Channeling the Cool of Canada…

This past week the brutal summer heat finally broke in Bloomington.  After a week or so over 100 degrees, and as high as 106, we’re finally back down to normal summertime temperatures.  The best news for me was that my art studio was the coolest part of the house (in the basement next to the air conditioner) so I could work comfortably with my boys nearby.  I even had cold toes and needed my slippers!  As I thought about escaping the heat I began channeling cool Canadian lakes.  Of course I’m an American now, having spent my first Fourth of July as a citizen, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking about Canada.  It’s the only time of the year that I really miss my former home as I think about trips to Pinery Provincial Park and the shores of Lake Huron.  This thinking carried me through my ‘Father and Son’ piece, which features a mature birch tree and a sapling overlooking a cool lake.  It makes me think of the beautiful relationship and bond that’s developing between Jim and the boys, but that’s another blog post.  One of the new elements from this weaving is that the water has more sparkle, thanks to some silver cording I found at a yard sale a couple of weeks ago.  The three ply silver cord was too thick for incorporating into my canvas, but I was able to unravel it easily and use a single ply among the blue yarns to bring life to the water.  It contributes a brightness than I’ve ever used.  I found a lot of treasures at that yard sale, including some white lace, fabric scraps and a pink sweater that will translate nicely into sweater petals for fall shows.  To finish off the piece I combed through my rock collection and incorporated materials that had colors that work well with the piece.  I’m especially fond of horn coral for this kind of weaving because it has a large surface area that makes it easy to attach firmly.  I also like the texture it provides—it blends into the grassy lake shore better than smooth rocks. 

My other art news involves commissions and travel.  I’m ready to launch on my next big commission piece, due by the end of September.  I’m anxious to get started on a piece that’s tentatively called ‘Life’s Path’, which is a huge (45 by 25 inches) landscape orientation piece.  The path will be the focus through a forest background and the piece will present some new structural challenges for me.  I already have the frame, thanks to Tom Bertolacini, my frame-maker, so I’m ready to begin.  Traveling is also weighing on my consciousness.  My out-of-town summer art fair schedule begins this week.  I’ll travel to Madison, Wisconson, for the Art Fair on the Square this weekend—stop in if you’re in the area.  It’s supposed to be very hot for Madison (approaching 100 degrees), but it’s my best show of the year so I’m looking forward to it.  It’s also a chance to catch up with friends Wendy and Duane (and their dogs and new barn) outside of town in the quiet, cool countryside. 

The family news of the week was Jacob’s tenth birthday—hooray!  He kept a countdown of days to the big event, and he made himself some ‘happy birthday’ posters on the door next to his bed that he covered up so he could be surprised on the actual day.  We had a great day, beginning with a chocolate chip cookie cake and buttercream frosting for breakfast.  Yum!  We biked around town, visited the library and had lunch at the Village Deli.  Jacob had more decadent food when he ordered the strawberry shortcake.  I backed off my motherly responsibilities for a healthy diet, at least until dinner.  It was also the first day out of the hundred-degree range, so it was incredibly nice to be out biking and visiting the town.  I have a lot of friends that can bike in hot weather, but it isn’t me!  Here’s hoping we have a summer full of berries, bike rides and cool weather!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving means family, food and travel. Before I got into the full spirit of the weekend holiday, though, I still managed to move some projects forward. I finished most of the carrot tops for my ‘Baby Carrots’ piece. I still need to finish one carrot top and needle felt the little babies onto the background. And dig up a few treasures for the soil—perhaps a rock or some slag and a rusty nail. Just the kind of stuff you dig up when planting veggie seeds in the garden bed. When I re-launch my art career tomorrow, after unpacking suitcases and getting laundry going, I’m also going to start on a black ruffled merino shawl that I was commissioned to create. I just got a big shipment of merino wool from Oregon, and I had already purchased all the black merino within a fifty-mile drive of home. My plan is to use the wet-felting strategy I developed for my ruffled scarves and create a larger triangular shawl.

This year for Thanksgiving we drove to see Grandma in Michigan. We started off from school Tuesday after lunch and drove like the wind. The whole family was mesmerized by a book on tape: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Tommie and Jim have read the whole series, but Jacob and I were hearing it for the first time. We both guessed who the traitor was, and what parts of the prophecy meant as the book went along. Even better, we were able to drive without stopping until dinner around five. We then embraced Kawkawlin with hugs all around with Grandma and Uncle Tim. He arrived from New Mexico earlier in the week and had some alone time with Grandma before we descended on the scene. For Thanksgiving dinner, Aunt Lois drove in from Essexville and the Gibsons from next door joined us. They brought their friend Millie. Everybody contributed to the dinner, which was fun. The Gibsons brought turkey, stuffing and gravy, Millie brought scalloped potatoes, Tim made a potato and bean stir-fry dish, Jim made salmon and Aunt Lois brought cranberry salad and mom made squash. She also arranged the table and made the place look special. I was in charge of cutting bread, arranging the relish tray and keeping wine glasses full. An important task! Everything came together beautifully. Everyone had all they could eat and then we finished off the feast with pumpkin pie and ice cream. We even opened a fifteen year old bottle of Muscat as a dessert wine that we have been saving since before we were married. The dinner, like most of the weekend, was just lots of chillin’, hanging around and chitty-chatting with family and friends. It was all very nice. We got to do a little secret Christmas shopping, and I even got a stylish winter jacket from Mom that I get to wear now, but promise to keep clean until Christmas and put under the tree. The highlight for the boys was when Ben and Kathey Gibson, took them to the airport. Ben flies a jet in his semi-retirement, and he took the boys for a tour of the plane. They got to sit in the cockpit, learn about engines and flying, and even had a brownie sundae at the airport. Does life get any better than that? When they came home they were just bubbling over about their adventure and showed us all the pictures and movies they took. Today we got an early start and sped straight home in time for welcome-home Kluski dinner! As soon as I get this written it’s sure to be bedtime. Tomorrow it’s back to work and a chance to reflect on the weekend.

And now back to art... this weekend is the Holiday Art Fair at the Unitarian Universalist Church (Fee Lane and the bypass, here in Bloomington) on Friday 10 am - 7 pm and Saturday 9 am - 5 pm. Hope to see you there!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Peach Pie on the Banks of the Blue River

This was a week of completion. With the Fourth Street Festival coming up next weekend I wanted to finish my ‘Blue River’ piece. I built up the background, which I wove a few weeks ago, and I set out to add detail and form to the water elements. I pulled out my luscious watery-blue yarns and shimmery silvers. I needle felted the yarns I wanted onto the background to create the swirl in the waters and the glisteny reflections of the blue sky. I just kept introducing new yarn elements until I was happy with the details. I then retrieved some deep coffee-brown wool I bought at Yarns Unlimited some time ago. I knew I’d need it someday. The wool was shaped and needle felted into the tree trunk and branches that stand out in the foreground. I created the tree foliage in the background by embroidering with three green yarns I mixed. To get the texture I wanted I mixed chenille, wool and cotton fibers and fed them through the eye of a darn large darning needle. Not the kind that flies over the pond in the summer, but the kind you’d use to poke a giant if you wanted his attention. Next I delved into my collection of ‘rocks with holes’ that I collect from local creek beds. The sedimentary rocks of southern Indiana, especially those with imperfections, get worn smooth by the water and sometimes have a hole eroded straight through them. They’re perfect to capture the local creek bed feel and they’re easy to stitch on where I want them. I don’t get to use my drill press, but hey, no project is perfect. I then found my bag of green crocheted leaf clumps I created on a long drive to Michigan. These became the leaf clumps in the foreground. Last, I created a new element for my ‘tree’ pieces by needle felting a small stand of mid-ground trees. I think it makes the tree in the foreground stand out even more and provides a focal point that places the green background still further in the distance. Early this morning I added the final touches by stitching it into the frame and voila! I have a new piece ready to debut at the Fourth Street show. Stop by and say hello.

I do need to confess one small self-serving act from this week. Last Saturday the HoA (Husband of Artist) and eSoA (elder Son of Artist) went off on a weekend fishing trip. That’s what they do. What the HoA didn’t know was that I went to the farmer’s market and bought a huge basket of peach ‘seconds’—the tasty ripe peaches that are bruised and usually less than pretty. The kind that my kids just won’t eat unless you cut them up and remove the brown parts—yuck! The HoA came home and concluded—who knew—that we should make a peach pie. Did I tell you that I love pies? So Monday night I got a beautiful fresh peach pie, and every morning since I’ve had a slice with a little whipped cream on it for breakfast. And a nice cup of tea or coffee, again made the HoA. Luckily, he’s on a diet so I was forced to eat a fair bit of the pie. I must have cashed in some karma points from some good deed I did last week! Now I’m wondering how I can get him to bake a blueberry pie from the bags in the freezer? Hmmmm.

Until next week…

Tree Woman Emerges...

This is the weekend of the Broad Ripple Art Fair in Indianapolis. My booth is waiting for us, packed with the new pieces of the season. Set-up was a little different this year—my photographer, frame-maker and friend Tom Berolaccini rode shotgun in the van and helped me set up. Friday was a beautiful day to set up, warm and dry with little spurts of sun through overcast skies and good company along the way. Tom’s son Mark is visiting from Louisville, and Mark helped Tom make the stretcher frame for the ‘Gold Fish in a Blue Ocean’ piece I’ve been describing over the past few weeks. That piece is nearing completion—I had my last session with the kids this week. They glued more gold scales on the fish, and now I’m ready to assemble the whole thing by attaching the fish to the blue background at different angles and gluing the shell-encrusted outer frame to the stretcher frame. It has been a fun project with the Creek-Love classroom and my younger son Cubbie.

I also made a lot of progress on the ‘Tree Woman’ piece I sketched in the April 25th posting. The pictures show the finished background, which has a gradient of blues to create the sky. I used a sumac weave to create the green grass, then used a dimensional crocheting technique to build it up even further. I need this to establish the roots of the tree trunk and body form. I’ve included a scan of the body, which came out a little flattened because my two-dimensional scanner isn’t so good at capturing my three-dimensional pieces. It’s kind of like looking up at someone lying naked in the bottom of a glass-bottomed boat. I still need to finish the head and arms that reach up, and I need to detail the feet a little more. But I really like how she’s coming, and I’m especially fond of her belly button.

The week wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. About three weeks ago I found a pill bug in my basement art studio. They’re the cute little bugs with a lot of legs and a grey shell that curl up into a ball when your kids try to pick them up. I opened the only window in my studio to let him out, but the window didn’t seal shut when I closed it. When the torrential rains came Wednesday, you guessed it; a lot of water came straight into my workspace. I was out at a Fourth Street meeting, the HoA (husband of artist) was off a Tae Kwon Do class, and the boys were playing with a friend as water coursed through my window and onto the carpeted floor. If there was a bright side, I’ve been through this before and knew what to do. It was a long, frustrating evening, but my little piece of the world is drying out. Someday, someday I need a ground-level art studio! I suppose then I’ll have to worry about falling tree branches and tornadoes.

I hope to see you at Broad Ripple, in the field (shocking pink signs), booth 69!


Until next week…

Celandine Poppies and Spring Eggs

Completion! This week I finished a commissioned piece I’ve been working on for months. It has a fern background and Celandine (wood) poppies growing through. These are two of the truly hardy plants in our backyard, necessitating constant vigilance, trimming and plucking to keep them in check. I had finished the fern background and I needed to create the yellow poppies, so I stepped into the back yard and snipped a model bouquet. They immediately cheered up my art studio and set me to the task. I started with scraps of thin, plastic-coated wire that I shaped into petals. The flowers were needle felted onto the wire frames, ironed flat, then wrinkled into shape. The wire nicely holds the shape. The pistils are made from wire wrapped with green wool and touched up by needle felting. I think they’re really pretty in a vase.

In the Creek-Love classroom we took the next step on our Gold Fish in the Blue Ocean piece. We finished gluing seashells onto the frame, and the kids have sorted tons of gold beads and jewelry pieces to make the gold fish. At home I’ve finished sculpting the fish by bulking them up with cellulclay in anticipation of gluing on the gold scales. Now I’m excited about seeing the final project—it’s been two years in the making. It started when my older son Tommie was in the second grade and is continuing as Jacob moves through the first grade. The weaving phase was the most time consuming as we slowly built up the giant background, but now we’re rapidly approaching completion.

The last big project of the week has been gearing up for our annual spring egg hunt, assuming it doesn’t rain. So far we’re looking good on the weather, but of course you never really know in the spring in Indiana. We’ve invited 19 kids and have a twenty-gallon tub filled with packed eggs. We save the plastic shells from year to year and the kids take home the booty inside. Last year we geared up for the event but it rained every weekend in season, and suddenly it was 90 degrees. Melting chocolate candy is not what you want to have a bunch of screaming kids handling while running around your house. We did have to discard most of the contents of the eggs from last year—Whoppers go bad, it turns out, as do a lot of other rich chocolate dainties. The gladiolus corms were dehydrated but apparently OK, so they got their own spot in the garden after an overnight soak. I guess it kept the kids from thinking they were candy and accidentally eating them. After the hunt the HoA (husband of artist) will have a suite of cupcakes for the annual ‘Cupcake Picnic’. As of now we’ve checked off all the key requirements for a successful kid party: Chocolate? Check! High-sugar products? Check! Chance to run around and scream? Check! Time limit so wired kids go home before the house is destroyed! Check! Check Check! We’re ready!

Until next week…

Cold Coffee made from Brown Crayons

Happy Valentine’s Day! Over the past week I’ve been dreaming less of chocolate hearts and more about the weather, so let’s start there. My art studio sits in the basement of the house, and the heavy Hoosier rains of spring and fall are always a worrisome time. If the power goes out or the sump pumps fail it takes a week to take up the carpets and dry everything out. Something valuable always seems to soak up some water when the water flows. Last week my loving husband installed a battery back-up sump pump that was a gift from Grampa, so even with the heavy rains I was ready for anything! On a brighter note, between the rains there were sunny, warm afternoons, perfect for biking to school. My hand-me-down bike has a big comfy seat and the traditional storage basket in front filled with the boy’s scooters and helmets instead of a small barking dog. We had nice rides home from Rogers and Binford through the puddles.

The water theme also seeped into my art last week. Over the past two years I’ve gotten into the world of Christmas ornaments, although a lot of people buy them just as all-year decorations. I set a goal of 100 last year, which I reached by making ten each month with a couple of vacation months built in. This year I’m back at it, and from the picture you can see that I’ve had water on my mind! The lighter blue was created from seven packages of Blue Lemonade mixed with ½ of package of Lime Kool-aid. When the fleece came out of the dye pot I just loved the color (and my heron friend thought it was deceptively water-like). The white fleece is Merino that I bought recently at Sheep Street in Morgantown (always worth the drive to see Nancy and Pat). Maybe after I stop worrying about rising waters I’ll get back to more traditional themes.

On a sadder note, even as the sump pump situation came under control my ancient espresso maker gave a last shudder and dumped out a cup of cold, weak … well, something. I was reminded of when Linus makes hot chocolate out of brown crayons for Lucy. This is a serious problem because my loving spouse makes me a cup of espresso every morning, usually with something tasty to eat. I quickly raced out to support the downtown economy and got a new one, and I can report that it works very nicely. Later that day my trust Kitchen-aid stand mixer decided it didn’t like heavy breads and started to whine. This isn’t good because my kids live on homemade bread (I don’t tell them what I slip in to make it healthy). My trusty neighbor Emily Leite came through with her mixer to finish the job and the bread came out just fine. Heaven forfend that I should have to knead it with my delicate, needle felting hands! Luckily it’s a major holiday, and I’m hoping against hope that loving family will think of a red mixer with lots of power as a Valentine’s Day present! Did I say RED dear?

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…

Fresh Fruit

January 31, 2009

Twelve years is a long time. That’s both how long I’ve been in Bloomington and how long it’s been since we had a snowfall this large. I remember my first winter in town, a fresh face from Canada. I felt right at home helping people free their cars from the snow as I walked in to work. This week we had two big snowfalls that closed the school for three and a third days (a two hour delay for Friday). That meant I had some boisterous company as I worked all week, so not much weaving in the art studio was done. Between hearing about Pokemon character evolutions I did get to bring my felted fruit to colorful fruition (see the January 10th post for the 1950s black and white version). I was really pleased with how the watermelons, oranges, grapes and cherries turned out! Some of my boys play pals were pretending to eat them, but I knew my son wasn’t fooled, even as he chomped—he’d never eat a watermelon with seeds in it. The other exciting thing was that the oranges gave me a great idea for another weaving. I’m envisioning a piece called ‘Sangria’, a pitcher of cold fruit in wine for a hot summer afternoon. The color for the oranges I made was a blend of five wools to get the flesh right, and I used big organic navel oranges from Bloomingfoods as a model. And then I ate them! The watermelon rind is made of wool from New Zealand that a friend brought back for me, and the light green that fades into the rind was a special find. It comes from a dyeing project this summer when I was making verdant greens and I had a tiny bit of a pale green solution left. I dyed and saved the fleece, but I wondered what I would ever use that fleece for. When I needed a perfect light green this week I had it!
This morning I’m packing up my latest projects to show at a felting workshop today. It’s for the AEIA (Art Educators of Indiana Association), organized by Gladys Newsom, and we’re going to make felted hearts. Valentine’s day is coming, and that means love and wool is in the air. For me, anyway—for my husband it’s love and chocolate, and chocolate for the rest of the year.



Until next week…

Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron

This week things warmed up all around. After frozen pipes and a few days of huddling inside as the furnace struggled to keep us above sixty, I finally got out and about this week to work on my Great Blue Heron project.

This story dates back to last winter, when Aerin Sentgeorge asked me to participate in Wonderlab’s “Science of Art” program. I did a weaving project with green yarns of all descriptions, and I let the kids feel the textures and incorporate the yarn into a shared project. This year is “The Science of Sculpture”, and I decided it was time to try making a Great Blue Heron. We see these magnificent birds when we go to Lake Monroe on collecting or fishing trips. When I sit fishing with my family at the shore, sometimes I feel like a Great Blue Heron, watching the bobbers for bites, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting fish for dinner.

So where does one start to make a free standing, slightly larger-than-life Great Blue Heron? Where every great project starts—the recycle center, Kleindorfer’s Hardware and Grandma and Grandpa’s back yard in Michigan. I started with a hunk of a Michigan willow tree that has been curing in the basement for two years. Things dry out pretty well there if you keep them above flood level when the power to the sump pump fails. I picked up an iron rod (and a bolt cutter!—I love tools!) from Kleindorfer’s for the support leg. I enhanced the thickness of the rod with lanyards I found in a bag at the recycle center, then wrapped the whole thing with yarn. The other leg, neck claws and the beak are supported with baling wire that I also found at the recycle center. Birds can’t have too much metal if they want to fly, so I say: “more fiber, less metal!” The body, which looks like a very sad frozen turkey right now, is built from wet felted balls of wool that are needle felted together. I’m planning to create the wing and tail feathers using a wet felting technique I recently learned at a workshop at Pam Kinneman’s Wee Sheep Farms studio. That was a terrific opportunity to learn a new technique, and I made a scarf I’m proud of that I’ll talk about on another cold weekend.

So then it’s just a matter of putting it all together! Maybe you can picture me sitting outside on the very warm day from last week, picking the bark off the willow base to look for worm trails on the surface of the wood. I was bonding with the woodpecker I heard looking for lunch on a nearby tree. My lunch wasn’t so fresh, but at least it was warm. I also had to laugh at myself as I needle felted (repeated poked with a needle) the crotch of the poor heron while both heron legs were flopped over my shoulders. That’s a visual image you can keep if things get hectic for you this week!

Until next week…

Fruit Salad

Fruit Salad

The end of the past week was cold in Bloomington Indiana. Chuck Lofton said that it was the coldest day in five years, and the temperatures dropped to the wrong side of -10F. Even for a Canadian that’s cold. Our old house took notice, though. An inaccessible pipe to the upstairs froze Thursday night, cutting off the shower and flooding us with worries of broken pipes. Fortunately, I have a very large hammer and no fear of drywall! A few swift whacks and I found the offending pipe and had my trusty hairdryer on the job, full heat. My male relatives discouraged my use of a blowtorch and soldering iron, which really slowed me down. (Don’t worry; I don’t even have a blowtorch).

That leads me into the activity that you’ll find me doing most of my free time—needle felting. I do it at meetings, while my loving spouse drives the family around town, and while the boys do their Tae Kwon Do at the Monroe County Martial Arts center with Mr. or Mrs. Scott. With time on my hands and the hair dryer in place I was working on this weeks weaving project, a piece called ‘Fruit Salad’. How can you not dream of summer when it’s 14 below zero and your pipes are frozen? So I was making slices of fruit for the piece, which you can see in an unfinished form in the image I included. You’ll see unfinished apples, cherries, watermelon, strawberries and orange slices.

The inspiration for the piece really came last summer when I was dyeing wool using Kool Aid with my kids. I remember pulling fleece out of the dye pot and thinking that the color looked just like watermelon. Then the ‘I love a challenge’ part of me kicked in and I started imagining which fruits I would needle felt, and what the composition might be for a weaving. I decided to make a piece along the lines of ‘Homegrown Tomatoes’ or ‘Some Like it Hot’, my pieces based on tomatoes and peppers. But now I was thinking about picking blueberries at Brays (by the Crane Naval Station), eating apples from Musgrave Orchard that come over several weeks in the Core Farms CSA baskets, and improving the cherry harvest at Grandpa’s house by removing the ones that come ripe a little too soon.

So off I went! I have home-dyed wool from Sheep Street and the Farmer’s Market and a season full of memories of fresh fruits. I have a mental image of the chef (Auguste Gusteau) and the rat (Remy) in the movie ‘Ratatouille’ who liked to blend flavors into new taste experiences. Of course the challenge is to transform a mouthful of wool into a mouthwatering slice of summer. It’s also an attempt to blend the flavors of the fruit and the harvesting seasons across summer and fall into one piece.

Until next week…

Felted Hearts

I’ve always liked a challenge. When the Bloomington Area Arts Council assembled ‘Small’, showing pieces of less than a square foot, I had to try. As you likely know, most of my pieces are three-dimensional wall hangings, but in the last two years I started making Christmas ornaments. I’ve also made a number of needle felted-creatures to live in my weavings so I set out to try something new and make small pieces. The theme was ‘Shhh… the trees are sleeping’, and I tried to imagine what trees were thinking in the long winter months. The frames and the background are needle-felted and the trees that emerge are wool wrapped around flexible copper wire from the Recycle Center. The show is up at the Bloomington Bagel Company through January if you’d like to see the collection on display.

This week a new challenge crept onto my schedule. Gladys Newsom, an art teacher at University Elementary School, contacted me and asked me about teaching a felting workshop at the end of January for the District 5 art teachers. I met Gladys at a recycled materials weaving workshop I taught at the Teacher’s Warehouse in Bloomington and I was eager to help. As a theme she suggested making hearts, with Valentine’s Day coming up. My first response, though, could be best summarized as ‘eeyewww’. This sounded too cutesy and I started thinking about alternatives. Then the side of me that likes a challenge set in and I set off to try to make a nice heart.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I came up with idea of making a three dimensional heart. I started with two walnut-sized wet felted balls and joined them by needle felting with raw wool to create the heart shapes. I coated these with bright red and very soft Merino wool from Sheep Street in Morgantown. I embellished my hearts with scroll patterns, swirls and polka dots and I was pleased with how they turned out! I scanned one to post that gives you an idea of what they look like.

Until next week…