Old Bike

I have a pretty hard and fast policy on not doing commercial posts of any kind, but I also really like to promote the work of independent artists doing interesting work. I mentioned Kara Ginther's hand-carved Brooks saddles briefly in another post recently, so I wanted to give a little blog time to Christopher Koelle, too, especially since his work may be of particular interest to readers of this blog. From his Etsy profile:

My name is Christopher Koelle and I love drawing people with bicycles, especially from the early days of cycling.

The original Sweet Ride art zine sparked in me an ongoing fascination with the history of travel and roads, from the Good Roads Movement of Horatio Earle to the epic, sprawling interstate highways we love and hate today. Sweet Ride is now just the beginning of a progressively larger ongoing body of work about these histories.

Artist Kara Ginther has been on the Interwebs a lot lately. You might have seen her hand-carving on leather saddles at To Be, Inspired, or BoingBoing, or Chic Cyclists. While her leatherwork has been getting most of the attention (and rightfully so), I'd also like to mention that Kara has a very neat side project going called the Mobile Museum of Material Culture, which as you can see from the photo above, is powered by an old tandem.

Our friend Yanek of bicyclog in Israel has just posted a lovely photo essay of bicycles on a kibbutz.

Calling all San Diego bicycle bloggers, riders, shop owners, advocates, enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in sustainable urban development! A small group of San Diego bicycle bloggers has just launched a new site called, appropriately, Bike San Diego. Drawing inspiration from sites such as BikePortland and Streetsblog, the primary mission of Bike San Diego is simple: to provide a one-stop source for bicycle-related news, events, and advocacy in America's Finest City. This is an all-volunteer effort at citizen journalism by and for bicycle riders in metro San Diego and San Diego County.

Boy, it has been a while since I did a blog love feature. What better way to get back into it than by promoting a new blog by an OBB reader. The Mixte Gallery, run by our friend Doohickie, delivers what it promises, and it needs your mixtes; or photos of them, at least. Not sure what a mixte is?

Just came across the blog There, I Fixed It, which seems to be some sort of cousin to FAIL Blog. In any case, I thought my readers might appreciate some of the "fixes" that people come up with. I like this one. Fire bicycle. Very clever.

The Chicago Tribune has put up a sweet little gallery of bicycles and bicycling from its archives.