I want to ride my bicycle!

The story of my winter has been creating commissioned pieces.  The next in line features a bicycle propped up against a fence in front of a flower garden.  Last week I completed the fence and this week I finished the bicycle and painted the fence!  Painting is exciting in the winter because it means we finally had a brief window above fifty degrees that allowed me to coat my popsicle sticks.  I was delighted to get that done because the forecast for the next ten days is for miserably cold winter weather with ice pellets mixed in for good measure.  On the bike itself, I always feel a little extra pressure to get the shape and proportions of the bicycle just right.  

 I showed the very first bicycle I made to Jeanne Smith, the owner of Bikesmiths in town.  I’m sure she tried to not to hurt my feelings as she gently critiqued the angles and proportions of my bike.  Ever since I have tried hard to treat my bikes like my biological organisms and get the details just right. This was also my first red bicycle, which is what the commissioner wanted.  I’m delighted to be pushed out of my black bicycle norm.  I guess I flash back to the bicycles in Amsterdam from my visit twenty years ago—I remember the bikes were always painted black.  I discovered that red just makes me feel cheerful and happy and I really like it.  I promised to have this commission to the owner by mid-March and I feel like I'm on track for that deadline. 

The next commission I promised to deliver by the end of March, so I’m feeling a little pressure to keep moving on that piece as well.  The piece features a forest path with two dogs waiting for their keepers in the foreground.  I’m very pleased with how the sketch turned out and I’m looking forward to creating the piece, which features a lot of trees.  That means that where ever I have gone I’ve been needle felting tree trunks.  Or unicorn horns, or whatever people see when they view the unfinished trunks as I poke away to shape them.  

 Oh, and when the warmer spell hit I also took that opportunity to do some more dyeing, because my stores of green yarns were seriously dwindling.  From the sketch you can see that various shades of greens are essential to the composition.  I got a great start on weaving the background yesterday afternoon when we had a snow day for the local school system.   

That gave me time and space to work in the art studio as the boys entertained themselves upstairs in the afternoon.  The morning was filled with boy-made pancakes, Apples to Apples, and the movie ‘The Boxtrolls”.  Then the boys invented a game that involved rubber balls, metal bowls, rubber bands and doing push-ups.  That’s all I need to know!  It gave me several uninterrupted hours with my loom, space heater and classical music as they played upstairs.  They even transitioned into making dinner for the family.  

 That turned out to be artisan macaroni and cheese by Jacob and three different versions of blizzard cake balls by Tommie.  The evening ended with a fire in the fireplace and a delightful glass of wine.  Hooray!  I hope I can be as successful today with a second snow day. 

On the family front, the big news is that both boys won gold medals at the ISSMA (Indiana State School Music Association) vocal competition.  I’m so proud of them!  An apple pie did appear just after I wrote the last blog, which means it’s been gone for over a week.  

 Fortunately the espresso has been available each morning, which pairs nicely with the ‘Oblivion’ cake from the Bakehouse.  That’s a flourless chocolate cake with a wonderful chocolate ganache layer on top.  We had a guest over for dinner and didn’t have time to bake anything ourselves.  The Bakehouse only had large cakes left when I got there in the afternoon, but that turned into a positive because the cake is awesome and I’ve been enjoying it for breakfast.  I think I have my new favorite local cake from a bakery since the departure of Angel B’s!  I’m thinking it will last until Wednesday, at which time I’ll be ready to switch back to pie again.  Maybe a midwinter cherry pie?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

School is almost over!

The end of another school year is a dominant theme in our household these days.  Jacob has several big projects coming to a conclusion, including Friday’s big extravaganza.  Jacob was Thomas Jefferson.  I came to see all the presentations in the library, and the kids did a fine job with their early American personalities.  I’ve been stopping in to support Mrs. Tamborrino as an algebra tutor some mornings and having a lot of fun with the kids.  I even helped participate in the rocket-building exercise—launch is set for Monday!  To wind down after a long day when Jim was out sparring Wednesday, the boys and I took a nice walk in the neighborhood and played a fun rhyming word game.  Who knew swapping spit with a Russian communist was a ‘Bolshevik lick’? 

On our trip we ran into a big herd of deer roaming the neighborhood.  Depending on your point of view, they were either enriching our lives, eating our flowers, or menacing helpless pet and bicyclists.

Between all my other responsibilities I have slipped off to the art studio to move my projects forward.  I completed all the tree trunks for the foreground of the piece, and I think I have enough branches created for the canopy.   

As school winds down, I’ve been able to pirate a few of the wire from spiral notebooks that are no longer needed at school.  It’s actually a good time of year to collect those.  I warped the loom and started weaving the extended trail through the woods.  The lower layers begin with a sumac weave that will be covered with a dimensional crochet technique that will form the final path.  I’m using up a lot of yarn colors that I don’t normally have a lot of use for.  That includes soft peaches, pale yellows and beiges from my collection. 

Last night we held a meeting of the artists who organized this year’s Open Studio’s Tour.  We gathered in our dining room for a potluck and talk about this year’s successes and what we’d like to do differently next year.  The kitchen became the staging area, with a wonderful collection of foods.  There was even an interesting pie that featured blueberries, mild goat cheese and basil.  Yum!  I think everyone was enthusiastic about the event, and everyone in the group seems to appreciate good food.  As I’m writing this I have a belly full of strawberry shortcake with freshly baked biscuits in my tummy.  Jim is working on a biscuit version that doesn’t have shortening, which I encouraged.   

They haven’t been perfected yet, but they were still really good!  And as I write and think how to finish this week’s blog without a picture of a pie, I’m looking out at the beautiful spring flowers in the garden.  They’ll have to do for now.

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Fall is coming!

Now that the Fourth Street Art Festival has past, I’m eager to launch into my fall activities.  Foremost on my list is completing a large-format commission piece, which will be 44 by 24 inches when it is framed.  It’s a huge piece!  It’s going to take an intensive effort to weave the background.  Luckily, I love to weave!  Right now I’m laying down the base yarn colors, although they will not be highly visible in the final piece.  That’s because I use a crocheting technique to build forward a ledge at the bottom of the piece.  That’s where I will “plant” the mature trees.   

Speaking of trees, I’ve been assembling the trunks during my captive times away from home, such as when I watch the boys do their Taekwondo classes.  The trunks are solid wool, but the core is made from my father-in-law’s old wool army blankets.  They were holey and needed a good home.  I also had a good stroke of fortune at Fourth Street when a young girl approached me to see if I wanted to buy wool roving.  She raised Shetland sheep for her 4H project and had just completed the first shearing.  The wool was washed and carded into roving.  I’m always on the lookout for small amounts of various wools so I asked her to sell me eight ounces of each variety she had.  Fortunately, the aunt was coming to Bloomington and was kind enough to deliver the wool after the festival.  I sort of tossed it downstairs to catalog later into my extensive collection.  When I started looking around for tree trunk wool for my commission, I realized the bag of new roving had the perfect deep, rich coffee brown for my tree trunks!  

 I’ll also use many of the green wools I dyed last week to make leaf clumps for the canopy.  I love it when a project comes together!  If that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I took on another commission this week.  I will be a tall, narrow version of ‘Some like it Hot’, my pepper collection piece.  It features red, orange yellow and green peppers of varying sizes and colors.  That will mean a lot of needle felting to create the peppers, but I’m mentally ready to take on the fall color palette.  I think I need to work with a broader range of vibrant colors after making many pieces featuring the crunchy, bright greens of spring and summer. 

And speaking of fall colors, last weekend we launched into our annual bruschetta making project.  We started out at the farmer’s market, buying twenty pounds of tomatoes.  Roma tomatoes make up the base, but the project consumed about eight pounds of heirloom tomatoes of various colors and shapes and several pounds of onions.  Luckily, Jim planted an herb garden this spring and kept it watered through the dry weather.   

That meant we were able to include four kinds of basil (lemon, Thai, globe and Greek) and two kinds of oregano (Italian and spicy).  Jim doesn’t seem to notice that I basically mowed down the patch, but it was all for a good cause.  We spent a day blanching and peeling until our fingers were wrinkled, chopped like crazy and stirred with the greatest of care not to break up the tomatoes or allow material the bottom of the giant stockpot to burn.   

Forty-seven jars later I think we’re set for winter.  Actually, there are only forty-six jars in the freezer while one was left out to test.  Tommie, Jim and I give it a huge thumbs up.  Jacob is still acquiring a taste for such things.  

 I can tell that we’re settling back into a routine, since this week there was no pie for breakfast.  I can either be sad about not having pie or I can look forward to the next one, which I’m sure will be soon.  The second choice always works better!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin