Mixed Fresh Greens on Mother’s Day.

This week was such a mixed bag—a little of this and a little of that. I was tying up loose ends on a bunch of art projects, not all of which were expected. The most exciting news on the art front was that I was able to re-launch on a weaving I started last fall. It requires beautiful red gum leaves with a deep wine-red color. I had needle felted the leaves months ago, but this week I found just the right yarn and some nice thin steel wire to create the stems. I think they look delightful! Months ago I began to create a toad to live in the piece, but I never gave him any skin. This week I’ll focus on toad skin, trying to resist the temptation to lick it. And even though I spent huge blocks of time and energy on commissions this winter, I still managed to launch on the next request on my list. It’s based on an early piece I did called ‘A Walk in the Woods’. I began a search of my cord boxes to find just the right material. I was looking for some specific thrums that I know work well for the tree trunks, and luckily I found enough of the material. Trunk creation involves twisting one really interesting cord to give the look of bark I want. If you’re a regular blog reader, it may seem as if I always have just the right material for a project. My husband Jim can’t decide whether I’m great at choosing which materials to save (everything) or whether I decide that what I find is just what I needed. The answer is—both! To create my path through the woods I did some digging to find just the right copper and light brown yarns. And yes, I had just the right colors! This week I’ll start the actual weaving, a phase of each project that I really love to do. Because this piece lacks needle felting, I needed something to keep my hands busy while I watch my boys during their Taekwondo and sparring classes. I decided to begin yet another project that does involve a lot of felting. It’s based on a photograph I saw in a Turkish cookbook. The picture shows grouping of vegetables that are being prepared for a salad. Everything looks so crisp and fresh that it makes my mouth water. My version will involve sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, whole carrots and radishes, and chopped broccoli. And whatever else occurs to me that I think would look good! I invested a little time this week putting the outer skins on my cucumbers and tomatoes as the boys trained under the watchful eye of Mr. Scott at Monroe County Martial Arts. This Friday will be a big day for all my boys there as they test to advance in rank. The younger boys will be blue belts with a black stripe, the last belt before brown and Jim will advance to blue belt.

The diversity of my art projects was matched by the diversity of other family events that culminated in a special Mother’s Day. Sunday afternoon was our spring egg hunt, which brought bunch of kids to the house to search for eggs and screech happily as they ran around the back yard. Dinner was Atlantic salmon with a ginger-orange glaze. It has a little balsamic vinegar and a touch of honey and I really like it. We opened a nice bottle of wine, had some red new potatoes boiled to perfection, and topped it off with a rhubarb pie still warm from the oven. I received an elegant watch from Jim and two sweet handmade cards from the boys. It’s good to be a mom!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Ratatouille is the first to leave the sinking ship

I began this week reveling in the late stages of completing my major art pieces, "Summer Harvest" and "Ratatouille." My photographer, Tom Bertolacini, came over to take photographs for my portfolio. He sets up all his fancy lights and gets out his fancy camera and takes some really nice pictures. Even better, though, is the fact that I brought the pieces upstairs when he was done! That’s important because two major storms passed through Bloomington on Friday. The second one woke us up around midnight when the tornado sirens went off. We trundled two sleepy boys into the basement studio, with blankets and pillows, and they lay down there. Fortunately, we got to see the window well filled up with water and watch the water start to pour in. By that time the tornado sirens were off and Jim ran out to scoop water out of the well. Then he used the push broom to sweep water out of the veranda and direct it into Celerin Pond which drains into Drummond Creek. That kept a lot of water out of the house, but enough came in to the storage room that I had to jump into defense mode. I cleared the wall storage units and rolled up the carpets in my art studio to let everything dry out. Nothing was damaged, but it kept us up until 3:30. Saturday we did a little drainage remodeling around the veranda and resolved to remove the stone patio that channels the water toward the house. Ah, spring in Indiana—I love it! I just love some parts more than others. A post script here—I could do without the ant invasions too.

This week I began weaving away on my BPP (Bloomington Playwrights Project) commission piece. The structural challenge was incorporating one key aspect of their logo, which is the “turning pages” at the bottom right hand corner on all their promotional stuff. Chad asked if I could somehow incorporate that feature into the piece. I imagined a strategy that I thought might work, but this week I did the experiment. Basically I wove three weavings, and into each of the first wefts I incorporated some used baling wire wrapped with yarn which also continued up the right side of the weaving. I then wove the rest of the weaving. I was able to create a tiered set of weavings and stretched them out on the frame. I snipped away the support strings on the corners and molded the wires outward to create the turning pages. During my travels I’ve been poking at the BPP logo letters. I’ve enjoyed working on crisp edges that don’t have the organic feel that my felted vegetables had. While I like doing natural things, the freshness of doing something new is welcome. To make the letters I used an old wool army blanket that belonged to Jim’s father. I cut six layers out for each letter and stitched them together. I needle felted my tumeric-dyed fleece on top of the blanket letters. Because I want to the letters appear to be suspended in front of the weaving I also incorporated baling wire into the back of the letters to create the look of floating letters. Overall, I feel really good about the progress I made on the piece, and next week I’ll should launch on to the cursive text of their logo, ‘Where theatre is born’. The piece will feature a hand holding a pen, which I’ve already completed and think it looks really good.

I’m sure I did other things this week—I’m a little short on sleep, which doesn’t help my memory. I do remember lunch with my sweetie this Thursday at Malibu Grill. I had the farmed perch from Bell’s in Muncie Indiana, which were really tasty. I had no idea that there were perch in Indiana—I’ve only enjoyed the perch from the great lakes. Jim made kluski for dinner last night, and it was especially good. Even so, after all the wetness and woe I had this week you’d think I might deserve another pie! My friend Wendy got one…but I think that she made that one herself...

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Chameleon Conga and Salamander Salsa

My life and art seem to revolve around my friends in Bloomington, Indiana. I live in a community rich in resources of all kinds that help me flourish, and I’ve come to deeply appreciate what I have. For example, this was ‘chameleon week’ for me, courtesy of one of my benefactors, the Monroe County Public Library. I went to the kids section to find picture books with big, brightly colored images of my quarry. I found a treasure trove of books to help me on my way, including a picture of a nice pardalis chameleon. To create its body, I searched through my materials only to find that some evil spell-casting wood sprite had transformed a ball of my fleece into a parsnip. Oh wait—that was me! The parsnip didn’t fit into my veggie piece, so I transformed the parsnip into the body of a chameleon. I keep everything I make, since you never know when something important will turnip. Sorry, my kids are into bad jokes right now and I couldn’t resist. I also pulled out all my green fleeces that I dyed last year and a dark brown natural fleece that fit in nicely and set to work. I put the last touches on it while listening to the proceedings of the Fourth Street Art Festival committee meeting, surrounded by local artists and craftspeople who are all committed to the success of the local art scene. As you can see in the picture, I then let the chameleon run around my art studio and inspect my yarns before she settled down among her home ferns. I hope somebody likes her as much as I do.

Well, I figure that if I can make chameleons out of turnips, I can turn amphibians into salsa. More precisely, I’m now off making six salamanders to dance together in my next piece, ‘Salamander Salsa’. I picked up a few colorful books from, you guessed it, the Monroe County Public Library. The variety of colors palates for salamanders is truly amazing. I’ve completed the first dancer, a spotted salamander, which is a rich, rich black color with yellow spots. Now I’m working on a mud salamander, whose name fails to capture its beautiful bright red color with tiny black spots. They always seem to be standing on sphagnum moss beds so I’ll have to whip up some moss for this piece too. This project will take a little time to bring together, since my three-dimensional animals always take more effort than I imagined.

The other big event on my calendar this week was the DBI (Downtown Bloomington Inc) annual awards ceremony. It was well attended, and I got to chitty chatty with lots of downtown business people. It’s so nice to see how cohesive and well-supported the downtown community is. This is a community that wisely values the vitality of its downtown, which is succeeding where other downtowns are failing in this tough economic market. I’ve benefitted from a number of downtown businesses showing my art over the years, with big thanks to places such as the Wandering Turtle, By Hand Gallery, Bloomingfoods and the Bloomington Bagel Company. I feel like I’m part of a vibrant community, and I like that feeling. Bloomington feels like home.

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

Entering the Fourth Dimension

The big event from my week was the Trashionista show. I’ve been so excited all week to see how my dimensional fashion creations would look on the runway. Both of the scheduled rehearsals were lost to the snowy weather, but Saturday the big day finally arrived. There was an afternoon rehearsal at the convention center. The backdrop for the show was very cool and professional. They used a crinkled metal meshwork and played different colored lights over it that changed as the music changed. It had a mesmerizing effect on my two young assistants who came to help or play Yu-Gi-Oh, whichever seemed like more fun at the time. For my gowns, the coordinator picked out the tallest models. I was armed with my clear duct tape for hem adjustment if needed, but everything fit beautifully. The professional models were just that, and they brought the gowns to life. When I designed the River Rapids I was imagining turbulent waters rushing over rocks. I included design elements such as hanging beaded strings that cascaded over the blue dress and black swirls. I was really pleased with the movement of the piece, and I thought I heard a little gasp from the audience when the dress came out. My inner fashion diva has really good hearing, and that’s how she remembers it! In conversations after the show, everyone seemed to like the translucent shawls made of dryer sheets. For me, that was the crowning element for the recycling aspect of the show, to create a wearable and attractive piece from material that everyone discards without a thought.

My world isn’t just about art and design, though, no matter how new and exciting it is to me. My two boys were real troopers through both the rehearsal and the show. When the focus was elsewhere they held Yu-Gi-Oh duels, which let me concentrate on the fashion. During the show, my son Jacob took my fancy-new-Christmas-present camera in hand to document the events. He was guided by his composition consultant, his brother Tommie. They homed in on different aspects of the show and captured some nice images from heights and angles that professional photographers feared to access. By the end of the evening I had 160 images to sift through. Jacob was also quite partial to the Blue Sky soda served at the show, since sodas aren’t part of our home routine. After a long evening of four dimensional art, where three dimensional creations are brought to life with movement, we all came home and crashed.

My art world, of course, kept moving along last week too. My life has felt full with much going on, more than I can describe here. I’ve felt as if I’ve had to sit still and keep an eye on a lot of things, blending into different worlds at will, so I felt it was appropriate to be working on my chameleon piece. He will be sitting on some fern fronds, which means I had a lot of frond leaflets to make. I spent a lot of time cutting brass flashing, purchased at the secret M33 supply store in Michigan. After this project, it seems that I’ll have to make a pilgrimage there this summer to replenish my stock. I found a really nice rich green to finish the leaves from the batch of yarns I dyed last week. After I wrapped the leaflets I started attaching them to a couple of the fronds, which turned out well. I have a few more to do and then I can literally flesh out my chameleon this week. I’ve sent my inner fashion diva off for a long nap to improve her disposition, but I’m sure she’ll roar to life when she has some new ideas. I promise that you’ll be the first to hear about it!

Until next week…


Martina Celerin