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woodturnings

Opening July 10th at the Manitou Springs Business of Art Center, ‘3 Ladies from Aspen’ will join dozens of other woodturnings by the members of the Pikes Peak Woodturners.

Figurative work is relatively rare in the woodturning world, with the exception of the nested and painted Russian dolls known as matroshki.  My interest in turning figures evolved from a snowman Christmas ornament–three turned spheres with an offset top hat.  I elongated the form, feminized it, and rotated the holding point in the base off-center to create a sense of movement.  The vertical figure in the Colorado aspen shows to good advantage in the lengthwise dimension, giving another meaning to the concept of ‘figure.’  

The hats are turned from contrasting scraps of cedar, burl, and canary wood, and glued on at an angle.  The tallest figure is 10.5 inches.

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We have a lot of theories about how folk art happens.  Working with children’s drawings is one way to investigate the actual way that human beings shape our vision with the work of our hands.  In the day that I spent with the girls at Sewing Camp (earlier post), I discovered that Josephine was already able to formulate stuffed animals that were simple, fat, and easy to make.  She already had a sense of stuffed-animal-ness and how to re-create it.

Holly is younger, and has not quite formulated the key features of a stuffed animal.  Her drawings included the dancing cow, which was quite challenging to transform into a 3D figure, and the charming bat pictured here.  The overlay is tracing paper that I used to flesh out the bat to a shape that was easier to sew.  I also had to recognize that all of the points of the feathers would be tricky to turn, so I chose to top-stitch the front to the back.  As the flannel unravels, it adds to the feathery appearance of the points.  

The key challenge is to keep the child’s vision by matching it to construction techniques that allow asymmetrical shapes, unexpected features, and the opportunity for the child to change or add elements as the project evolves. 

the overlay keeps the style of the drawing

  Holly drew the features only after we had assembled the bat, adding elements that did not appear in the original drawing:

Three girls between 10 and 12–a full day and two sleep-overs–an ironing board, sewing machine, and boxes of scraps = sewing camp here at Ridgeway Studios.   We started out with drawings of animals.  I always enjoy quilting on my drawings, so it seemed logical to start the girls with their own designs.   For the first round of projects, I traced the drawings onto fabric of their choice, sewed it to a backing, pillow-case style.  The girls turned them right-side out, and stuffed the forms.  They chose button eyes and used fabric paints for beaks, hooves, and other features.  They used simple embroidery with black pearl cotton for the horse’s main, and for highlighting the little square patches they put on several of the animals. As we developed more animals with a lot of points, I began to stitch the front and back together on the right sides.  Before long, I found all three of them sewing on the machine with this construction style.    On their own initiative, they also began to try some of the fancy stitches available on the Bernina.  After we completed nine different animals, they began to make sleeping bags and pillows for them, as well as clothes for two horses and a small elephant.  

Photo:  The Dancing Cow  10″ tall

In 1971, I spent the summer in the USSR, improving my Russian language skills.  Since that time, the Cold War has ended, but the cupolas of the Russian churches are still standing, and folks still like to grind pepper at the table.  I made this 7″ tall pepper mill after watching Nick Cook turn one at the Desert Woodturning Roundup in February 2009.  The architectural drawing is derived from the way Russian icon painters depicted space without perspective.   My drawing teachers told me that I lack good depth perception, so this is my kind of ornament.  

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