Frogs, pockets and soup...

My big project of the week was to finish the home for my red-eyed tree frog. I thought I had finished all the fern leaflets I could possibly want. I made a huge pile and started attaching them on to the veins to create fern fronds for him to hide in. Unfortunately, when the more I attached the smaller the pile got, and soon I was left with one unfinished vein. Back to the art studio I went, cut up eighty more leaflets out of brass flashing and started to wrap them. Happily, I had plenty of the yarn stock that I dyed for the project. It would have been a nightmare to have to try to match the colors. I love the colors I get when I dye, but it isn’t an exact art and I just don’t think I could re-create the same colors. I attached all the completed fern fronds to my woven green background and all is good in my world. Now I’m working on completing the frog. This is a fun needle-felting project with a lot of detail work, but there are some limitations. For example, I do a lot of work at the Monroe County Martial Arts school and at art-related meetings I attend. I’m just now putting in the eyes of the frog, but I’ve learned that most people are a little freaked out by the repetitive poking with the needle around the eyes. In my mind it makes no difference which part of the animal I’m working on, whether it’s the skin, eye or tail, but I can see why that might be a little hard to watch. So I slip down into my art studio when the kids are in school for those parts. I wear black leather and put on creepy music to set the mood, too. Not really! I’m just kidding!

In addition to the usual constraints on my time this week, a new project fell into my lap. The schools are having a fundraiser that I think is just fabulous. Instead of getting friends and relatives (and parents) to buy stuff they probably don’t need to send some proceeds back the school, last year they started running a read-a-thon. You pledge money for pages read, and the kids go to town reading whatever chapter books interest them. The competitive aspect gets a lot of people reading more, which is great. To kick off the events, though, they have a style show where kids dress up as their favorite literature character. Jacob decided he wanted to participate as a Yu-Gi-Oh duelist (sounds like a Japanese alcohol-free beer). That meant he needed a slick white jacket with pockets for one hundred dueling decks on the inside. Kind of like the shirts where illicit street vendors open up their coats and try to sell you knock-off watches. I leapt into action and repurposed one of Jim’s old dress shirts (I hope he’s not reading this!). The pockets had to hold the decks, so I did some fancy darting to create 12 pockets for decks. He filled them up, put it on and added his duelist arm gear and voila! He was ready to go. The best news is that I persuaded him that it would also be a great Halloween costume. That’s like feeding two birds with one loaf of bread.

My last bit of news comes from the dyeing world. I pulled out the last bag of frozen plant material from my summer trip to Michigan. I collected a bunch of purple loosestrife that I had high hopes for. It’s a beautiful flower, but it’s an invasive weed that chokes out native wetland plants. I chopped it up and boiled it like a weed I didn’t much care for, but not much purple came of it. Off to the compost pile it went. On the other hand, it did inspire me to get out my stockpots for soup. I recently stopped by the By Hand gallery and was chatting with Joan, and she offered me the last of this season’s kale from the garden. Luckily, kale is the secret ingredient in “Lois soup”, which comes from Lois Graham, the boys’ fairy godmother in Michigan. Of course to her it’s “Sarah’s soup”. I use chopped up veggie sausages instead of real sausages, but it’s full of kale, beans and spices. A soup by any other name…

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

Mr. Turtle Goes to Indianapolis

I spent last week in serious turtle mode. Where do you find serious turtles? That’s right, I started out at the Monroe County Public Library. I pored over the books with glossy color pictures of Eastern Painted turtles, which I needed to finish my latest weaving (Among the Ferns), but I didn’t meet any really serious turtles. The librarian told me that they’re off at the Library of Congress this time of year. To finish my turtle I needed some specialized fleece, starting with just the right deep olive green. I found some that I bought at the Hoosier Hills Fiber Arts Festival (in Franklin, IN) that worked well. Painted turtles have beautiful, bright red lines, and I matched the color I needed from a lot I picked up at Sheep Street in Morgantown. Last, I needed a natural-looking golden yellow highlight. I was stumped until I remembered my disastrous beet dyeing experience of a few weeks ago (August 15^th blog). Who knew that the perfect soft yellow-brown for turtle stripes was in beets, as soon as you got past that deep red color? So this week I poked and poked (and poked) and out popped the turtle. He slipped right into the fern fronds as his new home, but something was missing on the ground. I needed some rocks, and I decided that slag was perfect for the task. Slag is a glassy leftover from the smelting of iron ore, and I picked up mine in Michigan along the Saginaw River. Recycle everything, I say. I’m always delighted when I can take someone’s cast-offs and make something others think is beautiful.

Yesterday the turtle and I headed off to Indianapolis to the Penrod Art Fair. It was a great show—beautiful weather, lots of people, a helpful staff and an elegant garden setting. My booth was set up so the back of the booth was in the shade and the front in the sun, so I get the best of both worlds. The turtle prefers the shade this time of year. A lot of people remembered the frog I had last year and were pleased to meet the turtle (Ms. Frog lives in Wisconsin now). It was nice to meet patrons from previous shows and hear that the pieces they bought are still appreciated. I get pretty attached to my critters and flowers and everything else. It’s good to know they have good homes. Indianapolis shows are also a good chance to catch up with friends and acquaintances that live in that part of Indiana. When the show was over, take down went smoothly this year—no pouring rain, and we got a lot of help from the guys in the golf carts. They zip your stuff to the road when you’re ready to pack up, so we got in and out in just a few minutes when the van got through the queue (definitely not a Czech word—too many vowels). Thanks to all the Penrod Society folks who helped to make it a great show and the IMA for keeping the grounds so beautiful.

Now I just have to figure out what to do this week.

Until next week…