Ants and the Arts!

My first blog line is starting to sound repetitive, but my art focus has been on the next commission piece in the queue.  This refrain will be continued over the next couple of months as I work toward completing my next four commissions...

This week I’ve been making more cute vegetables.  The carrots are done and await installment onto the weaving.  The celery stalks are next, made by needle felting the needed shapes from raw wool that I washed and carded this summer.  I need both center cut stalks and pieces closer to the white root section – the ones that are shaped like a paddle.  I now have three of the five naked celery stalks for the piece made, and when I get all of the forms made I will clothe them in celery-green-dyed wool.  And then I’ll be on to tomato completion.  I resumed tomato poking again to create the meaty part of the sliced fruit, which requires a slightly different shade of red from the juicy part.  

 I’ll finalize the slices by creating the seeds from wool that I dyed with the bark of maple trees from Grandma’s house in Michigan.  When that’s done I’ll have five of the ten vegetable piles and I’ll be off on the trail of broccoli florets.  This commission was promised for the middle of December and I’m feeling good about meeting the deadline.  I’m hoping to find just a little window of some warm weather soon to do some more dyeing, though.  I have a couple of large, forest-based commissions pending that I’ll need more of my green mohair boucle to make leaf clumps.  Then I can just huddle down in my art studio and try to weave and stay warm until winter passes and I don’t need to imagine spring greens. 

I did have some measure of closure on a project for my boys and me.  The final “Phantom” performance was Saturday night.  Sunday was tear down morning.  A whole bunch of cast family member volunteers showed up to reduce the set to a nicely organized pile of lumber for the next performance.   

The costumes and materials have been packaged for future performances (go costume clean up crew!), and some key prop pieces borrowed from Cardinal Stage Co  made their way back home.  All in all, it was an exuberant bunch of musical theatre art supporters and I was impressed at how quickly it all went away. 

I did spend some time this week getting ready for the upcoming holiday season.  I assembled a bunch of five packs of note cards, packaging them with ribbons for delivery to local art galleries.   

I’ll bring some along to the upcoming Artisan Guild Show at the Convention Center where I’ll feature my Re-Shirts and weavings.  Of course my ‘Looking at Water’ exhibit will still be up in the adjacent Rogers room, so my framed pieces be well represented.  I did also hold a pop-up exhibition at the Spring Hill Suites downtown.  Ashley organized an evening show for a couple of local artists.  She and the hotel staff did an outstanding job bringing it all together.  There were wonderful champagne aperitifs and beautiful catering—the food was good but the crab cakes were delicious.  

 It was really nice to hang out and chat with both people who came specifically for the show and some hotel-goers who stopped by to see the art. 

Finally, on the horizon is the Opening Reception for the Big-Headed ant exhibit atWonderlab.  Come and join us this Friday (Nov 7, 2014) from 5 - 8:30 pm for art, ants and activities.  Both children and adults are welcome to create their own miniature Big-Headed ants by felting balls of merino noils (thanks, Sheep Street!) for the head and abdomen and using brown pipe cleaner for the appendages.   

Erin from Wonderlab and I made the prototype, and we had a lot of fun doing it.  I’ll be there, hanging around in case anyone wants to talk about ants.  If not, I’ll be poking at vegetables.  I’ll bring all my little veggie piles for people to see.  And speaking of cranberries, Jim made me another cranberry apple pie!  This time he used a whole bag of fresh cranberries.  It had a delightful tart flavor and I’m looking forward to a week of espresso and pie breakfasts.  That, and some leftover Halloween candy should keep me zinging and creating more art!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Weaving an Exhibition!

This is has been an intense week of artwork for me.  I’ve been getting up at six a.m. each morning and going straight into the art studio to weave.  I’m steaming along on pieces for my exhibition titled “Looking at Water.”  My goal is to have sixteen new pieces, and I feel like I’m on track to reach my goal.  I have eleven completed, but I have four more in progress and a sketch for the last piece.  In some cases I have the weaving largely assembled but I’m still lacking a featured animal or physical structure, such as a fish, turtle or a dock.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so many open books!  My attention is now is focused on a second weaving featuring a dock that I’m pretty excited about.  

 The inside of the weathered dock boards are felt from army blankets that came to me in my treasure hunts.  That continues the strong connection to my father-in-law’s old army blankets that supported so many pieces, but the wool from them is mostly gone.  As each piece comes closer to completion I feel better about the show.

My desire to do this exhibition came in part from a very successful exhibit I did early in the year at City Hall and Meadowood, "Portraits of Trees."  The show featured trees and lots of fresh spring green.  It felt great to see the pieces together on the wall after a long, cold winter.  Around that time I decided I wanted to assemble pieces for another exhibit built on a theme.  The idea transformed into the “Looking at Water” themed exhibit scheduled for October at the Convention Center.  Thinking about the shows reminds me that while I lack formal training as an artist, I seem to learn about the art world from unexpected places.  I’m not a television watcher, although I do watch Project Runway religiously.   

At the end of each season the surviving artists create collections that determine the winner.  I love the continuity in the collections the designers create, where theme elements connect the pieces—it might be a style, a fabric or a color.  One piece speaks to the next, not as a reiteration of the composition, but as a spark to begin the conversation on the next design.  I’m consciously trying to replicate that concept in my exhibition.  I’m looking forward to hanging the show as a linear story of “Looking at Water”, with design ideas and materials that flow through the exhibition.  The broader concept is still solidifying in my head, even as I have now mentally created all the pieces.  Come and see the exhibition and we can see how the story unfolds!

My other big art news is the completion of the bigheaded ants last month, which were finally delivered to Wonderlab.  This past week they invited me to participate in laying out the ants in their new home.  They are going to be crawling over the wall up to the sign that introduces the bigheaded ant exhibit.  After laying it out it became clear that they needed one more ant on the back of the sign.  As soon as my water exhibit is complete I’ll create one more worker ant.  Then I’ll re-launch on all my commissions in progress to bring everything together.  I have the large “Garden Path” piece to complete, and that’s my top priority.  

 I also finished weaving and stretching out the background for the “Summer Salad”commission.  That means I’ll be felting lots of vegetables for the foreground.  Sliced tomatoes, here we go!

On the family front, Jim and I celebrated fifteen wonderful years of marriage together.  It’s hard to imagine a life before marriage and my family.  Jacob grilled salmon for the celebratory dinner, which came out beautifully.  

 There was also a new peach pie, but the boys (and I) again made short work of that.  Then, somehow we managed to walk right past the raspberries at the farmer’s market on Saturday!  With the peach pies so fleeting, shouldn’t another pie appear very soon?  I know there’s fruit in the freezer!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

My world of water comes back into focus!

I was awake at 3:30 yesterday morning, unable to sleep as I mentally went over my inventory for my upcoming ‘Looking at Water’ exhibition at the Convention Center in October.  I spent a big chunk of my day locked in my art studio weaving water and creating cattails.  The only thing that brought me back to the computer to produce a long overdue blog post was the dire threat made by Jim that I couldn’t have more than one pie per post.  I enjoyed the first peach pie of the season two weeks ago, so I knew I better start writing!  Now I'm getting way ahead of myself.  I’ll try to catch you up on what’s been happening. 

My ants are finally done!  I delivered the colony to Wonderlab this past Thursday.  We’ll have a meeting this week to discuss the display, which might involve making one more ant.  Along the way, I feel like I learned a lot about the anatomy of ants, what distinguishes the species and which morphologies are shared.   

I came to love my ants, but I’m glad they’re out of the studio.  At Wonderlab they’re talking about painting or stenciling ants along the wall that leads to the exhibition, which sounds fun.  If they do that, I really think the last stenciled ant should be an intermediate between the stenciled ants and the first three-dimensional creation.  That would make it look like the last ant was crawling out of the wall.  I think that would be interesting, but it would mean making one more half-ant.  I invite everyone to the opening reception on the first Friday in November.  There will be a fun kids project to create ant parts by wet felting fleece into balls to produce the body segments.  These will be connected with pipe cleaners.  I have just the most perfect brown noils from Sheep Street that I will donate to the project.  This is just the ideal material to learn how to felt color-appropriate ant body parts.  Come and see!

Of course Labor Day means the Fourth Street Festival.  It was a very successful show from my perspective, with no major incidents.  The weather wasn’t ideal when the show opened Saturday in steady rain, but Sunday turned into an absolutely beautiful sunny day.  The humidity was low with some clouds, and over 33 thousand fair attendees came out for the two-day event.  Happily/sadly I sold one of my water-themed pieces I intended to show at my upcoming Convention center exhibition that I described above.  I think I’ll be able to replace the piece and come up with a full complement of sixteen pieces for the exhibition by the end of this month.  

 The ‘Looking at Water’ concept means that you’ll see any and all forms of water, from a drop falling from a faucet to small ponds with aquatic life and on to vast lakes.  So much of our lives revolves around water that I just had to think about water and express it in my art.  I’ll hang the show in late September and the opening reception will coincide with the first Friday’s gallery walk from 5-8 p.m.  Please stop by and say hello at that reception too!

My life is never so simple as to allow me to focus solely on my own art.  I’ve been dividing my time to help with the Sounds of South group’s ginormous production of Phantom of the Opera in late October and early November.  I have always possessed a passion for the theater, having regularly attended theatrical productions, opera and plays with my father.  I fondly remember having season tickets to the Stratford Festival performances in Stratford, Ontario.  When Tommie auditioned into Sounds of South it opened the door a crack for me to get involved.   

Earlier this summer I made a set ofskirts for the performance, and last month I finished repurposing an evil monkey on an ornate music box that is central to the performance.  I made an ornate hat for the diva in the performance, Carlotta, and it matches her extravagant gown and personality.  I added a reticule to her outfit, which is now also a new word in my vocabulary (thanks David Wade!).  I was also charged with making the body of Buquet that is hung from the rafters by the phantom.  I’ve never made a dead body before.  Heck, I’ve never made an alive body – well, except for my sons! 

My life was also filled with big personal events.  Jim and the boys tested for their black belts in Taekwondo on the 16^th of August.  His brother Tim was the ‘bad guy’ for self-defense and got thrown around a bit, and Grandma came down to see the performance too.  It was a very emotional test all around.  Jacob was praised for his power and precision in his forms, Tommie for his flexibility and graceful high kicks, and Jim for just making it through the whole process.  We had a big reception at our house after the party where it was nice to just sit and relax in peace and quiet with food from the Owlery, cakes and cupcakes from Blu Boy, and a beautiful personalized cake from Esperanza Hogan.  

 Oh, and I did get a peach pie, a rare treat this summer with so few peaches, as a reward for finished my ants.  I know as soon as I get this posted I’ll get another pie.  Type, type, type!  Start rolling the crust, Jim!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Anticipating Mother’s Day

Each of my art seasons has a very different feel to it.  May is a transition time, when I plan and prepare for my summer art travel season.  I love working outside on the veranda on warm days, skirting fleece and pulling apart the clumps.  The spring weather is glorious; my art studio still has the cold chill of winter.  My art making activities are devoted to commissions, preparing for summer fairs, and thinking about how I’m going to pull together an October exhibit I agreed to do at the Convention Center. 

Right now I have four major projects that I’m trying hard to move along.  First, I was commissioned by Wonderlab to make a suite of bigheaded ants.  They’re installing a major new exhibit in November that features a colony of the striking creatures.  The ants fall into one of three castes, and I’ll make three of the minor workers, a major worker, a supermajor ant as well as a queen.  The ants are only a few millimeters long, but I’ll create ants to scale that range from six to eighteen inches.  This is a fun project, which means it’s moving along nicely.

I have also made great progress on my large format commissioned piece.  This features a stone path through trees in the foreground and background, and I have now completed and installed all the tree branches and trunks.  I’ve made a lot of progress on the stones for the path.  I make these by needle felting wool on to a chunk of Grandpa’s old army blanket that I cut into pieces.  I laid out in the flagstones in a satisfying pattern and needle felted them onto the path, which makes a huge effect on the weaving.  Next I’ll start creating the flowers and explode colors all around the meadow.  I’m hoping the person who commissioned me will send me some of their wedding chuppah to incorporate into the flowers.  It’s a rich purple and will both look great and make the piece more personal. 

My other projects will come together as I can find time.  I’m still moving all of my washed fleece through the tedious process of preparing it for weavings.  I’ve gone through three more bags since I last wrote but I have seven more to go.  Still, I feel like I’m seeing light at the end of the tunnel.   

The latest patch of dry, warm weather helps pull me out of my studio and onto the veranda to work.  I’m also starting a new commission piece that will feature autumn aspens in a large format.  I put in an order for a custom frame with Tom Bertolacini, my frame maker.  I’ll start moving into the details of that piece as my current projects wind down.  As I mentioned above, I agreed to do an exhibition at the Convention Center built around the concept of looking at water.  I felt really good about my exhibit at City Hall and Meadowood that I called ‘Portraits of Trees’.  Launching on a theme and exploring related ideas led me to pieces I would not otherwise have considered and created, some of which are special to me now.  Water is such an integral part of my life that I thought I would try to create pieces based on the beaches, rivers, lakes, and waterfalls that help me relax and rejuvenate.  I still remember conversations with my father about the two ‘elements’ (water and fire) that are so basic and meditative that I could stare at them for hours.  I’ll try to visit some of those places for the October exhibition. 

I’ll close with just a couple of notes from my non-art world.  Tommie and I spent a Saturday cleaning and spiffing up the veranda and now we've been enjoying meals out there - including bread (made by Tommie) and Canadian cheddar-broccoli soup - yum!   

Jim and I made it to our first farmer’s market Saturday.  Tommie was off at his Academic Superbowl event (his group placed third of fifteen teams in his event—hooray)!  Jacob wanted to sleep in, so we left him home.  We got coffee and hot chocolate to help keep us warm on a cold morning (thanks Marina at Le Petit Café!) as we bought strawberries, asparagus, honey, herbs in pots and a few other necessities.   Oh, and Jim made a delightful apple pie from the transparent apples at Grandma’s house, harvested last summer.  

 I’m hoping that Sunday, which is Mother’s day, will bring the traditional rhubarb pie.  I think that as long as I can get Jim back to the farmer’s market to ‘discover’ some rhubarb things will turn out well. 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Eye of newt, wing of butterfly, and petal of flower…

I cooked up a real witches brew of artistic fun this week. First, I stopped in at Wonderlab to see the finished butterfly piece and I think it looks great. Paula Grez, the volunteer who helped so much and took pictures of the project as it came together sent me an image that I’ll share. I’m still waiting for the glue to completely dry, which I expect will take a month or so, and then we’ll give the piece a waterproof seal. The plan is to hang it on the outbuilding so it will be visible from the B-line trail. We’re going to do an experiment to see whether it will attract a giant pixilated bird!

I also finished my ‘Transplant’ piece last week, even though it isn’t really done (hmmm…). I came up with a strategy to make a pretty red cactus dahlia flower for the plant itself. I started by cutting lengths of my precious copper wire from a roll and wrapping them with red yarn until I had a charming little pile. I made a small red felt ball for the center and started attaching the petals to make the corolla. I’ll admit that in the back of my mind I had doubts that it would work, but with great confidence I leaped ahead and glued all the petals on before I turned it over to look. Wow, it worked—what a relief! It matched what I was envisioning, and that pleased me. Brimming with confidence I forged ahead to make the little rootlets for the overgrown root ball of the transplantee. Had a little too much 20-20-20 fertilizer and auxin (a root stimulating hormone) at the greenhouse, didn’tcha little one? Welcome to my garden of Indiana clay and overhanging trees! Anyway, I assembled the whole thing together on the weaving. I still want to add a few things to the soil for a more realistic look, so I picked out some broken terra cotta, a rusty beer cap, nails and a small geode from my extensive collection of soil artifacts. I couldn’t quite convince myself to add them permanently to the piece—I need to be in the right mood to make that happen. So now I’m on pause with the piece as it hangs in my art studio in a place where I can’t help looking at it as I work. After I decide which pieces really work and which start to bug me after a while I’ll whip out my hot glue gun to make it permanent, but I have to be in the right mood.

Lots of new stuff, or should I say newt stuff, is also beginning my studio. I began my salamanders, skinks and newts piece. That means I truck around a bag with needles and fleece in nice skin tones—that is if you’re an amphibian or a reptile with bright colors that scream a warning to predators. I sit and poke during my boys’ Tae Kwon Do class as I watch and chat, or anyplace else that I have a little time on my hands. Soon I will have summoned the creatures from my fleece pile, just like my kids do with their Yu-Gi-Oh decks when they have a little time on their hands. A lot of that has been happening with the snow days last week, and while they waited during the dress rehearsal for the Trashionista show. That was last night, but I’m going to wait to describe my experience until the whole thing settles in. Basically it was a big crowd, a whole lot of fun and a rewarding experience. I also hung a few pieces in the Indiana Fiber Producers show at the Monroe Bank in Bloomington, with a couple of my big pieces on display right behind the tellers. You can also catch the end of my shows at the two Bloomingfoods locations until the end of the month, or catch the last glimpse of my scarves at the Bloomington Bagel Company. If you buy a warm scarf now I will guarantee up to six more weeks of winter to enjoy it. As for me, I’ll be cozied up in my art studio with my new silent space heater, keeping warm until the snow melts and the flowers start popping up in the yard. I can’t wait!

Until next week...



Martina Celerin

Tomatoes, Flowers, and Butterflies...

They all played a big role in my week. This week I finished my ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ piece. I ultimately made 72 felted tomatoes for the piece, finishing with a couple of branching stems of little cherry tomatoes. They ripen from the plant outward, so there’s always a couple of green ones at the end to keep you from harvesting the whole branch too soon. Maybe the new owners will put the piece on a sunny windowsill to let it ripen. As I finished with the painstaking work of creating the five little petioles for each tomato, I thought about how looking closely allows one to appreciate the intricacies of nature. But with that said, I’m sooo looking forward to munching on the little cherry tomatoes that pop up as volunteers all over our garden each summer. My husband has unwittingly carried out my evil plan to get them spread all through the flower beds as he mulches. He can’t begin to weed them all out, as Grandma insists we should, so I always get plenty of little red delights each summer. I love sending out Tommie with a bowl to harvest a few when we have company—nothing beats a just-picked bowl on the table.

Finishing a piece means a new challenge, and this week the weather began sunny and bright. I was just feeling good about feeling firmly planted in this town, thinking what a great community of people I live in. That meant it was time to start my ‘Transplanted’ piece, with a root-bound flower establishing in a new garden bed. I dug into my chocolaty brown yarn box, and the yarns really did look like milk and dark chocolate on my studio floor. I created the base of the weaving using a sumac weave with 10 different yarns blended together. Just when it felt like there’s no more room to expand the sumac weave, I dug the hole by making an indentation and added a tabby weave with fewer yarns mixed together. I ended up with a wonderful cavity to plant my root ball in, and the dirt didn’t keep slipping back in to fill the hole as I did it!

For the root-bound flower I chose a red cactus dahlia. This is a special flower in our garden, since my husband seems to slip them in all around—it’s kind of a defining flower for us. To create all the colors and textures I needed I envisioned a huge project of blending and carding green fleeces ahead of me, which I wasn’t looking forward to at all. I needed a deep, rich red for the flowers and a good match for the dahlia green leaves. That normally means getting out my antique hand carders from Quebec, with handles made like the old mission style furniture that are beautiful but a pain to work with. I don’t think ‘ergonomic’ is a French word, or maybe it didn’t fit on the boat when they came over to settle Quebec. Your hands get pretty achy after you’ve done a lot of carding. To solve my problem I borrowed the drum carder from the local Spinners and Weavers Guild, which looks very medieval and even a little scary. Then it became a matter of finding the six or eight green fleeces to make the perfect dahlia leaf color and turning the handle! I did run the fleece through twice, but out came exactly the color I wanted to create the felted compound leaves of the dahlia. I think I need one of those—hmmm—when’s Mother’s day?

Finally, yesterday marked the culmination of a community art project at Wonderlab. I did the first installment for ‘The Art and Science of Color’, and we made a pixilated Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. The pixels comprised 3500 wine corks that I’ve been collecting from all over town (Yes, it’s a very happy town!). They were painted yellow, blue or black by Wonderlab volunteers, which was a Herculean project—thanks everybody! I had sketched and painted the butterfly on a four feet square panel that Andrea Oeding had built and prepped (great job, Andrea!). From 1:30 to 4:30 Saturday the kids of Wonderlab and I, along with a lot of help from still more volunteers, glued the corks onto the painting. Paula, one of the Wonderlab volunteers and biology grad student, took some great photos. Wow, what a project! We came out a little short on the black and blue corks, but the butterfly emerged nonetheless. The border of the project was intended to be a dark green, but we intentionally didn’t paint any green corks. The plan was to mix visually blue and yellow corks to get a green effect, but the soft tints we used ended up looking more like a bed of flowers. So now the glues are drying, after which we’ll seal it before it goes on display on the workshop building in the Wonder Garden next to Wonderlab. It should be visible from the B-line trail, which of course will now have to be called the butterfly line trail.

To close, I just want to say that it has been an honor to work with Andrea and all the people at Wonderlab. Even though the weather didn’t cooperate, with the big snowstorm that closed schools on Friday and put us off until Saturday, everybody stayed positive and enthusiastic. And the best news after last week: we’re a little closer to summer!

Until next week…

Thoughts of warmer weather…

We’re back in the icebox in southern Indiana after a nice warm-up last week. While my frozen toes understand reality, my mind is off in warmer places. I finished my seashell piece, but with a twist that took even me by surprise. I had very carefully laid out a pattern for the large shells, designed to create clear movement as you visually took in the piece. Then my inner child quickly surveyed the piece and clearly demanded: MORE SHELLS! I watched as she grabbed a handful from my ‘shells with holes’ bag and proceeded to dump them on the piece. I gave her a healthy snack to settle her down a little, and while she was eating I arranged the shells a little. I loved the idea of having a little chaos in the front, and yet if you look carefully you can still see the underlying pattern and flow. Now there’s a metaphor for my life with kids! Or maybe the feel of the piece just captures that little depression in the beach you find where all the shells collect at low tide. There’s usually a cute little beat-up seastar that didn’t handle the surf well. That’s the metaphor for my husband.

A lot of other new or commissioned art is also coming together in my studio, and some of it will unexpectedly be on display around town this month. I got word from Jean Kautt at Bloomingfoods (she organizes the Blooming Arts Series) that the February artist had a family emergency and couldn’t hang a show. I have a few new birch pieces (birches, beaches—I’ve got to branch out), plus a few ‘previously shown’ pieces that I’ll hang at both Bloomingfoods locations. The show will be called “Thoughts of Warmer Weather: Water and Sunshine”. The east side store will feature ‘Water’ and the west side will be ‘Sunshine’ in case you’re wondering. I won’t show my new ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ commission piece, but after adding the last little cluster of tomatoes it looks warm, happy and yummy. This weekend I’ll complete the attaching and call it done. I’ll also be at Wonderlab this Friday as part of their “The Science of Color Series”, doing a kid- and adult-friendly community art project. We’re going to build a large Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mosaic out of wine corks that volunteers have been painting for the project. Stop on by and share in the fun!

Finishing pieces also means new beginnings, and at the moment I’m struggling to decide which piece to launch into next. I have several ideas swirling around in my head, and basically I’ll just wait to see what the weather is like Monday to decide which color palate I need to work with. The first piece will present a chameleon, sitting on a fernlike compound leaf. The second will feature a sand crab on a beach pocked with crab holes. Keeping the sand out of their living room carpets must be quite a task—I’m sure there’s a great market for rugged sand crab vacuum cleaners. The third piece hits a little closer to home, to be called something like ‘The Transplant’. It will show a section of earth with a freshly dug hole, ready to receive a geranium with a severely overgrown root ball. If you’ve ever bought a flower that’s spent a little too much time at the greenhouse with abundant light and fertilizer you know what I mean. It’s going to be a little painful (for everyone involved) to break up the root ball and get started in a new environment, but you know it’s both necessary and the right thing to do. I think about my own transplantations that way, whether it was my move from Ontario to Bloomington, or whether it was my move from world of science into the art community. I owe a lot to the gardeners along the way, and I know that with a little light, water and fertile ground, anyone can blossom!

Until next week…

Riverbeds and Arugula

This week I’m descending into the green riverbeds of Monroe County. Last week I was dyeing a suite of verdant yarns that have already found themselves in my weavings. I constructed the base of one piece using a sumac weave that lets the weaving grow off the loom. It creates a realistic base for the single tree that will stand in the foreground. I wrapped the tree branches, needle felted the tree trunk and attached branches onto the trunk. As I laid out the background weave I used my trusty black sharpie and drew the outline of the piece on the warp. Then I started weaving, using a set of deep teals I blended to create the predominant colors of the weaving. I documented my progress with a picture and decided it was time for a break. The boys were ready to go for a bike ride, so we loaded the bikes on the rack, filled the water bottles and headed for the old rail trail and started our adventure. We stayed in the shade canopy and traversed the Clear Creek trail, a most pleasant eight mile trip.

That evening I got back to weaving and by the next night I had the piece finished. I’m really enjoying creating my most recent pieces with tree and water themes, and I’m pleased with how they have turned out. I stretched out the weaving and this evening I’m incorporating it into a dark brown frame. To finish the piece I’ll worked on needle felting trees onto the distant shore. I’ll also expanded the river into the foreground using sparkly silvers and a lot of strong contrasting blues to achieve movement in the water and give still more depth to the piece. To finish it off I’ll added some rocks I collected from Lake Monroe last year. My secret is to scour the creek beds entering the lake for small rocks that have a small hole eroded through the rock so I can discreetly secure them to the weaving with thread. I spend hours combing the creek beds and evading the copperheads for just the right rocks, and I must say that my collection of rocks with holes is extensive. Of course when that fails I have a secret back-up plan: my drill press!

To complete the foliage I also need to crochet leaves using the materials I dyed last week. I love it when just the right color for a piece I’m working on turns up, even if it comes about by accident. If you try enough color variations on enough materials you’ll find what you need. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The other news of the week involves my latest breakthrough soup. I get all sorts of new greens from the CSA group each Wednesday, and this week it was arugula. I think I used the green arugula (and not my green yarn) in the Tuscan white bean and arugula soup I made on Thursday, which was very tasty. One sprinkles it with grated, aged Parmesean cheese from Bloomingfoods and it tastes terrific! It’s amazing what you can find on the internet—recipes to consume just about anything. Late in the week I dropped off one of my last abstract weaving to Wonderlab for their silent auction. Of course the boys quickly disappeared into the building as I chatted. I ended up doing my default activity, which is creating ornaments for the upcoming holiday art shows. I had a striking mohair teal that I picked up at the Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival in Franklin, IN a few weeks ago. It’s such a strong, rich color that I had to incorporate it into a project. Later I dropped off some soup to one of my enablers, Mary at the recycle center. She gave me some organic soybeans that went into the soup, so I made sure Mary got to try it. I think that’s what recycling means. Anyway, the soup made Mary—and me—very happy.

Until next week…

Gold Fish in a Blue Ocean

It’s finished! “Gold Fish in a Blue Ocean” is at Wonderlab to hang for the rest of May and the month of June. It has been a long swim (see the April 25, March 2 and March 16 entries), but the school of gold fish has been united. The fish really are gold, with every last scale a piece of jewelry, beads, button or coin—some are real and some are pirate booty that washed ashore. They’re attached with white glue, which is kid friendly, and the final fishes are coated with two thick layers of polyurethane to help hold it all together. The can says ‘fast drying’, but that was just to get me to buy it. So even though the piece was scheduled to arrive at Wonderlab on the 20th it took an extra day.

The piece itself is quite a mosaic. The weaving is built from ties, socks, lanyards, and cords in a pattern that only a kid could create. The gold fish protrude mightily from the piece, with big eyes built from a small black bead on a big white button. I struggled with how I was going to attach the two, wondering what kind of glue might be best, when I realized that, well, they’re buttons, and I can sew them! I grow as a fiber artist every week. The other big structural issue was the problem of gluing the stretcher frame that holds the woven background to the seashell-encrusted frame that Tom Berolaccini made and the kids decorated. All the wood screws I had were too big or too small, so off to Bloomington Hardware I went early one morning. I had to get to the store, find the right screws, and drive to the Creek-Love classroom (where the weaving was made) in time for their musical performance day. My younger star performer, who is a teacher at heart, demonstrated and explained his Tae Kwon Do forms to the class in lieu of a musical performance. Others did amazing things on the piano, violin, harmonica, drums and guitars, among other instruments. We celebrated with ice cream after school that day, just as we celebrated the performance of the ‘six of spades’ in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in the Binford music room the day before. I recommend investing in Jiffy Treet and the Chocolate Moose as my kids get older.

This was also a full week on the working artist front. Last weekend was the Broadripple art fair, which started out rainy and cold on Saturday. The people were damp and grumbly and it wasn’t much of a day to sell art. Sunday’s weather was just the opposite, with sunny, warmer weather bringing out the beaming art fair participants. I always have delightful and unexpected conversations, such as one with a man who used to work beside felting machines. The temperature around the machines was 106° and he lasted one week. It’s amazing to me to think about the thousands of needles at work on the wool, in contrast to me with a single needle working on art projects. My dandelion piece sold on Sunday (see the March 7 post). Many admired the piece, but some offered me a trowel. I’m sure they’re the people with the monoculture lawns that get watered every night.

The Spinners and Weaver’s guild art auction was this week too. I came home with a huge box of yarn for not a lot of money. I mercilessly put all the yarns in the freezer to kill off any unwanted little bugs that might try to invade my art studio. I also ended up bidding against Ulla for an enormous kit to create a Rya weaving. We sat on opposite sides of the room and kept bidding up the price. Finally I hollered her that I just wanted the yarn! She said she just wanted the fabrics, so a bargain was struck. We split the bid and the materials and everyone was happy. Now I have a box full of fabulous wool in a rainbow of colors. She got an enormous box of materials I would have recycled. But that’s how the world works, isn’t it!


Until next week…

Dyeing to be Blue

This week my Great Blue Heron raised his elegant head for a few appearances. I had constructed the body a few weeks back (see the January 24th post) and it was time to start fleshing him out. Well, feathering him out, I suppose. I started off by dyeing a range of blues and grays for the feathers. With little pots of blue water on the stove, my heron had to peek in to see if there were any little fish for lunch. He stared for quite a while before giving it up to chase dust bunnies in the jungle room. As for the dyes, I often use natural materials or Kool-aid for subtle colors. This time I needed more robust RIT dyes, which are relatively non-toxic and the company is located in Indiana (hooray!). The colors weren't exactly right to suit my heron, but I assured him that I could card colors together and make them just so. With a little smoothing, physical and emotional, he was ready for his first public
appearance: an in-progress avian sculpture for Wonderlab's "Science of Sculpture" program.


On Friday evening I carded wool and poked my heron along the path to biological accuracy with a few dozen new friends. I talked to a lot of adults and children about how the barbed needle I used to felt wool combines the fibers into the shapes I want. I also showed how the carders can be used to combine the raw dyed wool into organized fiber bundles of the colors I need. It's hard work but it's fun to try. To get the heron colors right I checked out books from the Children's section of the Monroe County Public Library. They have books with better pictures than can be found the adult section, and they don't charge late fees when I forget that a book is due. More kids need to check out those books, I decided, since many thought my heron was a stork or an ostrich. Knowing the sensitive nature of my long-legged friend I quickly dissuaded them of that notion. Besides, the stork won't be visiting our house any more. My two boys spent the evening climbing, inventing and eating with friends, while the HoA (husband of artist) patrolled the grounds to keep an eye on things. It was nice to have the family together as I worked.
I should also mention the other projects that were ongoing as I poked and chatted. The terrific Wonderlab group ran a wet felting workshop using wool they dyed with Kool-aid. Kids and adults used soapy water and a lot of hand rolling action to make colorful balls that they carried off in little paper towel coverlets for drying. I saw some beautiful color combinations, and I sensed that a lot of people had fun in what was truly a hands-on learning project. I felt right at home with all the fiber work going on. The "Science of Sculpture" exhibit will go on for a few more weeks with projects such as glass blowing and stone carving on display. If you look carefully you can see one of my fish sculptures hanging from the ceiling, and you can also see my "Shh… the trees are sleeping" show on the wall as you go up the stairs. Stop in if you can! And thanks to everyone who participated and made it a fun event for me.



Until next week…