This week I’m assembling two Welsh stick chairs that are based on examples from several sources, including John Brown and Don Weber. I’ve made this sort of chair about a dozen times, and every time I build it I stray a little further from the originals.
About five years ago I started using a different arrangements of back sticks and a different crest rail. Now I’m changing the seat and undercarriage. First I made a new seat template. It’s still a D-shaped seat, but I started fresh with trammels and a compass to make it slightly larger.
I increased the rake of the rear legs to make the chair more lively. And I also changed the front legs to make them look appropriate with the new rear legs (wire models like those shown in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” guided these changes).
But the biggest change is to the stretcher turnings. I’ve been using 1-3/8”-diameter turnings with a bulbous center, much like what I first learned from Don Weber about 13 years ago.
After looking at a lot of English Windsors and Welsh stick chairs, I decided to simplify my turnings and thin them down to 1-1/8” in diameter. After getting both undercarriages together this afternoon, I was pleased with the result.
Tomorrow I start steam-bending the arm bows and am considering one more design change for this generation of chairs.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Peter Galbert’s book “Chairmaker’s Notebook” is invaluable for making all sorts of stick chairs, including Windsors and Welsh stick.
Note: This is a codicil to the entries I wrote called “Cut the Cord.” Part one is here. Part two is here. The entry below will make more sense if you read those first.
After more than five years of freelancing and making furniture to feed my pie hole, here is the most difficult part of being free of corporate America: getting paid.
This isn’t some screed about how vendors don’t pay me. Everyone I deal with (furniture customers, publishers, etc. ) is quite nice and honest. And no one has tried to stiff me on an invoice or avoid paying me.
But paperwork is paperwork. There are times when I build, film or write something and I don’t get paid for a year. But that’s just part of the deal. I might have to pay for materials for something that could take six months to build before a check comes through. That’s part of the deal. And there are times where people have owed me as much as $12,000 when I’ve had a $10,000 college tuition bill due. But that’s just part of the deal.
Being free from the daily commute means that I also have to be able to weather almost any financial crisis without whining, selling plasma or borrowing. For me, that means I have to have $20,000 in the bank at all times. My wife and I call it (and I’m so sorry for the implied swear word): “F-you money.”
As long as that money is there, I can pay almost any bill that comes up. I can wait out any vendor that has me on 45 days. I can hold out if I need to wait for something to clear there and something to process there. It takes much of the stress out of the accounting.
As I’ve found during the last 65 months, everything works out just fine in the end. You just have to be able to hold your breath for a much longer time than when you were paid every other Friday.
Wax production has been slow this fall because Katy’s class load is pretty heavy, and she’s taking art classes during the weekend (they’re making an entire board game?). But amidst all the teen-ager stuff, she’s made another 25 tins and put them up on her etsy site here.
The tins are $12 each for 4 oz. of wax, which is useful for all manner of things, from finishing the insides of a cabinet or other project, lubricating drawers or (as Raney Nelson pointed out) it’s a great lubricant for tools. He’s been using it on our dividers – the wax makes the action smooth but not sloppy.
I am pleased to announce that expanding the number of people who work on our books is showing results. With the help of Megan Fitzpatrick (who has been assisting us from the beginning), Meghan B. and now Kara Gebhart Uhl, we are finishing up some massive projects (and even taking on some new ones).
The latest news: We just sent the third volume of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years” to press and it will be ready to ship in late November or early December. It covers joinery, is 288 pages long and filled with a huge amount of information on designing, cutting and even repairing your joints.
The book is $37, which includes domestic shipping. You can order the book here or download an excerpt here to check it out.
When we began planning this third volume of “The Woodworker: The Charles H. Hayward Years,” we used the 1954 edition of “Woodwork Joints” by Hayward – a 5-1/2” x 8-1/5” folio printed by Evans Bros. Limited – as our guiding light.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the book “Woodwork Joints,” which was first published in 1950 then reprinted many times and in several different editions of varying quality.
The compact 168-page book is beautifully illustrated by Hayward and contains the kind of spare prose that made him the best woodworking author of the 20th century. Like a good woodworking joint, Hayward’s text contains nothing superfluous and lacks nothing important to the task at hand.
Every illustration from “Woodwork Joints” had appeared in The Woodworker magazine, where Hayward was editor from 1939 to 1967. So as we read every magazine issue from those years for our book, we marked and scanned every magazine article on joinery to make sure we captured everything that could have ended up in “Woodwork Joints.” We almost succeeded.
The good news is that our efforts have produced a book that covers nearly all of Hayward’s writing on joinery during the 28 years he was editor at The Woodworker. And because of the nature of the magazine format, we actually were able to plumb much deeper into the details of cutting and fitting joints to include things that never made it into “Woodwork Joints.”
For example, Hayward wrote 20 pages on dovetails in “Woodwork Joints.” This book has 90 pages on dovetails, and the pages are much bigger (8-1/2” x 11”) than the 1954 edition. As a result, you’ll find far more information on the secret mitre dovetail, stopped dovetailed housings, decorative dovetails and the double-lap dovetail. Plus details on how to correct faults in your joints, how to avoid crushing the end grain when chopping out and even a novel way to cut both the tails and pins simultaneously.
In addition to Hayward’s take on joinery, this volume also contains the perspective of other British writers of the day that Hayward published in The Woodworker, including J. Maynard, Robert Wearing, K.J.S. Walker and C.A. Hewett.
So where did we fail? Despite our best efforts to find them, this volume does not contain a couple short sections from “Woodwork Joints,” including hand-cut joints specifically for plywood and the use of metal fishplates with scarf joints.
Those faults aside, we think this volume is an admirable companion – if not a replacement – of “Woodwork Joints.” I hope this book becomes as ratty and thumbed-through as almost every copy of “Woodwork Joints” I’ve ever seen. That would be the best tribute ever to Hayward as his work continues to inspire the next generation of woodworkers.
Like all Lost Art Press books, “The Woodworker: The Charles Hayward Years” is produced and printed entirely in the United States. At 288 pages, it is printed on smooth acid-free #60 paper and joined with a tough binding that is sewn, affixed with fiber tape and then glued. The pages are covered in dense hardbound covers that are wrapped with cotton cloth.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We don’t know which of our retailers will carry this title but will announce it when they sign on. Also, this volume will not be discounted when bought as a set with the other volumes. Sorry, but it would get too complicated for our accounting to handle.
I don’t often write about current events – Wait! Wait – this isn’t about the election. I swear on a stack of Roubos that I will never write about that. This blog is a safe place.
What I’m writing about is a recent story in The New York Times about furniture styles headlined: “Why Won’t Midcentury Design Die?” Here’s a link to original story (no guarantee that they will let you read it, I’m afraid).
The story begins:
In 1998, The New York Timesnoted a new design trend. Cool creative types were tossing aside their thrift store décor in favor of midcentury modern. Out went the funky votive candles and wrought-iron beds, and in came the clean-lined furniture of Arne Jacobsen,Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Florence Knoll. The look’s adherents were labeled “Generation Wallpaper,” after the magazine.
For some reason, time stopped.
Nearly two decades later, midcentury modern remains the rage. If anything, it’s even more popular. Flip through a shelter magazine, scroll on1stdibs.com or shop at a mass retailer like CB2 or West Elm, and it’s all variations on a spiky-legged-chair-and-Tulip-table theme.
Art Nouveau, 1920s Spanish and shabby chic were all looks that the cognoscenti embraced at one time or another, but never for this long. It’s as if the mechanism that refreshes cultural trends every few years has developed a glitch.
The writer then interviews editors of shelter magazines, sellers of furniture, gallery owners and interior designers about why this has happened and what they think of it. Two typical comments:
DAVID ALHADEFF, owner, theFuture Perfect: “I’m completely over it. I roll my eyes. Placing another Womb chair in the corner of the bedroom is easy and a real cop-out, frankly. Designers and architects should know better at this point. Oh, my gosh. Enough!”
MICHAEL BOODRO: “Your eye does get bored. Twenty years ago, when midcentury was first being discovered, you could do a straight interior, and that was exciting. People want to go beyond the expected. You don’t have to show the Florence Knoll sofa in nubby beige like she did.”
I read the whole piece, of course. And I was both nauseated and thrilled. Not by the photos of midcentury pieces or the comments of the interior designers. I was instead deeply affected by the word that rarely gets discussed when talking about interior design. And that’s “waste.”
Interior designers thrive on change because it gives them work. Someone wealthy wants to redo their brownstone. They call an interior designer, who then gets to go shopping (and, perhaps, employ some makers), guts the rooms and installs the new stuff. And the scene repeats itself every so often.
This cycle of destruction and redecorating used to be reserved only for the rich. But with IKEA and other contemporary manufacturers, we can all act this way, throw our old stuff to the curb and redecorate with new stuff, which will last five or six years at most. (Rinse and repeat.)
But what happens where a particular style, such as midcentury, gets stuck in the public consciousness? What if people don’t want to throw out their Eames fiberglass chairs or their tulip tables? What if they become illogically attached to their Hans Wegner chairs. Or Mid Century Mobler?
If you have read “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” then you know what I hope will happen. Furniture will become like craft beer, cave-aged cheese or artisanal no-kill lederhosen. And there will be one more giant purge of our termite-barf furniture.
I’m too jaded to think this could really happen. But you have to have hope.
I am pleased to announce that expanding the number of people who work on our books is showing results. With the help of Megan Fitzpatrick (who has been assisting us from the beginning), Meghan B. and now Kara Gebhart Uhl, we are finishing up some massive projects (and even taking on some new ones).