My main DIY task for the past few months has been the unexpectedly fraught process of choosing and making a set of dining room chairs. Chairs are one of the more difficult woodworking projects. The main challenge comes in the design phase, in determining details such as: How much the back should tilt? How high should the seat be? How much should the seat slope? How wide should the chair be? How much of a curve on the back? The standards for these measurements come in a range that you have to refine. These details then enter into a challenging comfort vs. aesthetics dialectic. Even though I’m making a reproduction I still have to consider and modify all of these details since I’m working from photographs, not physical measurements of antiques.
Just choosing a chair was an excruciating process. After drawing up plans for potential chairs in Sketchup, I made full size models out of scrap wood. My first scrap wood model was a three legged Art Nouveau throne that you can see in San Francisco’s de Young museum. I quickly learned why the workers at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Johnson Wax Company headquarters complained about his attempt at a three legged chair. As the V&A Museum notes, there was a reason behind Wright’s three legged madness,
The chair has only three legs and was designed to promote good posture in the sitter. If the sitter adopted any other position rather than one with two feet on the ground with weight evenly distributed, the chair would become unstable.
The model I built definitely had this posture-policing quality. Sit in it like a slob and you’ll topple over. Lean back and the chair will break. The chair’s curves and elegant inlay work asked you to up your drip game. I imagined something like this:
Jean Delville, Portrait of the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians in Choir Dress, Joséphin Péladan (Portrait du Grand Maître de la Rose+Croix en habit de chœur, Joséphin Péladan), 1895.
Alas, I built two more full scale models of different chairs only to discover that they were way too big for our modest bungalow.
Final chair on left, model on right.
At last I found a much more modest chair with a cottagecore vibe that I was pretty sure would work, an obscure Gustav Stickley design from 1902. I built a full scale model and went through a long series of adjustments (I hinged the back so that I could get the optimal angle for comfort). I made adjustments to the plan in Sketchup and commenced building the final chair (shown at the top of this post) with some quatersawn white oak that I had laying around.
Someone gave me a 3D printer and I used it to generate router templates for the curves in the back slats and to make gauges for the compound angles of the side rails. I never thought I’d ever use a 3D printer but it’s actually proved useful and I’ll blog about it in another post.
Mistakes happened as they always do. I cut the front legs too short but figured out a way to add on some wood to hide the mistake. I pre-finshed the wood before assembly but in the process of gluing it together somehow managed to not apply enough glue to the side rails.
Once I finally got the chair assembled I struggled over stain color. Ironically, I’m in a philosophy class this month where the subject of color came up, as it also did in a previous philosophy class I took last year. I’ll spare you the details but let’s just say that Plato, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze all struggled over what the f*** color is. If you really think about color you’ll come to see that the paint sample chips at the paint store lie to us with their certainty and granular specificity. Color perception in a piece of furniture can shift depending on the time of day, the initial color of the wood you’re working with and your mood. I was happy with the color but Kelly was skeptical and she’s the one with the art degree so I’ve learned to respect her expertise.
Then came the final rush chair seat weaving step. I’ve done this once before but this new chair was more challenging than that previous one and this time it the weaving process really didn’t go well. I probably had five or six false starts, getting about a quarter of the way in only to see the strands drift off course and then having to completely unweave and reweave. On one of the first weaving attempts I noticed a lack of glue in the side rails and I had to stop, reglue and reclamp.
I finally finished weaving the seat, was not happy with the results, and the rails came loose again. I think the chair is too low, the slope front to back too dramatic and the color wrong. I’m definitely going to have to cut apart my mediocre weaving job, bang the chair apart and hope I can fix the bad glue joints. I’ll probably have to sand it down to bare wood again and restain. It might look okay in the picture but you’ll have to believe me when I say it’s getting as close to firewood as any project I’ve ever done. I’m considering making a second one with the lessons I’ve learned and later attempting to fix this wonky first attempt.
In woodworking, after an initial period of enthusiasm about beginning a new project, there’s always a phase of imposter syndrome. That’s a good thing because you have to stay humble when working with natural materials and manage both expectations about how long it takes to build something as well as realism about your skill levels. Sometimes things go smoothly, but most of the time they don’t. I’ve come to believe that in woodworking you never reach “mastery” you only get slightly better at recovering from mistakes. The paradox is that you make more mistakes because you’re always trying to strive for something slightly out of the reach of your skills. In short, it’s always just plain hard.
