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In 2015, right after retiring from the bicycle business, I made a series of quilts using vintage bicycle art. The advertising posters from the 1890’s had the sense of risk, adventure, and elegance that I thought were missing from the sportster mentality of 21st century cycling. They featured women riders, as well as an astonishing amount of innocent nudity that has been lost in the tides of pornography and prudery washing through today’s culture wars.

Two quilts will be in a multi-media show, ‘On the Road,’ at the 40 West gallery in Lakewood during June.

Two others are going to another multi-media show in Colorado Springs in August.

Most of them combine the images from vintage posters with traditional themes in quilting. This one is ‘Tour du Jour’ with ‘wild goose chase’ blocks.

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.