repurpose an old sweatshirt by patch quilting pieces onto it to make a jacket. I snapped a couple of pictures and caught up on the latest news, but as soon as I wandered along I ran into a woman wearing another sweatshirt jacket that was embellished with lace. Wow! Then my brain started to work—hmmmm, there must be a way to use that technique in one of my pieces. I think I broke a couple of cogs off the main gear wondering about that, all the while enjoying some fabulous quilts that were on display. This isn’t your grandmother’s quilting!

The rest of my artistic energy, left over from getting better, was directed at my latest weaving. I’m working on a fern-based piece that features a panther chameleon. I finished wrapping the leaflets, which I described a little last week and created the fern fronds. I arranged the fronds in the weaving with just a little opening for my new friend, Ms. Chameleon. I had a lot of fun this week choosing the species of cameleon pardalis (little lion) from among several I found in library books. I admit that I’m forever fascinated by what I can learn. Give me a library book and I’ll find something cool, and the chameleon books were a rich source for new ideas. I learned that the Malagasy people of Madagascar have a charming expression that involves chameleons. They say that wise men are like chameleons: they have one eye in the future and one eye in the past. That sounds a little like motherhood, although often both eyes are in the back of my head to make sure my kids don’t injure each other or burn down the house. That also reminds me what I learned about reading the color of chameleons. For my Ms. C. there is a spectrum from green (calm and peaceful) to tan (sleepy) to yellow (surrender) to black (angry) to black with lots of orange spots (pregnant) to black with stripes (really angry). I know a few women who seem to progress through the same sequence of emotions as they enter parenthood; next time I’ll have to sneak a peek at their back and belly when I think events are heating up. Anyway, for my chameleon, the colors are going to be fun to do, as will the curly tail that looks like an emerging fiddlehead on a fern. It’s as much fun as a fiber artist can have in the winter!

On the bright side, the weatherman says we’re clear to have a week above freezing and some clear sunny weather. It’s time to break out the bicycles and spray paint and get ready for spring! The eranthus and snowdrops are up, the crocuses are ready to burst, and the first tulip leaves are peeking up through the ground. I can’t wait!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin