The cover of “American Peasant.” Coming out this week.
Sometimes we have so much stuff going on at Lost Art Press that I need to condense it all into one brief blog entry. Here we go.
‘American Peasant’ Released Early
My latest book, “American Peasant,” shipped from the printer 10 days early and will arrive in our Covington warehouse on Monday or Tuesday. We’ll open up ordering as soon as we can. The book will be $37. It is the prettiest book I’ve ever written, designed or published. I hope you like it.
FWW issue 311
On the Cover of Fine Woodworking
I am on the cover of the latest issue of Fine Woodworking magazine, which was a surprise and shock. I wrote an article on building Irish stick chairs for the magazine, which I worked on with Anissa Kapsales. I had no idea that I was going to end up on the cover, and Anissa kept it a secret.
The article turned out quite well (I think). And FWW has contracted me to write three more articles for future issues. I was wary about getting back into the magazine publishing world, but the good staff at the magazine has made it a pleasure. And fun.
The Stick Chair Journal No. 2
The second issue of The Stick Chair Journal has gone to press and should be released in early August. The cover article in the issue shows how to build the Hobbit-esque chair from “The Lord of the Rings” movies. There’s also an article about the first John Brown chair made in America. And a new technique I’ve worked out that makes assembling stick chairs much easier.
Other news….
We have new Lost Art Press hats that will go up for sale this week. They are navy blue and feature our dividers embroidered in white.
Whitney Miller has just finished editing her video on building a Swedish Tool Chest. We hope to have that up for sale this week, too.
And also worth noting: We have started production on our new Exeter-pattern nail hammers. Sexy, sexy, sexy.
Some quick administrative stuff. To try to meet demand for classes on building a stick chair, I’ve scheduled a class in building a Welsh-style comb-back chair at our Covington storefront for Nov. 18-22. Registration for the class will open at noon (Eastern) on June 24.
The classes are expensive, I know. The price includes all materials, plus continental breakfast and lunch every day. (We are serious about the food.) The class size is small – six students with one instructor and an assistant. We go to great lengths to make the week special and work hard so you go home with a finished (completely finished) chair.
The other bit of news here is that we have to scale back “Open Wire” a bit for the rest of the year. Megan and I are traveling a lot in the coming months, and it’s difficult to juggle our Open Wire when one of us is out of town.
Here are the Open Wire dates for the rest of 2024:
July 20 August 10 September 14 October 19 November 16 December 14
We will post reminders before each Open Wire date. Those are the Saturdays when both Megan and I will be in the office and ready to answer your woodworking questions. Megan and I enjoy Open Wire, but we hate to leave the other in the lurch when the other is traveling or teaching.
This chair is a close cousin to the chair offered here a couple weeks ago. Same great wood and same finish. The only difference is this chair has a stout H-stretcher, making it suitable for all sitters.
I am selling this chair for $2,600, and that price includes the crating and shipping to anywhere in the continental U.S. The chair is being sold via a random drawing – details below.
This chair is made of mahogany that is at least 70 years old. I bought it from Midwest Woodworking in Norwood when it was going out of business. The wood is gorgeous stuff, light and strong.
The chair is set up for dining. The seat tilts about 3°, with a back tilt of another 12°. The seat is 16” off the floor, which makes it comfortable for a wide range of sitters. The seat is a single wide plank of mahogany (that I had to amazingly rip down to make the seat). All the housed joints are assembled with hide glue and elm wedges so that the chair can be repaired long in the future.
The finish is super blonde shellac with a thin coat of black wax, which tones down the red and accentuates the wood’s pores.
Purchasing the Chair
We’re selling this chair via a random drawing. If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 5 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, June 7. Please use the subject line: “Hobbit Chair.” In the email please include your:
Name
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
On June 7, we will pick a name at random and contact that person. Note that if you don’t hear from us on Friday, you did not win (sorry – the mail program has made bulk replies impossible). We will happily crate up the chair and ship it to your door. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) Shipping and crating is included in the price, with no additional charges whatsoever.
This is the last Hobbit chair for awhile (and last mahogany chair for awhile). I have a new design in my notebook that I am eager to bring into the world.
“The Stick Chair Book” is divided into three sections. The first section, “Thinking About Chairs,” introduces you to the world of common stick chairs, plus the tools and wood to build them.
The second section – “Chairmaking Techniques” – covers every process involved in making a chair, from cutting stout legs, to making curved arms with straight wood, to carving the seat. Plus, you’ll get a taste for the wide variety of shapes you can use. The chapter on seats shows you how to lay out 14 different seat shapes. The chapter on legs has 16 common forms that can be made with only a couple handplanes. Add those to the 11 different arm shapes, six arm-joinery options, 14 shapes for hands, seven stretcher shapes and 11 combs, and you could make stick chairs your entire life without ever making the same one twice.
The final section offers detailed plans for five stick chairs, from a basic Irish armchair to a dramatic Scottish comb-back. These five chair designs are a great jumping-off point for making stick chairs of your own design.
The arms can be the simplest part of a chair. If you’re lucky, you might find a branch in the woods that grew into the shape of a perfect arm. Or the arms can be as basic as two straight boards: one for the right hand and one for the left.
If you like, you can make a C-shaped arm that wraps around the sitter by gluing three sticks together – one for the sitter’s right hand, one for the spine and one for the left hand. On the other hand, a chair’s arms can have insanely involved joinery – mitered scarf joints or curved half-laps (for starters).
And if that’s not enough of a challenge, try steambending, where there’s a significant risk of chuck-it-in-the-trash-and-start-day-drinking failures.
With dozens of methods available, deciding how to make the arms of a chair can be daunting. So, let’s begin with some basic principles.
Typical Pieced Armbow The-three-piece armbow is strong and can be made easily with boards from the lumberyard.
The Goal of the Arm The mechanical goal of every arm on every good stick chair is simple: Avoid short grain as much as possible. If you plan to build your chair with two separate, disconnected arm pieces, then things are fairly simple. You can easily find two sticks to do the job and avoid weak short grain. The troubles begin when you want your chair to have what’s called an “armbow” – a curved arm that wraps around the sitter from her right hand to the left. How in heaven’s name do you avoid short grain with a C-shaped arm? There are several strategies:
Find a curved branch that looks like a 90° bend. Saw it through its thickness (called “resawing”) to make two identical curves. Then join the two 90° curves to make an arm that curves 180°. Or get really lucky and find a curved branch that is perfectly C-shaped.
Take a straight stick and use steam to bend it over a form to make a 180° curve.
Saw up a bunch of thin (1/8″-thick) pieces of veneer. Apply glue to their faces like spreading butter on bread. Bend them over a curved “form” that represents the arm’s final shape. Let the glue dry. This is called “bent lamination.”
Purchase “cold-bend hardwood,” which is flexible when wet. You bend it over a form (similar to steambending but without the steam). When it dries, it keeps its shape.
Create a “pieced armbow.” This is where you use three or four chunks of wood that are sawn to a curved shape. You glue them up in a way that eliminates short grain, sometimes adding a piece called a “shoe” to the top to shore things up.
Get your arms in the air I spotted these curved branches on a tree on the grounds of St Fagans, the national history museum of Wales. It could be one massive armbow or several 90° bends, depending on how you cut it.
Typical Dimensions Arms can vary quite a bit. A steambent arm might be 1″ thick and 1-1/2″ wide. A pieced armbow might be 1″ thick and 2-1/2″ wide. A curved branch or root can be a whopping 2″ thick and 4″ wide.
The arm has to be strong enough that it won’t crack during assembly or in service. And this challenge is made more difficult by all the holes you drill in the arms for sticks. Make the arm too bulky, however, and it might look ugly. It’s a balancing act.
In the world of stick chairs, a typical arm is about 1″ thick, give or take. In a strong material, such as oak, I’ll accept 7/8″ thick. For width, I like 1-3/8″ wide for arms that I’ve bent. And about 2-1/4″ wide for pieced armbows.
If the arm has a shoe, I usually shoot for 1″ thick for that component, though I have seen much thinner ones on historical chairs.
When assembled, the armbow is typically wider than the seat. If my seat is 20″ wide, then my armbow will be 23″ to 26″ wide overall. The depth of the armbow varies according to the design of the chair. If the back of the chair leans a lot, you might have to make the armbow deeper (or not, depending on where you want the hands to end up). Sometimes the hands hang over the front edge of the seat. Sometimes they are in line with the front edge of the seat. Sometimes they are a few inches back. Here’s a good starting point: My armbows are typically about 16″ deep, and that works for most of my chair designs.
All that said, the arms can vary a lot in a stick chair. Don’t be afraid to stray from these guidelines when copying an old chair.
Root-back chair A gorgeous root-back chair on display at St Fagans. Note the shape of the seat – a fairly shallow arc, which matches the shallow curve of the massive arm.
Arms in the Hedge Among stick chairs from Wales, it’s fairly common to find a chair where the arm’s shape was determined in part by the tree. A tree branch grew in a graceful curve, and it was harvested by a cunning chairmaker. I first learned about this bit of cleverness from chairmaker Chris Williams and Emyr Davies, a conservator at St Fagans. They planted the following idea into my brain: “Chairmaking begins with a walk in the woods.”
That is, you can find a chair’s arms in the branches, and the chair’s design begins there.
During my visits to the forests in Wales, these simple words became real. I looked up into the branches of these craggy Welsh trees and saw the arms of chairs waving back at me. Curved branches are quite common in trees that are part of the intertwined ecosystem of hedgerows and sunken lanes.
Scarfed Armbow This Welsh beauty has an armbow made from two curved branches that have been joined with a scarf joint. The two back sticks that pierce the joint reinforce it. Photo courtesy of Tim Bowen Antiques in Ferryside, Wales.
When I returned to the United States, I went to the forest to look for arms, but above me I found only legs, sticks and stretchers – straight stuff. The North American forest tends to produce arrow-straight tree trunks as the leaves stretch upward for sunlight.
Of course, naturally bent wood is out there in American forests and towns, but it’s not nearly as common as it is in Wales, where the landscape nurtures these curves.
If you do find curved material for arms, harvesting it, sawing it, drying it and shaping can be a challenge.
Naturally bent wood can possess significant internal stresses. The reward, however, is an armbow with no short grain.
There are two typical ways to use the curve of a branch in an arm.
With a branch that possesses a shallow curve, use the curve as-is, like in a root-back Welsh chair. These arms act more like a backrest, really. Sometimes they have a shoe (aka doubler) that is carved from the solid arm. Sometimes a shoe is applied.
With a branch that bends 90°, saw it through its thickness and join the two pieces into an armbow. The joint can be a scarf or a half-lap.
While I have looked for arms during many walks in the woods, most of my success has come from “walks by the stream.” Trees that grow adjacent to a stream can have roots that bend from the bank then plunge down. Sometimes erosion can expose these bent roots. They are ideal for arms. (Thanks to chairmaker John Porritt for showing this trick to me.)
Hot & Tricky I love steambending, but it does require some special equipment and there is a risk that the arm will split during the bending process or while drying. Using air-dried or green, rived wood greatly reduces the failure rate.
Steambent Arms Steambending is challenging, time-consuming and there’s always the risk of failure. Despite this, I have loved it since I bent my first comb in 2003. You need a steambox, a way to make steam (I use a wallpaper steamer), a bending strap and a form. The biggest challenge, however, is getting the right wood. The grain has to be dead-straight along its length, or it is likely to split while being bent. Air-dried or green wood bends the easiest – it still has lots of moisture in it, which helps carry the heat into the stick. If the wood has been kiln-dried, it needs to be rehydrated before bending. Cut the stick to shape then soak it in water for a week or two.
But even when you do everything right, sometimes steambending goes wrong.
After steaming the stick for an hour or so, you bend the stick around the form, secure it with clamps and let the stick dry. You can let it air-dry for a couple weeks, or you can build a primitive kiln using some insulating board, duct tape and a light bulb. You want the bulb to heat the kiln to 115°-125° (F). After a few days in the kiln, the arm will be dry enough to keep its shape.
People have written entire books about steambending. The chapter on the comb-back with a bent arm goes into detail on this technique.
Bent Laminations I’m not a fan of using bent laminations in stick chairs. Laminations usually look wrong to my eye. Basically, making a bent lamination involves sawing multiple thin strips of wood from a board in sequence. You apply glue to their faces, bend the wet mess over a form and let the glue dry. Then you machine the glue-encrusted part to shape.
I am happy to use bent laminations when making contemporary pieces, but in a vernacular stick chair, I’m going to opt for something else because it can look a bit like fancy plywood.
Cold-bending My favorite way to bend arms is to use “cold-bend hardwood,” which is flexible when wet. Clamp it to a form. When it dries, it keeps its shape.
Cold-bend Hardwood Surprisingly, the easiest way to bend an armbow or comb is using a high-tech material called “cold-bend hardwood” or “comp wood” (“comp” is short for compression). This material has been heated with steam and compressed along its length. When it arrives in your shop, it is wrapped in plastic and is pretty wet (about 25 percent moisture). It also is flexible. You cut it with a band saw and bend it around a form. It’s like steambending without the steam, strap or failure. I’ve had only one failure in 10 years of working with it.
What’s the downside? It’s expensive. A stick of comp wood that will get me three armbows might cost $150. When I sell a chair for $1,400, a $50 armbow isn’t all that big a deal. If fact, it might be cheaper than steambending because there is almost zero risk of failure when bending an arm. However, if you are a hobbyist, your time is your own and you can make these decisions without worrying about the clock.
After you bend the comp wood, you clamp it to the form. Then you can let it air-dry for a week or put it in the kiln overnight. When its moisture drops below 15 percent or so you can take it out of the form. I have found it quickly acclimates to your shop’s equilibrium moisture content.
The comp wood is indistinguishable from wood that has been steambent, so it looks fine in a stick chair. And I go into detail on using comp wood in the chapter on the comb-back with a bent arm.
Half-lap Armbow This chair was inspired by a chair on display at St Fagans in Wales. The arm is joined by a half-lap. There is no shoe. I had to pick the arm stock with care to avoid as much short grain as possible.
Pieced Armbows My favorite way to make an armbow is the easiest method overall.
A pieced armbow is made from two to four bits of wood that are sawn and glued to avoid short grain. A pieced armbow allows you to use flat boards from the lumberyard (or sticks from your backyard) and, with a bit of cleverness in selecting the grain, create a sturdy armbow.
The joinery can be as simple as butt joints and glue, or as showy as mitered lap joints or long scarf joints.
Making a pieced armbow begins with choosing the shape of the arm, choosing the joinery, then making patterns for the parts.
Separate Arms If your arms aren’t connected, then it’s much easier to avoid short grain. You might need the grain to curve a little, so look for your arms near knots.
This stick-back armchair is designed for reading and relaxing. It is based on Irish examples I’ve studied during my travels, and I have gradually tweaked this design to get it right where I want it.
I’m offering it for sale for $1,700 via a random drawing. The price includes crating and shipping to your door anywhere in the lower 48 states of the U.S. Details on the sale are at the bottom of this entry. First, some details about the chair.
While the chair has a spartan appearance, it is remarkably stout. That’s thanks to the fact that the legs and sticks are rived out of tenacious Southern red oak. All the joints are assembled with animal glue, which is reversible, and wedged with black ash wedges selected for arrow-straight grain.
Design-wise, this chair is different from Irish armchairs I’ve made before. The legs are double-tapered with a jack plane. The sticks are also double-tapered and faceted with planes. The arms are rasped and scraped to shape to resemble those of Gibson chairs. And the backrest is curved and positioned to support your shoulders.
The seat is tilted 3°, with the chair’s back tilted 33° off the seat, making this a great chair for sitting by the fire or on the porch. The seat is 16″ off the floor, making it comfortable for almost all sitters.
It is finished in General Finishes Milk Paint in Twilight (which is an acrylic). Like all my chairs, I make them as best I can, but most of the work is by hand. So you will find an occasional stray tool mark or tiny imperfection. These are not left intentionally, but they are the result of hand work.
How to Buy the Chair
The chair is being sold via a random drawing. If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday, May 7. Please use the subject line: “Irish Chair.” In the email please include your:
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
If you are the “winner,” the chair will be shipped to your door. The price includes the crate and all shipping charges. Alternatively, the chair can be picked up at our storefront. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.)
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Soon we will offer full-size plans for this chair.
