I’m still in Germany, but Brendan Gaffney and Megan Fitzpatrick will open the Lost Art Press storefront to the public today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The store is located at 837 Willard St. in Covington, Ky.
We’ll have our complete line-up of books available for sale, plus some blemished books (cash only on blems). As always, Brendan and Megan are happy to discuss any woodworking topic you might need help with, or to demonstrate a technique at the bench.
And if you want to talk smack about me, I won’t be there. So go nuts.
I’ll be back home on Sunday night and will definitely be in the store for the Nov. 10 and Dec. 8 open days. I hope you can visit.
I’ve always used octagonal legs on my stick chairs because the geometry makes sense to my modern head. Cut the four-sided leg from a plank. Then plane down the four corners to create an octagon.
But when you study old chairs, hexagonal legs are far more common than octagons. I’ve given a lot of thought about how to create hexagonal legs at the bench, but it seemed more complicated than it should be. After talking it over with chairmaker Chris Williams in Wales, he arranged for a day in the workshop with Gareth Irwin, a Welsh chairmaker, turner and green woodworker. (His Instagram feed is definitely worth following.)
We met at Hugh B. Haley’s workshop, Phoenix Conservation, which is where Chris works when he isn’t building chairs in his garage. After Hugh made us some much-needed coffee, Gareth pulled his tools from his van. And in about 10 minutes, he made the process seem effortless and obvious.
The key to make it easy is to work with wood split from the tree – not sawn stock. Gareth brought along a section of fresh young field maple to demonstrate. The hexagon is derived from the natural pie-shaped sections from the log. Here’s a quick photo essay that shows the process.
Here Gareth makes the first split across the pith of the log, splitting the log in half and then into fourths and eighths.
He splits off the pith and some other heartwood that could be used for something else, leaving a section of the tree that, after a little hewing, is roughly hexagonal.
At the shaving horse, Gareth refines this shape. Thanks to the hewing, there is always a flat section of the leg that rests on the stage of the shaving horse.
Gareth tapers the hexagonal leg with a drawknife and then starts to make the tenon at the top of the leg. He stops when the tenon is oversized. Then the leg gets dried for three or four weeks inside before he forms the finished tenon.
The demonstration was brief, and so we all got to chat a lot about the craft (and drink more coffee). Gareth brought one of his chairs along. It sits and looks fantastic. In fact, a local stopped by and purchased the chair from Gareth under our very noses.
Though I’ve been happily married for 25 years, I’ve had a number of intense love affairs – the kind that make you want to write bad poetry and buy good lumber. These affairs are, of course, with pieces of furniture I’ve encountered through the years. And while the opening sentence above might seem a joke, it’s actually not.
When I get fixated on a piece of furniture, I daydream about it. As I drift off to sleep I think of its curves. When I drink my morning coffee I ponder its construction. During the day I build the piece in my head over and over. The only way to stop my obsession is to consummate the relationship by building the piece.
On Friday I visited St Fagans National Museum of History and met my latest dalliance – Chair 024, a three-stick chair in one of the public spaces in the museum. I won’t write a poem about the chair – I’ll leave the poetry duties to other bloggers. But I will share what attracts me to this form, and I will also apologize in advance because I’m likely to write quite a bit more about it in the future.
First is the overall form. The chair has an armbow with a somewhat shallow curve, a bit like the low-back Cardiganshire chairs I discussed earlier. Yet it has a charming (and unusual) three-stick back with a simple and compact crest rail.
Second is the seat shape. I’ve not encountered a seat in this shape before and don’t have a name for it. I love how the seat reflects the shape of the arm above and that the seat has extensions at each end that mimic the round hands of the armbow.
I love the beefy sticks. In North America, we tend to prefer thin and tapered sticks, which can lighten the look of a chair dramatically. This chair will have none of that. The sticks verge on 3/4” in diameter and have little or no taper to them.
I adore the hexagonal legs. I’ve been itching to make hexagonal legs because that shape is more common in the historical record than octagonal legs. I’ll write more about hexagons and how they were likely made in a future blog entry.
Finally, I like the compact size of the chair. It’s not terribly wide or deep, and that characteristic has always been attractive to my eye.
I know that some (many?) of you might fail to see the beauty of this chair. You might even find it ugly, and that’s OK. Girls in my high school thought the same of me. It took only one woman – blinded by love, I suppose – to make me happy for the rest of my life. Except when we visit museums, and my wandering eye finds a shapely oaken leg….
Emyr Davies (left) and Chris Williams discuss a low-back chair at St Fagans.
When deciding what chairs to place in the historic buildings collected at the St Fagans National Museum of Wales, Emyr Davies says museum officials have to be careful.
If they place a high-style chair in a house or a room at the castle, no one will bother it, says Emyr, the senior conservator for furniture. But if they put one of the vernacular Welsh stick chairs on display, visitors are so drawn to them and curious that they will plop right down in them.
During my visit to St Fagans I felt that same urge to sit in every chair, but I resisted (perhaps because I was accompanied by museum officials). So instead I took 200 photographs of the 29 chairs that we inspected during the day. Some of the chairs were as familiar as old friends because I had studied them ad nauseam in John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
But about half of the chairs were new to me – chairs that had been in the storerooms of St Fagans or in their shop for repair. These chairs were a revelation and offered details I had not encountered before in books. One was green with yellow pinstripes. Another had a crest rail that resembled a cartoon dog bone. I believe I counted three seat shapes that were new to me. Plus, one that was painted with oxblood.
I also had the great privilege to listen to Emyr’s thoughts on the chairs after spending his career studying and repairing them. Here’s one detail to consider.
Emyr puts the chairs into two broad categories. The first category consists of chairs that have – for lack of a better word – Windsor-like qualities. Sticks that pass through an armbow and enter a crest rail (or comb) at the top of the chair. The second category of chairs are technically low-back chairs. The arm is usually quite massive and is obviously made from a branch that has either been trained into this shape while the tree was alive or was found in the wild.
Emyr has several names for these chairs that reflect the shape of the arm, including “hornback” and “rootback” chairs. They also are sometimes called Cardiganshire chairs because that area of Wales tends to produce lots of curved timber.
I’ve never built a chair from this second category because the arm always vexed me. The solution to that is, as Emyr put it: Get a dog and go for walks in the woods. You’ll see the arms in the branches.
Would that curved branch fit in my suitcase?
So just as I was placing a few of those chairs on my to-build list, we walked into one of the buildings open to the public, and I was struck dumb by a chair that is named in my notes as Chair 024. I took 19 photos of this chair. That’s a love affair in my world, and I’ll write about this beauty in my next entry.
Inspecting an antique chair at St Fagans National Museum of History.
I’ve known Chris Williams for a few years, and I now feel we are destined to have our lives intertwined for the rest of my days. There simply isn’t anyone else who thinks about chairs in the the way I do. And when I say chairs, I mean Welsh chairs.
I don’t know if I have any real Welsh in my blood. My latest Ancestry.com profile says 22 percent of my DNA is from England, Wales and nearby. While that’s something, I do know that Welsh chairs are etched in my brain.
When I pulled up to Chris’s tidy home in Llanybri late Tuesday I night, I hugged him, and we talked about chairs until midnight. When I left Saturday morning, our last words (before a warning about a tricky turn on my trip) were about chairs.
And the rest of the time in the middle was all about chairs as well.
Chris Williams points out an armbow growing in a tree.
During my visit, Chris was building a chair in his garage, sneaking off at odd hours to fashion its sticks. Plus, he had two recently completed chairs in the guest room. One was a new design he has been working on (follow him on Instagram if you want see its development) and the other was for his book “The Life & Work of John Brown.”
All three are markedly different. So we spent hours (apologies to Chris’s wife, Claire) talking about the details down to the facets, grain lines and fibers.
While we were muddling minutiae, Chris would stop and exclaim: “You couldn’t say something like that in front of John Brown. He’d tell you to (expletive deleted). He was all about the form.”
Like naughty schoolboys, we did it anyway. Apologies to the memory of John Brown.
