Harbingers, Herons and Fishing

The great blue heron is done!  And Jim and Tommie got to go fishing, so spring is off to a good start.  I’ve been working on my heron piece for several months, and it’s just so fun to have all of the pieces finally come together.  The hanging willow branches seen in the foreground were made months ago.  Each leaf is attached to the main branch by a thin chartreuse vein.  The technique I used for this takes me back about fifteen years when I was first starting out in fiber art.  

I came across a spool of thin wire wrapped with a thread of green that I thought was crazy—I would never do anything like that!  Still, I saved the spool for a special use.  Unfortunately, the green was not quite right for my piece, so I had to wrap my own material.  I discovered it’s really not that hard to make, it just looks crazy. 

Spring is finally here and I’m feeling happy. The winter hasn’t felt as horrible to me as many of my friends have said or posted.  I think that’s because I spent so much time in my art studio this year.  

I don’t know if it’s the broad spectrum lighting or the fact that I’ve been creating art every day, but I just don’t feel as exhausted as in years past.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m tickled to have spring here, and I’m certainly celebrating with more spring pieces.  That brings me to my current piece, which is called ‘Harbingers of Spring’.  It will feature a cheerful Robin and several clumps of dandelions, traditional signs of the season changing.  Speaking of robins, I can’t believe how many we have this year!  It just seems like a bumper crop. 

It feels as if I’m avoiding more robins than squirrels when I’m driving these days.  Lately I’ve been working on the individual dandelion leaves.  I figure that I need to have four to five leaves per clump and roughly three clumps, so I have a few more to make.  I struggled a little with getting the proportions right when I needle felted the robin, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. 

I do still have a deadline looming for my exhibit called:  “Migration:  where have you been and what have you seen?”  I’m hoping to include my robin piece in that show as part of fifteen new pieces in the big reveal.  It will be fun to see them all together and have closure on my migrating animals project.  The exhibition will hang at the BPP (Bloomington Playwrights Project) into June, through their performances of “The Jedi Handbook” and “To Quiet the Quiet”.  Stop by and see a performance and the fiber art!

My big project on Friday was retrieving Tommie from Oberlin.  I set out at six a.m. with an espresso under clear skies in Bloomington.  It turned into a harrowing drive through rain, falling slush, hail and white-out snow conditions through western Indiana and Ohio.  I persevered and got my little pumpkin.  It was nice to meet up on campus with great aunt Marian and Uncle Paul and have lunch at Aladdinin Oberlin.  By the way, they make amazing pita pizzas.  My favorite is the Farm that is loaded with raw spring vegetables.  We got our hugs and hit the road again after a nice visit.  The weather turned nicer, with blue skies and puffy clouds all the way home.  It’s wonderful to have my family together again, even for a few days.  And yes, Jim did get to go fishing with Tommie.  It wasn’t a great day, with high, murky cold water.  Still, they launched the canoe and fished where they could and caught just a few crappies they released.  On the other hand, I suspect that my heron didn’t catch many either. 

And hooray, it was another pie week!  It seems like the fruit gods dropped a huge load of inexpensive blackberries on Bloomington this past week, so a nice blackberry pie appeared.  Yum.  I have one slice remaining until the hourglass timer gets flipped over and the sands reverse direction. 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Pie in the art studio!

Yes, I enjoyed a beautiful slice of warm blackberry pie with my family in my usual working space.  Tom Bertolacini, my frame maker and photographer, dropped off fourteen oak frames, including one for my next piece of a non-traditional size.  It will be a re-interpretation of my ‘Tap Water” piece for a patron in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Tom also left behind some giant cucumbers, zucchini, squash, two generous quarts of blackberries, and one tomato that Patty was willing to part with.  

 Jim transformed the berries into an awesome pie.  On Monday evening the boys brought the creation down to the art studio and we all feasted before dinner.  I was on my way to the annual BloomMagazine reception, and although there was food I couldn’t possible go without trying the pie!  Dawn Adams and I had a wonderful time.  I got to see the most recent issue of Bloom and I was delighted to see a large photo of me from the local artist showcase event that Bloom puts on in the winter.  If that wasn’t enough, the ad for the Fourth Street Festival also features a giant image of one of my pieces, Summer Salad.  It was a good evening for me!

With the annual Fourth Street event coming up over the Labor Day weekend, I’ve been trying to spend as much time in the art studio as humanly possible.  I even make the sacrifice of eating pie for breakfast (with espresso) in my art studio!  

 I’m currently working on a northern pond piece, which is really the home for my loon.  I have completed the background, the cattails and the accompanying leaves.  I made them out of used paperclips that I straightened out and wrapped with yarn.  I found a nice brown chenille to make the actual cattail heads.   

They recall a warm, fuzzy memory for me, since in Czech the word for cattail is ‘cigar’.  I remember as a child trying unsuccessfully to light them.  I’m also working on tomatoes for a piece, and I am eight tomatoes shy of the completed work.  I still have to make some of the stems and leaves, but I have several meetings ahead of me.  That translates into plenty of tomato poking time.  I hope to have the piece completed by Labor Day.

I got to work on the components of the Tomato piece because we made one last trip to Grandma’s before school began on Wednesday.  We had a delightful trip, and in addition to making tomatoes on the drive, I made progress on a number of other fronts.  I had been thinking about making more underground pieces.  I was looking for memorable and rusted objects that evoke an emotional response.  Pieces that trigger a memory of something forgotten that used to be a regular part of your life.  While Jim and Tommie were off fishing, Grandma, Jacob and I went off to an antique mall across the street from our lunch spot.  I found a tintype photograph of two army officers that I knew I wanted to incorporate into a weaving.  I also found rusted old metal cars and a rusty fishing lure, among other treasures.  Grandma said she had plenty of those old rusty lures out in Grandpa’s pole barn.  Sure enough I found plenty of those, as well as a trove of other rusted treasures.  While I was there, Grandma’s neighbor Kathey Gibson came over and saw what I was doing.  That brought on an invitation from Ben Gibson to dig through his garage.  He had years of rusty history in his garage!  I found old keys, antique welding goggles, rusted tools, and treasures of all sorts.  I have two big bags to sort through some quiet day this winter. 

As I sit to recount my memories of the past few weeks, I realize how jam packed the whole time has been.  We brought back two big bags of transparent apples from Grandma’s prized tree.  They became three freezer pies, uncounted tupperwares of frozen chunks for muffins, and a big bowl of applesauce.   

The boys wanted to go on one last kayaking adventure, so we went to find the place Cindy Creek, the boy’s first grade teacher who got us started on kayaking, called Crinoid Beach.  We paddled across the lake to find the ‘beach’ – they are really more of limestone outcroppings.  I’m not sure that we landed on Crinoid Beach but we landed on a beach with lots of rocks with holes in them – perfect for incorporating into weavings, so for me it’s now the Rocks-with-Holes-in-them Beach.   

The boys got to swim and we all had lots of fun splashing around and having our lunch.    

And on Friday night, Jim tested (and passed!) his test for half-red, half-black belt in Taekwondo.  We’re so proud of him! 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

French Onion Soup and Blackberry Pie

I had a big landmark in my art career this week: my boys went back to school! First there was the mad rush to get all the school supplies together. Then I thought I was going to have big blocks of time to get things done, but somehow a lot of time was consumed doing paperwork. Somewhere in the middle Tommie’s cast came off, his broken arm mended. This week I’m going to park my bottom in my cool art studio and get weaving! Yippee!

I guess I did get a lot of art done this week too. Mostly I worked on my whimsical bird piece. I had been struggling with how to translate my tree sketch into a wire and felt object. The big issue was creating tapered tree branches that were thin at the ends of the curly branches and thick at the base near the trunk. I started with a thin wire core that I bent and wrapped for the curly ends. As I moved from the curly ends to the stout base, I increased the thickness by incorporating some really nice felt wool fabric that I got from Kathey Gibson on a trip to Michigan. I cut it into triangles, pointy ends facing the thin tips, and kept wrapping the branches with these filler pieces to bulk them up. I then used thick strips of the felt to wrap the tree trunk and create the general tree shape I wanted. Finally, I just needle felted on top of the crude trunk to smooth it into the shape and color I wanted. I’m delighted with how it turned out! I’ve propped it together to see how it looks, and next week I’ll “nail” it all down on the woven background.

With all my successes on the stove last week, starting with fresh yummy bruschetta and ending with sumac dyeing, I decided to continue the trend. This week I had tomatoes, tomatillos and cilantro, so of course it was time to make salsa. I also decided it was time to bring out my collection of frozen onion skins. I collect the brown outer layers every time I break into an onion for cooking and store them in a bag in the freezer. This week I got frustrated with the disordered state of the freezer and decided to organize it a bit. I came across the onion skins and decided there were enough for the dye pot, so out they came to make a little space. I cooked them for an hour, steeped them over night, strained the skins the next day, then warmed it back up so it would be cozy for my fleece. Every project is an experiment for me, so I threw in three different kinds of fleece, all white, to see what would happen. I left the fleece in the pot overnight and was surprised and pleased when I saw the three very different caramel colors. I also saw that there was enough color in the pot to try again, so I threw in some more fleece. The materials that spent two nights in the pot were darker still—what a surprise! Next time I need to work with ‘time in the dye pot’ as a variable. This is obvious in hindsight but it never occurred to me until I saw the results of the experiment.

I have a lot on my plate these days, such as the Fourth Street Art Fair coming up on Labor Day weekend. I’m also doing a workshop for teachers in Danville, Indiana, in early October. Last time we made ornaments, but not everyone who wanted to come could make it so we scheduled a second session in October. I proposed that we could make felted hearts or turtles, and we’re likely going with the turtles. I’ve been making demonstration turtles parts so that I can show the pieces in stages—kind of like a cooking show where they have the beautiful torte already baked to pull out at the end. This turtle is more whimsical than my previous ones, when I was trying for accuracy. I like how my prototype came together, and I like his tilted head and the quizzical look that gives him. It’s kind of like the look I get from Jim when I ask him when he’s going to clean the bathroom.

And speaking of my sweet husband, this week’s pie was made from the last of the season blackberries. Mmmmmm…

Until next week…

Martina Celerin