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I did a number of ‘split turnings’ for the 2023 Women in Turning Virtual Collaboration, working with Margaret Stiles in Ft. Collins, and Donna Rhindress on the island of Haida Gwaii in Brititsh Columbia. We used the split turnings to make spoons and bowls for a project about hunger relief.

At the conclusion of the project, I discovered more split turning projects from Richard Raffan, and this led me back to the master of cutting up woodturnings and recombining them –Canadian Stephen Hogbin. In 1980, Hogbin published photos of his experiments in Australia, pushing the limits of lathe-turned work. He was a kind of first-generation Derek Weidman, for those of you who are interested in the use of the lathe for sculpture.

One of my favorite Hogbin experiments were the walking bowls from the mid-1980’s. His recent book has instructions for making these (Stephen Hogbin on Woodturning), which I followed, I am working at a smaller scale because of the limits of the mid-lathe, but the steps and the challenges are the same.

Traditional darning mushroom to honor my Grandmother Franceska, who was a pioneer farmer in Utah–the source of this cottonwood burl cap.  The stem is mesquite – another wood that was unknown to my Slovenian grandparents.  They both brought needlework skills to their new life.  Grandfather Francis was trained as a tailor, but preferred to try farming.  They moved to Denver soon after my mother, their 8th child, was born in 1923.  Grandmother continued to sew, darn, make lace, and crochet in the city, passing her skills onto my aunts.

While working on my quilt of ice age horse drawings, I discovered the marvelous ‘Kone’ of Miroslav Jaros on Pinterest.  These carved and decorated horses reminded me of the simple horse carvings that my Slovenian grandfather made for me and my sister in the 1950’s.  We loved playing with the wooden toys, wich needed all of our imagination to supply the details and the stories.

I feel very comfortable exploring some of the forms that Jaros uses.  We have the same eastern European heritage, so any appropriation is personal, and not cultural.  I have never seen his work in the round, or even learned the scale of it, and I never copy directly from his forms.  There are many examples of Swedish folk art horses, as well, although they lack the more sculptural and monumental weight of the Kone.   With my grandfather standing behind me, I have a great sense of joy exploring this form.

The horse figures in the photo have been roughed out on the bandsaw from 1.5″ thick stock.  They are about 5″ tall.  I used carving tools and abrasives to refine the forms after taking the photo.  These are marvelous surfaces for ornament!  There are an infinite ways to divide the surfaces for pyrography, paints, patination, and applied decorative elements, like upholstery nails.  Although the shaping is somewhat tedious (more than woodturning; more like quilting!), the surface decoration makes it all worthwhile.

The candlestacks started as a way to use all of the leftover ‘beads’ from the sculpture totem in the Creative Gambit show in July 2019.  My favorite leftover bead was the teacup and saucer, turned off-center.  For the show, I painted the teacup/saucer chartreuse, but these two are showing off the figure in the aspen.  Each section of the stack is turned separately, and then the stack is joined together using a wooden dowel.  The stacks are around 10″ tall.  The top is sized to hold a 2″ diameter pillar candle, a large tealight, or a 3″ round candle.  The one on the right also holds a 5″ coach candle with the taper-style base.

All wooden candlesticks are safer with the battery-operated lights.  There is a reason we don’t find very many old wooden candlesticks.

Many famous woodturners (Michael Hosaluk, John Jordan)  have turned teapots in varying degrees of functionality.  It something of a modern standard that the spout is part of the original turning, and not added to the body, as it would be in a ceramic teapot.   I decided to start with the basic shape as a bead for a candlestack.  So it is solid, with a hole for the dowel, and a handle made of this amazing flexible wood.  This one is quite a bit smaller than the two teacups in the photo above.

The use of a central dowel to connect parts comes from stacking toy blocks.  I’ve also used a 2″ plastic pipe to build the hatstand.  It allows me to make much taller turnings than I could fit on my shortbed Vicmark lathe.

I’m working alongside Liz Kettle (textiles) and Jennifer Hanson (pottery) to present a show of new work in Manitou’s Commonwheel Gallery in July.  Although most of fine craft is just plain hard work, sometimes it needs a playful start to find new directions.

Creative Gambit will have risk-taking moves by each of us individually, as well as three assemblies combining our work.   For three artists who work in primarily functional mode, these collaborations are a distinct departure.

‘Tea for 3’ will be a still life vignette inspired by Alice in Wonderland.   The stack of cups is turned off-center in two sections; the handles are bent spoons.  Liz is making a fabric vase, and Jennifer has crafted a whimsical teapot.     We realized early on that in a gallery, we should do gallery things.  The still life painting is a popular genre, but we can go behind the scenes to make our own subject matter.  That is one of the powers of fine craftwork!

  I have quite a set of caps, so I have been thinking about ways to store them.  These two products were inspired by the sketches I have been doing for the ‘Creative Gambit’ show in July.   Both of them are turned from some 6 x 6″ recycled redwood posts.

The pawn is a nice table-top stand from a classic shape in chess.

The hall tree is built like a totem – small turned sections on a central 2″ plastic pipe.  I have always wanted to make larger spindle turnings, but I have a short-bed Vicmark lathe.   The totem design is a great solution.  The sections can be rearranged, too.  This totem includes finishes with charring and black milk paint, painted faux beadwork, metal reactive paints, and one bead that is upholstered with a batik fabric.

I have always been interested in products on the cusp between treen and furniture.  Here are two!

An assortment of canteens – wood or ceramic, torus-shaped or round – now at Boulder Street Gallery (through March).

The ceramic torus canteens commemorate the ‘pilgrim flask’ which was a traditional pottery product.  There are several also turned from wood, just to explore this form in a different medium.

Most of them here are 2-axis turned canteens with at least one medallion to cover the hole used to hollow it out.  There is one medallion turned from pewter, and several others with wood medallions turned, textured, with color, gilders’ paste, or pyrography.  Two of them are ‘faux’ canteens with beer-bottle openers on one side.

Wooden canteens are one of the projects that Dennis often demonstrates for other woodturners.  His website has more photos and instructions – dennisliggett.com

‘Earthenware’ uses carved cross-hatching through layers of milk paint, which are also sanded back.  About 9″ diameter.

The center medallion is turned on the offset axis, but moves visually back to the center!  It seems that the effect of the offset bowl is obscured by creating a center for it.   Won’t do that again…..

Milkpaint is subtle.  I find it very difficult to photograph the actual appearance of these platters. 

‘Mums’ uses deeper carving in order to fit the scale of this 18″ platter blank.  The mums are sanded back to the original red underpainting so that the edges of the petals emerge.    Sunflower milk paint provided a deep layer over the whiter paint, which was textured with deeply textured paper while it was wet.  It has a little more of a silk brocade feeling.  A thin wash of sparkly gold covers the entire platter.

Did the Vikings build snowmen?

Here’s my answer made from Colorado aspen.  6″ tall

Merryl has been using milk paint on platters and fruit for most of her career as a woodturner.  Even when other turners became more and more flamboyant, she stayed with her restrained shapes and quiet colors.   She is best known among symposium attendees for her use of milk paint finishes.   In November, the Center for Art in Wood will present a retrospective of her work.

In honor of Merryl, I ventured into some unknown dimensions.

I haven’t made platters this large (13″ diameter) before, so scaling up the surface design to the bigger surface area was challenging for me.  I also wanted to explore ways of using milk paint as a finish.   I chose to layer 5 colors of milk paint in a very free way, with big brushes, while the layers were still wet.  I had burned and carved some areas of texture before painting.  Often, sanding back through the layers works well.  This time, however, I wanted to stay with manipulating the texture of the wet paint, by lifting off some of it.  I liked that effect well enough to forego sanding back through the layers.