BY GREG MERRITT
My exploration of seating continues with a couple of Shaker inspired stools. Many, many moons ago, long before GPS, we made a trip to Nashville for a friend’s wedding. We had very little money at the time and knew this would be the only trip for that year. Unfortunately, our time in Nashville was less than pleasant, other than the wedding. Anyway, on the trip home we began looking for any stop that would salvage the trip. My wife scanned over the road atlas and stumbled on the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill just outside of Lexington, KY. So, on a whim, we routed ourselves to the village.
We arrived late afternoon on a Saturday and were pleasantly surprised that they had overnight rooms. As luck would have it there was a room available. Not only that, they had a dining hall that served family style meals. So, we moved into our room and walked to the dining hall and had a very pleasant dinner by candlelight.
The next day we toured the village and I poured over the furniture and buildings as far as they would let me. This was long before I had any tools or even a shop space, but the desire, the desire to build was there. The last stop before leaving the village was the gift shop and there I bought three little books of scaled drawings of Shaker furniture.
That’s a bit of back story, but I thumb thru these books every now and again for inspiration. This time around the stools caught my eye. Actually, the rocker has my interest, but I figure the stools will be a good way to get my head around the process. These are simple stools and should nestle nicely with the kitchen island that I converted my old workbench into.
I like most things Shaker, there is an elegant simplicity in all that they built. The one thing I have never been a fan of though is the woven tape seats. Seats woven with muted earth tones are OK, but the brighter colours just look out of place to me. So, my stools will have seats woven with fibre rush. It looks simple to accomplish and I personally like the look. After playing around with the proportions and a little time at the drafting board, here is what I came up with.
Not too different from the original Shaker design, just tweaked slightly. I’m building these stools with what I have on hand. The legs will be red oak and the stretchers will be white oak. The seats will be woven from fibre (paper) rush. I’ve gotten off to start turning the eight required legs. The goal is to crank out one leg after work every evening. So far, so good. I’m three for three. I’m actually getting pretty quick at it. Quick being a relative term. The story stick is a handy thing for this repetitive work too.
I deviated from the Shaker simplicity and added a single bead to the leg as well as a little wood burning. You know I can’t not add some wood burning. Just one more reason I would have made a lousy Shaker.
Progress continues on the stools. Mostly one hour at a time after work each day. This has become my basic workflow as of late. Come home, check in and then out to the shop until dinner time. Then grab as much time over the weekend as I can. Anyway…
I managed to finish turning all eight of the legs (posts). These are close to final shape, but I’ll most likely chuck them back into the lathe and change the shape of the taper to the foot. I also completed the initial turning of all of the required rungs.
When I design a project, I tend to focus on the overall proportions and keep the details to a minimum. I do this so as not to overly influence the final product. I know this seems counter to the whole idea of design, but it’s what works for me. My goal is not to crank out identical, production style pieces. If I make a piece again, I want the proportions to be right, but I also want each piece, or series of pieces, to be unique. So, part of my process is to work each element in stages. Essentially designing on the fly through a process of gradual reduction.
Working this way would drive some folks absolutely crazy. A lot of people like to have everything mapped out ahead of time. For me though, I like having the details sort of evolve along with the project itself. Sometimes I have an idea about the details from the start, but often I don’t have clue what will develop. I find this to be particularly true with my wood turning. A contributing factor is that I’m not all that confident in my developing wood turning skills, but I’m beginning to find my way.
The point of all that rambling is that my pieces tend to change as a project progresses. The first change to the project at hand was to add a bead to the legs.
The rungs were next to fall victim to change. I first turned all of the rungs to a simple cylinder and added the tenons. I then set eight of them aside to become the top rungs around which I’ll weave the fibre rush seat. The remaining rungs went back on the lather and received a taper on each end.
The final bit of modification was to the foot end of the legs (post). During the initial turning I established the transition point of the taper to the foot, but left this area “fat”. I felt they needed a little more grace and took cues from some Shaker examples to added a bit of life to the taper.
So now I have all of my wood bits ready to go. Next up will be the drilling of holes and assembly of the frames.
With all of the parts complete, it was time to bore some holes. There are (24) rungs which left me facing (48) holes that needed to be drilled plumb and square. It’s not that difficult of task really, but one errant hole can mess up the whole works. Actually, a little variance can be beneficial by way of adding tension into the frame. Too much variance though will either split a post or make it impossible to assemble the frame.
So, I cautiously began marking out and drilling each mortise holes. To add a little extra stress, I had to be diligent with my depth. These are blind holes and need to be as deep as possible to form a strong joint. I used a standard auger bit and had to pay careful attention to the lead screw. Half a turn too far and the lead screw would come through the opposite side. To control the depth of bore you can count turns, strap on a vintage depth stop contraption or, as I did, wrap a bit of painter’s tape around the bit.
The process was to mark out the centres by sighting across the post at the top and bottom locations and connect those with a straight edge to establish the intermediate location.
The best way I have found to hold an individual leg is to place it in joiner’s saddles and clamp it to the bench with a holdfast.
The drilling is straight forward, but I checked my progress with a square.
Sometimes though, it validates your skill with the brace and bit.
And so, I progressed, first with individual frames and then the entire frame.
The glue up was a bit stressful. It was a lot of parts to assemble and hot hide glue doesn’t wait. I was given a few extra seconds though, due to the high temp (88F) in my shop. So, no pics of the glue up. All of my concentration was on the task at hand.
The glued frames with a second coat of Tried & True Original. The first coat was applied while the pieces were on the lathe. That first coat of the individual pieces saved me a good bit of work when cleaning up the glue squeeze out.
A note about the grain orientation of the pieces. I set the rungs so that their grain was perpendicular to that of the posts. I also set the posts so that none of the rungs inserted directly through the long grain of the post.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to weave the seats.
Now that the stools were assembled, it was time to tackle the seat weaving.
The material that I chose to use is fibre rush. This is a paper product that imitates the look of natural rush and has been in use since the early 1900’s. I had planned on researching and writing a thorough post on fibre rush, but Cathryn Peters (wickerwoman.com) has a “history of” article on here site that covers it. Jump over there and have a read and then come back. I’ll wait…
…to understand the weaving process I read through the articles on Ms. Peters’ site, bought a small booklet on the subject and watched a bunch on YouTube videos. The most helpful video, by far, was Ed Hammond’s (peerlessrattan.com) video.
Having prepared as much as I could, there was nothing left to do but jump in and do it. So, I gathered my supplies and tools and settled in for a long afternoon.
The pattern is a simple over-under and progresses counter-clockwise around the stool.
While the pattern is simple, the nuances that are the hallmarks of skill and proficiency are not. As with most hinges handwork, these must be earned with time on task. Where to push and where to pull? How hard? How large a coil of material can I work with? On and on. The thing that I struggled with the most is how to handle and turn the coil as I weaved. The loose coil of rush must be continually rotated, in the correct direction, else the strand will untwist and leave you with a string of flat paper. I fought this all afternoon! Constantly having to stop and re-twist the strand.
There is a rhythm that began to reveal itself as the afternoon wore on and I became more and more comfortable with the process. Over the rail, up through the middle…over the rail up through the middle. Even so, my progress was clumsy at best, but I managed to get the first seat completed.
This first seat is presentable and I’m confident that the next one will improve in both execution and speed. This first round of weaving took me six hours! I also woefully underestimated how hard this process would be on my fingers. My thumbs and index fingers are raw and sore. So, either tape or gloves will be needed for the weaving of the next seat.
I spent my evenings after work weaving the seat for the second stool. I was a little more comfortable with the process this time and actually enjoyed applying the rush.
I’m happy to report that I gained a little speed and the weave looked much neater. So much so that I dismantled several courses on the first stool and re-worked it so that there wasn’t such a marked difference between the two. Not a dramatic difference, but it would have driven me crazy if I hadn’t fixed it.
Just about everything I have read or watched says that the fibre rush should be sealed with a couple of coats of clear shellac or something similar. This adds a bit of durability and stain resistance to the seat. So, I dutifully complied with shellac.
The first coat took a good bit of shellac and I was a little worried that the uneven appearance wouldn’t subside once everything was dry.
The first coat did indeed dry to an even, albeit, darker colour and the second coat went on quickly. I also took the time to add one more coat of Tried & True original to the frames of the stools.
With that, I’m calling these stools done.
Either hubris or taking the blame. Not sure which.
