Lucy and I will move above the storefront in early August. Our new home will be about one-third the size of our old home. This is a good thing.
As a result, I need to find new homes for my prototype pieces that we use here in Fort Mitchell that we’ll have no room for in Covington. Plus, I’ll be selling off some special books (such as leather editions of LAP books) and some other nice and sentimental stuff.
Sorry. The chair is sold.
First up is this stick chair. Made in red oak and finished in black paint and lacquer, it is designed for a person who is 6’ or taller. The armbow is 9” off the spindle deck and the seat height is sized for a person with long legs.
This prototype is perfect structurally and has a nice new finish on it as of today (gawd, I sound like a used car salesman). Its demerits are aesthetic only. I’m not thrilled with the way the four back sticks fan (so slightly) outward. This was intentional. And then I never did it again.
I liked the piece enough to sign it – if that tells you something.
Anyway, the price is $550 plus delivery. The price includes a custom crate, but not trucking costs. Usually trucking these chairs costs $200 to $400 depending on where you live in the country.
If you want it, don’t go to the comments. Send me a note through my personal site here.
I have sworn off chairmaking for a couple months as I finish up some cabinet jobs and four teaching gigs overseas. But when August rolls around, this chair and I are going to have a serious conversation.
I stumbled on a pair of them at Colonial Homestead in Millersburg, Ohio. The only information about them on the label was they were from New England and were likely made between 1790-1820.
To my eye, they look remarkably modern. I love that the rake of the spindles and legs are in opposition to each other. The armbow, of course, is also a piece of work. It’s laminated from two pieces – both steambent as far as I could tell.
While I would love to make a faithful copy of this chair, I don’t think that’s a good starting point. The seat is incredibly small. I do not have a reputation for a large posterior. In fact, several rescue parties have been dispatched to find my missing butt. My wife often jokes that when we become rich she will pay for implants for me.
But when I sat in the chair I felt like a cork in a wine bottle.
So the seat has to be a bit wider. Aside from that change, however, the chair is fairly comfortable and straightforward to build. I might omit the bead detail on the front posts. I might not. Because of the thick paint on the chair, it was impossible to determine the wood species that were used (likely pine for the seat). So I’ll just have to guess based on historical examples.
I haven’t built a low-back chair for many years. Should be fun.
Final notice: We have fewer than 100 copies of “The Book of Plates” left in stock. When it is sold out, it will be gone forever. The book is at the almost-losing-money price of $49.
If you live outside the United States, you can buy the book at this rock-bottom price at Lee Valley, which is also closing out its stock. Link here. Highland Woodworking also has it for $49.
For those of you who have purchased the book, thank you for helping us clear out this title, which was gobbling up storage fees at our warehouse because it is so massive.
Today I dropped Chris Williams off at the airport for his journey home to Wales, and I cannot believe how quickly the last three weeks have rushed by.
In addition to Chris teaching two classes on making Welsh stick chairs, Chris and I spent a lot of time working on his forthcoming book, “The Life & Work of John Brown.” The book has – like all books – taken some hard left turns as it germinated below the soil. And Chris and I have spent many evenings sorting out the important chapters.
But the biggest discussion has been over whether or not to include detailed plans of a chair in the book.
After much thought, Chris concluded that adding plans to the book would go against the spirit of how John Brown made chairs during his life (and how Chris makes chairs now). John Brown and Chris contend that no two Welsh stick chairs should ever be identical. Instead, each chair should be built to suit the materials at hand, the skills of the maker and the tools available.
Don’t worry. You’ll be able to build a Welsh stick chair after reading Chris’s book. But your chair will start from a personal place instead of from an established pattern.
That’s how Chris built his first chair. He’d read John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs,” and then figured out his own way by observing the chairs in John Brown’s book.
It’s not an easy way to make a chair. But it is satisfying. I built my first chair in a class, but my second chair went in a different direction than the first one. Even today I don’t expect my chairs to end up how I envision them in my mind or on paper. Each has a life of its own.
Chris tries to imbue his classes with the same spirit. His students were encouraged to go their own direction with their chairs. There are, of course, limits to what you can do during five days. But I was impressed by how some students took this idea to heart.
All of the chairs in the classes had four back sticks, but that’s where the similarities ended.
In the real world, Welsh stick chairs have enormous variations – in the number of back sticks (three sticks up to 11 or so). The shape of the seat (circle, rectangle, D-shaped etc). The construction of the arm. The undercarriage (if there even is an undercarriage). The comb. Plus the length of all the long stocks and short sticks, and the rake and splay of every component.
So when you look at Chris’s chair, or mine, or one of the thousands being built, know that your chair shouldn’t look like that. Exactly. Or at all. But it should look Welsh. And that is something you have to develop an eye for and will definitely be covered in Chris’s book.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. When will this book be out? Chris plans to have the writing done this fall. I’ll design it in November and December. And we hope it will be in your hands in February or March 2020.
Long-time readers of this blog probably saw this one coming. My June column at Core77 is about how I mix my anarchism with my design work. It’s a summation of how I work, with examples from projects you might be familiar with.
So come for the anarchism; stay for the trolling.
The column is free to read – click here to dive in.
