Pat started Tiger Lily Workshop in 1990, as a vehicle for selling her hand and machine knits. I took up wood turning as a hobby in July 1991 and that same year, began to sell my work under the name of Wood Lily. (As I noted to Pat, tiger lilies are common as grass but the wood lily is an endangered species.) In 1993, Pat added wood turning to her list of skills and we "merged" Wood Lily into Tiger Lily Workshop.
Wood turning is fun. For me these days even more fun than programming. I prefer to work with oddly shaped, distressed, and partly decayed wood. It's satisfying to make something interesting, artistic (well, sometimes artistic), or occasionally even useful from wood found by the side of the road, in a firewood pile, or in the odds and ends bin at the lumber yard. Scrounging works too: the sound of a chain saw will bring me running. Here I am apparently quite pleased at what I've just made.
Actually making those particular pieces of sugar pine was very pleasing. I've generally found pine too soft to turn. The grain tends to tear rather than cutting smoothly. But then our next door neighbor brought some blocks of pine back from her family farm in Wisconsin and asked if I could make some bowls for her to give as gifts at a family reunion. Thanks to my ever more skillful touch--and some deft work with 80 and 120 grit sandpaper--success!
I used a linseed oil finish to give a velvet feel to the surface. Mostly I use tung oil finishes that give a fairly flat look. High gloss finish is fine for some and I admire the effort put in by some expert wood finishers. But when I was young, plastics were just coming in and they tried like crazy to make plastic look like wood. Damned if I'm going to make my wood look like plastic!
Shape and feel are very important. Both Pat and I think in terms of form and touch. A turned object has not only to have a pleasing appearance; it has to feel good to hold, too. Please Touch! signs adorn our show shelves. Because Pat and I have different tastes in style and form, our work shows plenty of variety.
With a few exceptions, we do not use rare or endangered woods and all our functional bowls and plates have food-safe oil or wax finish. The exceptions apply to wood that we occasionally get from farmed trees, from recycled furniture, or from recycled fancy cutting boards, this last being an irregular but good supply of mahogany. We even got a goodly supply of padauk from pallets used with a furniture shipment from India.
In 1994 Pat picked up an interesting scrap of wood from the workshop floor and thought, "This is too pretty to throw away!"... which is how her line of Creative Wood Recycling jewelry came about. She likes to make something out of "practically nothing"... Thin slices of wood become wearable art, a water soaked log fished from the Potomac becomes an oil lamp, a twisted knot of honeysuckle root turns into a paperweight or twig vase.
Unfortunately we don't have any pictures of Pat at the jewelry bench or lathe. Here's one of her at a craft show, though. She's sharing a squeeze with our friend Stephen Somerville, of Bumpas Virginia. Steve is an absolutely super potter.