This comb-back chair is based on the chair on the cover of “The Stick Chair Book,” with some modifications detailed below. The finish is fresh milk paint (a recipe from a forthcoming book) tinted with a French mineral pigment called “saffron.”
This particular chair is set up for lounging. This summer, I have been tweaking this design to make it more suitable for reading by the fire. The back is pitched at 20°, and the seat (about 16-3/4″ high) has some additional pitch. The chair is quite comfortable, and I wasn’t keen on selling it (which is rare for me).
The seat, legs and stretchers are in red elm, which is tenacious and lightweight. The arm and comb are white oak, which bends well. And the sticks are fast-growth hickory, which is flexible and strong. All the joints are assembled with hide glue, which we make from scratch here.
In addition to changing the seating geometry, I made some small design changes to this chair that I’m happy with. The stretchers are now oval/rectangular octagons, which makes them a little lighter (visually) but just as strong as equilateral octagons. Above the seat, I omitted two of the short sticks to create some negative space between the back sticks and the short sticks. This gives the chair a bit more of a Welsh feel and breaks up the solid wall of sticks presented in the original design.
The arm has the most changes. It’s steambent, like the original design, but is now fully shaped with spokeshaves. The original design had chamfers. The hands taper to a bit of a point (an old shape that I love), and the tapers lean toward the outside of the chair, giving it a welcoming look. All these design changes will be discussed and explained in the forthcoming revised edition of “The Stick Chair Book.”
The finish is a durable milk paint we make here at the shop. It has a low sheen, unlike the chalky look of commercial milk paint. No topcoat is necessary. The paint, applied by Megan Fitzpatrick, shows some subtle variations of color in places — it’s not an automotive finish. The chair as a whole was shaped entirely by hand, so there are subtle tool marks evident. These are the by-products of handwork.
How to Buy the Chair
The chair is $2,300. That price includes shipping and crating to anywhere in the lower 48. If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, August 27. Please use the subject line: “Saffron 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.)
The following is excerpted from “The Intelligent Hand,” by David Binnington Savage. It’s a peek into a woodworking life that’s at a level that most of us can barely imagine. The customers are wealthy and eccentric. The designs have to leap off the page. And the craftsmanship has to be utterly, utterly flawless.
Personally, this book makes me want to draw and create every time I pick it up. It is a reliable source of inspiration to me, a reminder that creative time is not wasted time. And David’s writing is just fun to get wrapped up in.
I was fortunate; I was not destined for the production line. I was lucky enough to go to the wonderful art school at the University of Oxford that was set up by John Ruskin, the great theorist at the centre of the Arts & Craft Movement. Ruskin believed that art should be taught at places of great learning, that art students would benefit from being at the centre, right in the hum of the academic process, and that in turn those universities would be enriched by their presence.
Ruskin set up three art colleges: The Ruskin School at Oxford, The Fitz William at Cambridge and The Slade College at London University. Although The Slade has since prospered and gone on to become one of the greatest post-graduate art schools, I don’t believe that all three were universally welcomed by “the Dons.” The Fitz William is no more, and my own experience at Oxford suggested that The Ruskin School was not entirely loved by the University. We were always damned by the idea that as art students we could not be given a proper degree because we were “not academic enough.” The intelligence that we displayed daily was of the wrong kind for the Dons (the professors).
William Morris and his buddy Edward Burne-Jones were at Oxford at Exeter College. They shared lodging in the same street as me, but many years earlier and probably in much greater comfort. My time at Oxford was the late 1960s, concurrent with the brand-new contraceptive pills, very, very short skirts, the very beginnings of feminism and all the fun that entailed.
The Ruskin School was then situated in a wing of The Ashmolean Museum. We had three large studios, one of which was devoted entirely to life drawing and painting. Before you were allowed to draw from the nude you needed to serve a full term’s apprenticeship in drawing plaster casts of Greek statuary, mostly from the Parthenon. This was mind-numbingly dull, but it gave you great discipline in the simple task of looking very, very hard.
We were in a gallery in Walton Street about 200 yards from the Ashmolean. An ancient but much loved and respected tutor named Geoffrey Rhodes would slowly, very slowly, make his way from the school to the cast gallery. He was a small man who took tiny, painful steps. I was the only student diligent enough to be drawing at three in the afternoon. It was silent in the gallery. The outside door opened; I could hear Mr. Rhodes’ approaching footsteps. Tap, tap, tap. It took ages.
“Ah, there you are David,” he said. Slowly, he looked at my drawings, then put his whiskery head next to mine to see what I was looking at. To see exactly what I was looking at. “Ah well, not much I can help you with there, carry on.” He then turned and tapped his way back to tea and cakes in the staff room. Drawing is like that; there are times when words just don’t do it. Mr. Rhodes knew that, which is why he was universally loved and respected.
This was at the time of “The Hornsea Art School Revolt.” The school’s studios in London were being filled with dry ice, smoke and writhing naked bodies. “Happenings,” laced with LSD and weed, were “what we did now.” If you painted, it had to be a kind of Mid- Atlantic Expressionism: big vacuous canvases, lots of sloshing about and full-on freedom of expression.
I didn’t work this out until much later, but all these developments were about de-skilling young creative minds. The Conceptual Art that won the “Salon” and that has become the Official Art of my generation needs no skill – just ideas. For it, skill is a restriction and inhibition to creative expression. Which is, of course, nonsense.
What I came to learn at art school was how to draw, how to look, how to think visually. This was slowly, gradually being devalued and removed from the curriculum. All the skills were being chucked out of the art school window to the point that now, a generation later, we have few capable teachers left to teach the basic drawing skills.
I had come to learn to draw; I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have the skill to draw and draw well, which meant practice. Ten thousand hours, they say, to achieve any skill or competence. Like a pianist, I knew that it was necessary to practice.
I had come to learn to draw, I felt this in my waters. I loved the daftness of all this at Hornsea, especially the writhing nakedness, but something within me wanted to have the skill to draw and draw well.
The Ashmolean Museum is a wonderful place for a young, visual mind to explore. In it, there’s everything from Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai armour, from Minoan figurines to Classical Greek statues. The classical Greek dudes were a big deal for me. They were in a long gallery between the drawing studio and the front door. A small ragged group of us would gather at the front for a cigarette every time the model took a break. We sat on the stone walls outside the main doors, got piles (hemorrhoids) and had monumental snowball fights. We really were a scruffy nuisance to have in a museum, but it was the best place to be. I absorbed the Ashmolean though the pores of my skin. In three wonderful, full years I knew what the artefacts of world culture felt and looked like. My eyes had wrapped around and embraced everything, whilst probably I knew very little. What I did know, however, included a small collection of Raphael and Michelangelo drawings of which I devoured every line and every nuance. It was BBBBBBBbrill. Did I tell you I had a stammer?
Stammering was an affliction I carried with me throughout childhood and school into my middle years. It was an invisible affliction. I didn’t look like I was crippled in any way, but to a large degree, it stopped me from speaking. My mouth would jam up with words beginning with “B” or “M.” I could see them coming up ahead in the sentence. It was like lockjaw – I was left humming, buzzing and dribbling, trying to push out a word that had jammed in my mouth. The more effort I put into getting the word out, the tighter the lockjaw.
To say this affected my life would be an understatement. Think what your life would be like if you couldn’t talk. That’s unfair. I could talk – it’s that I chose to not talk very much. It was irritating when it came to girls and no doubt restricted my sex life when I could have had much more fun. But isn’t that always the case? We all could have had much more fun when looking back. Much later, I was able to get past this obstacle, but that is another story for later.
I wonder if Burne-Jones and Morris got piles from sitting on the same stone walls outside the Ashmolean? They certainly inhabited the same space. For Morris, brotherhood and comradeship was a big deal. He gathered about him members of a group of young painters who were to become the rather pompously titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They later went on to paint up a storm. Then, they painted with startling lack of success, the walls of the Oxford Union.
Morris was always wrapping fellow artists and writers about him like a warm cloak. Blessed with a background that meant a few shillings were not a problem, he could focus on ideas and ideals. Here, Ruskin came to influence both Morris and his group. “The Stones of Venice” was a powerful and popular thesis published in three volumes between 1851 and 1853. The books examine Venetian architecture in detail. In “The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter in book two, Ruskin gives his view on how society should be organised:
“We want one man to be always thinking, and another man to be always working, and we call one man a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising his brother: and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”
Wow. Tell that to Henry Ford.
I have worked night shifts at Black & Decker. I worked a machine that bored a part of the casing for an electric drill. These were the industrial “top of the range” drills. Learning to do this well took about two shifts. After that, what could I do to keep my mind occupied? I had a total number of casings to do in a shift; too few and I had the charge hand on my neck. Do more than this, however, and the union guy was going to give me earache. So you play: How fast can I go for an hour? Then how slow? How few could I make in the next hour? I needed the money but after a while, when I had paid my bills, I joined the 863.
Morris picked up Ruskin’s social ideas and ran with them. Known initially for his poetry, Morris again assembled a group of trusty creatives to create William Morris and Company. The goal was to create, improve, make, have made and sell stylish artefacts for the burgeoning middle-class home.
The Muse came to Morris and found him working. (The muse has always got to find you working!) His inspiration was the English countryside, not just the generality but the very core of how nature fits together. I believe this is why the movement has so much resonance for us now. Not what Morris did – his shapes and forms, the wallpaper and fabrics – but why he did it, and the way he was looking at nature. Morris gave us a Victorian response. Why can we not look at nature and give a 21st-century response?
Morris rented Kelmscott House near Oxford – a beautiful, warm, stone house with a mature garden full of perfumed summer. During his time there he developed something that touches the essence of nature herself. His drawings were cleverly arranged into repeated images that could become wallpapers or woven tapestries.
It was typical of Morris to spend a part of the week “in the doing” – weaving, drawing, printing. The making was important to him, and he was not afraid to bring back old techniques. His textiles needed skills, looms and processes that could be found abroad and recovered from obsolescence.
The Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society poster below shows in part the ideas that were evolving – the artist and the maker shaking hands as equals, with mutual respect.
“Let you have nothing in your home that is not both beautiful and useful.” That was the strap line of Morris and Co.
Oscar Wilde answered that with: “The definition of Art is that it is useless.”
First-class, Oscar. His argument (which has little historical validity) in the following years won the day. The creative force of the 20th century has very largely created an art that defines itself as useless.
Leaving this battle (yet to be lost), the Arts & Crafts movement encouraged a new generation of makers, often young men and women with sufficient resources, to set up small workshops outside the cities that were close to nature. These were jewelry makers, potters, weavers, silversmiths. The new railways would take their product back for Morris and others to sell, and they could live the rural idyll.
It was the furniture makers who particularly affected me. They were part of a small group that settled near Cheltenham. Each year, I take a group of Rowden students to see their work at the Wilson Museum in Cheltenham. I do this to show them the freshness of the workmanship and to remind myself of the essence from which Rowden has come.
Rowden students examine a table base by Ernest Gimson at The Wilson Art Gallery in Cheltenham.
For me, their move to the countryside was most important. It was the closeness to nature, having it around you every day when walking the dog, seeing the changes in the hedgerow as season followed season. Remembered changes from last year become marked in your work. You get closer to the raw bones of nature, and your work benefits. You bring home bits of hedge and draw, not knowing why, but feeling that it is part of the process – and you trust your feelings.
Two brothers, Sidney and Ernest Barnsley, and a good friend, Ernest Gimson, all young, all recently trained as architects, took to this idea of living and making out in the sticks. They came to the quiet Cotswold village of Sapperton (not far from Cheltenham) and set up small workshops. Sidney Barnsley worked alone, always. Ernest Barnsley spent a little time with Gimson, but soon gathered a commission for work at Rodmarton Manor and became engrossed in that. Gimson is my hero. He worked not alone but with the help of both local and imported craftsmen. Probably learning as he went, Gimson, with his assistants, created a place that turned out extraordinary furniture.
The table shown above is made in solid English walnut with black Macassar ebony and pale green holly detailing. The boards of the tabletop are secured with a decorative dovetailed key. The hide glue would probably have secured the joint, but these were joints to express, to show off the workmanship.
Each year I delight in showing the freshness of the workmanship displayed in the wide chamfers worked in the hard black ebony. Tool marks are evident; they could only come clean off the spokeshave or drawknife. This is stunning work.
The goal of this small group was to make pieces with integrity, very largely by hand. There is almost no veneer from the early Gimson workshop; what you saw was what you got, all the way through. Gimson worked with local craftsmen, notably Henry Clissett and Edward Gardiner, who were skilled chairmakers. Clissett was notable for aiming to make chair a day and rush the seat in an evening. Gimson aimed to take these traditional chairs and improve the product, using his design skills in conjunction with the craft skills of Clissett and Gardiner.
The Edward Gardiner chair, also at The Wilson.
Here is an example that blows me away (above). This is a chair reworked by Gimson but made by Gardiner. Look at the chair back. Look at the arrangement of the back splats. Five of them all different, each getting larger as our eye climbs up that back. This chair is aspirational – it seeks to pull the eye up, a positive upward movement. Look at the chair legs. They can’t outward toward the top, welcoming the body into the chair. See how the back splats are arranged on the chair. Look hard. The centres are each wider, one from the next. The ends are each wider, one from the next. The splats are fixed with a negative space that is wider, one from the next. But look at the centre. The top of each splat is the same distance from the splat above. It’s as if all is upward energy, every element is up – but this is like a string in the centre of the chair back that pulls down. You don’t see it until you hunt – but it’s there.
This is what a good chair design does; it teases the eye to find the hidden logic. It is just there. You could not change one element without binning the whole lot. Gimson must have driven Gardiner mad (until the orders came in and the money followed).
It was not so much the work that grabbed me by the throat, it was the activity. These men and women were contrarian counter-culture beings, and I liked that. They set themselves up in the wilds of rural England when transport and communications were ridiculously hard. The move to the country was a serious decision and one I support, working at Rowden in the heart of rural Devon, with a lake to chuck the dog in and fields to walk.
The library at the Bedales School, which involved the talents of several great designers and woodworkers.
Although Gimson is my role model, it was the other guy, Sidney Barnsley, the guy who worked alone, who had another most serious effect. He had a son, Edward Barnsley, who, confusingly, also became a furniture maker. Edward Barnsley came to work at and later own a workshop at Petersfield in Hampshire. The man who founded the Petersfield workshop was Geoffrey Lupton, a former apprentice of Gimson’s who was largely responsible for the library at the nearby Bedales School (above). The building was designed by Gimson, the tables in it are by Sidney Barnsley and the chairs are by Gimson. The building was started by Lupton but was completed by the workshop under the direction of Edward Barnsley.
I nearly wrote “finished by Edward Barnsley,” when really it was the team that he led – a group of clever intelligent makers, probably capable of telling the lad, “No boss, it’s got to be this way.” Our culture doesn’t allow us to name everyone; it’s bad enough to acknowledge they are even present – but they damn well are there. And it’s this presence, a team working together, with different skills pulling together, that makes something extraordinary.
The Edward Barnsley Workshop continues to the present day. In 1950 they took on apprentice Alan Peters, who went on to open his own workshops at Cullompton in Devon. It was this man who gave me a model to follow. I admired him so much. With a lovely Devon long house, the barns converted to workshops, the stacks of English hardwood drying in the sheds, and his two skilled assistant makers, he made beautiful, saleable modern furniture. He was the man I wanted to become. But that’s another story.
The following is excerpted from Matthew Bickford’s “Mouldings in Practice.” In this book, Bickford shows you how to turn a set of complicated mouldings into a series of predictable rabbets and chamfers that guide your hollow and round planes to make any moulding that has been made in the past or that you can envision for your future projects.
The first half of the book is focused on how to make the tools function, including the tools that help the hollow and round planes – such as the plow and the rabbet. Bickford also covers snipes bills and side rounds so you know their role in making mouldings. Once you understand how rabbets and chamfers guide the rounds and chamfers, he shows you how to execute the mouldings for eight very sweet Connecticut River Valley period projects using photos and step-by-step illustrations and instruction.
The term “moulding plane” is an inclusive one. Dedicated moulding planes (also called “complex moulders”) have soles that consist of multiple curves, flats, quirks, steeples and anything else centuries of art have imagined. Dedicated planes create one profile and do it well.
Fig. 2-1. Ovolo with two fillets. The profile this plane creates is similar to that of a window sash.Fig. 2-2. Cove with two fillets. Take note of the angle at which these planes are held relative to the wood. These planes are sprung; the angle at which they are held is the “spring angle.”Fig. 2-3. Ogee with fillet. Like the other planes, this ogee plane creates this single profile at a single location relative to the edges of the board, at a single angle.
These planes, when small, are easy to push and are often much quicker to produce a profile than any router bit, if only because the router surface needs to be sanded. A 1/8″ side-bead plane creates a bead along an edge that is ready for finish after 10 quick strokes. A thumbnail plane creates a convex ovular shape and adjoining vertical fillet, and can consistently and quickly cut profiles along 20 edges of five drawers in a dressing table. A 4″-wide crown moulder, with help from a few friends (and perhaps a horse), creates a complex cornice that is completely uniform from piece to piece across splices and from wall to wall and through mitered corners.
The profiles these planes create are precise, uniform and consistent. Therefore, any time a uniform profile is needed, but the mouldings cannot be cut from a single long piece, a dedicated plane is desirable. A drawer, after all, has four sides – and the lips of individual drawers may sit a mere 1/2″ apart – so efficient consistency is required.
There are dedicated planes that execute just about any moulding, including all those already mentioned. Many of these dedicated planes are also desirable for the craftsman who produces the same edge many times, such as a harpsichord maker who adds a small quirked ogee to the bridge of multiple harpsichords made months apart.
Fig. 2-4. Dedicated harpsichord bridge. This common profile in Italian and German harpsichord bridges will always be 5 minutes away from completion for the user – less if the tool remains set up.
These dedicated, single-profile planes, however, serve little purpose to the craftsman who produces numerous small lengths of moulding in an ever-changing portfolio. These single-profile planes are dedicated to one profile and, like most router bits, they do only one thing. Though the profile these create can often be manipulated to some degree (by removing a fillet, for example) specialty planes are without value if you need to control the details of a profile, or create something with major or even minor differences.
To fresh eyes, the complex profiles integrated into these planes’ soles are apparent; the integral fences and depth stops the planes often include, however, are not. The fences require the plane to contact the edge of a board as a reference, limiting the plane’s angle, spring and location. The depth stop ensures a consistent depth of profile, but often makes it impossible to use the plane to create part of a larger, more complex moulding.
Fig. 2-5. A complex moulder. The width of the iron is the same as the cutting edge illustrated above. No portion of the iron is present at the fence and depth stop. When the plane has progressed to the extent that the depth stop registers against the face of the stock, the iron will stop contacting the wood.
Most dedicated planes also demand proper setup steps to be performed prior to their use.
Without the minimal rabbeting setup in the example in Fig. 2-6, significant edge maintenance will be required because the edge closest to the fence takes dozens of passes more than the edge closest to the depth stop. When the edge nearest the fence deteriorates, the entire blade profile will need to be sharpened in order to keep the iron matching the sole.
Fig. 2-6. The rabbets required. The minimum number of rabbets desired for using a complex moulding plane is similar to those created when using hollows and rounds. You, the user, will need to determine how much stock removal is necessary for each profile. I imagine there are times when preempting a complex profile with a rabbet plane, plus hollows and rounds, is ideal. After all, these few planes with individual curves are easier to maintain than a highly complex profile.
Fig. 2-7. Many passes required. The portion of the iron that is closest to the fence may take 40 passes before the edge farthest away takes one. When it is time to sharpen, the entire edge must be addressed, despite only a small portion needing it.
The genius of dedicated moulding planes is in their absolute consistency, made possible largely by their integrated fences and depth stops. However, these same features also limit the versatility of the planes, and make them poorly suited to address many people’s primary motivation for investigating moulding planes: eliminating excess tooling.
The planes we will discuss in the pages to follow do not share these limitations. We are going to focus on rabbets, hollows, rounds, snipes bills and side rounds. Each of these planes serves a different function. All these planes, however, share a similar characteristic: They have neither integral fences nor depth stops. Without these two characteristics the planes are remarkably versatile. And by using simple stock preparation techniques, the user can impose steering and depth control on the planes to direct and focus their versatility to create all manner of profiles precisely and simply with just a handful of planes. These planes have no fences. We will make guides. These planes have no depth stops. We will make gauges.
But how do these tools work? These planes cut specific portions of an arc in a profile. Each size cuts a segment from a circle of a specific radius. While a plane’s cut matches the circumference of a specific circle, the percentage of the circumference is up to the user. There are no fences that need to be registered on the work, no spring lines to obey and no depth stop to adjust.
Fig. 2-8. The limits of side beads. A 1/8″ side bead can efficiently establish that profile on the edge of the board. It cannot make a bead set in from the edge or the convex portion of an ogee as the No. 2 hollow does above.
With hollows and rounds, the plane that cuts a side bead on the edge of a board is the same plane that cuts the convex portion of an ogee set 1″ from the edge of a complex waist mould. Unlike a dedicated moulding plane or even a Stanley No. 45 plane, these planes do not need to reference an edge while being held at a specific angle.
Whether the specific arc created by these planes falls along the narrowest edge of a board or onto the widest portion of a linenfold panel, the arc’s location is not predetermined. If the arc you need is a minimal 60° of a circle or more than 180°, that function is not determined by a depth stop. Whether the arc stands alone or in a sequence is a decision made by the user, not the planemaker.
These planes do not have predefined purposes other than cutting an ideal radius. Executing any moulding along a straight edge is achievable with these planes – whether you are making moulding on a board that will be applied beneath the top of a piece or even to the top itself.
Fig. 2-9. Geometry of the sole. The sole of this hollow and this round is one-sixth of a circle. The sole’s width is equal to the radius of the circumference it creates.
The soles of hollow and round planes represent 60° of a circle. Thanks to basic geometry and the properties of an equilateral triangle, we know that the width of each plane’s sole is equal to the radius of the circle each creates.
These hollow and round planes generally come in pairs, one convex sole (round planes) and one concave (hollow planes). The pairs vary in radius, which means they also vary in width. There are several numbering systems used when describing these planes, some dependent upon the maker, some on the origin of the tool. For this book, the following numbering system will be observed.
In this system, the plane’s number (usually stamped on its heel) designates its radius in 16ths of an inch up to 3/4″, or 12/16″. The numbering system then breaks, as subsequent planes increase in radius by 1/8″ instead of 1/16″.
There are a few other planes we need to learn about that assist the hollows and rounds – snipes bills, side rounds and rabbet planes.
Hollows are to rounds as snipes bills are to side rounds: The first has a concave sole and cuts a convex shape, while the second has a convex sole and cuts a concave shape.
Fig. 2-10. Other planes. Snipes bills (left) and side rounds are helpful planes for some profiles.
Fig. 2-11. The rabbet. A rabbet plane is rectangular in form and cuts square rabbets.
Many people look at the above planes and, for good reason, do not recognize their purpose. But you soon will.
We are now selling jars of Soft Wax 2.0 – our favorite finish for bare wood – which we make at our Covington headquarters.
An 8-ounce jar of Soft Wax 2.0 is $25. Or you can buy a kit that includes the wax, an applicator pad and the huck-weave towels that do an outstanding job of buffing out the finish.
We make Soft Wax 2.0 using only three ingredients: purified linseed oil, cosmetic-grade beeswax and a touch of 100 percent citrus solvent (made from orange peels). The finish is non-toxic and can be applied without gloves.
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. (We have it on our kitchen countertops and love it.) Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint. It also can be applied over bare wood that has been stained or dyed. You can easily remove cured Soft Wax 2.0 from a surface by flooding the wood with mineral spirits and wiping it away.
You can read more about the wax and how to apply it here.
During my last day in the U.K. last week, we crammed in as much as possible. It was like a hot dog eating contest. But instead of cased meats, we were consuming culture. And instead of a stomach ache, I became consumed by ennui (just kidding, I got Covid).
One of the last stops before Paddington Station was at Robert Young Antiques in London. I’ll make any excuse to stop here. Everything in the store is wonderful. Of course, we were on the lookout for stick chairs. And we found three winners.
In the front room was this Welsh comb-back with unusual arms. Look how far forward the hands are to the seat. That is unusual. The seat is shallow – 12” at most. But you would be surprised how comfortable these shallow chairs can be.
Also of note: the oval side stretchers. These are a fairly Welsh characteristic as far as I can tell. And they are one that I have embraced with my chairs lately.
And, of course, the seat is not saddled.
The second chair was also Welsh and what we call a root-back chair, likely an 18th-century example.
These chairs have a wildness to them that I always love. This chair is twisted to the right – almost like a corner chair. It’s difficult to see it in the photos. Definitely not symmetrical (symmetry can be boring, darling).
As always, I love to see three-leggers out in the wild. And the little “heart” on the arm indicates it’s sold. Awww. Someone else loves it, too.
The third chair is wild. Look at the negative space between the front post and the back sticks. That is nuts. Also, check out the back sticks themselves. They are fanned out dramatically. That’s a bit unusual for a folk chair. But what is even wilder is that the sticks are hexagonal/octagonal. And they carry their shape above the arm.
The whole chair is fascinating. The legs are so diminutive compared to the massive seat. Even after a few days of sitting with this chair, I don’t quite have it figured out.
