September 19, 2014

Rocking Chair, part 2

Remember this rocking chair?  I wrote about it here.  


I found fiber rush from Cohasset Colonials, who had nice, if slightly pricy, chair weaving kits available.  It came pretty quickly, but I managed to burn my thumb on an oven rack a few days later, and so put off the weaving until it had healed and I had gotten back from my trip to Virginia.




Yes, that IS another old wooden rocker in the background.
Brian's grandfather made it.  


 I'd just like to say that this is a frustrating, painful, awkward process best suited to someone much more anal retentive and OCD than I.  The chair frame will never be even, which means your weaving will never come out neatly in the middle, and if you mess up early on, you won't know until it's far too late to fix it.  The weaving slows down quite a bit at the end as you try to feed yards of damp rolled up paper through a progressively smaller hole while the rush kinks and twists up on you horribly.  It will probably take me three or four more chairs before I get competent at this.  I saw some cute fabric woven chair seats on Pinterest, so it's quite likely that I will NOT use fiber rush as my next seat medium if I ever bring home an orphaned seatless chair again.


Here's my finished orphaned chair, now with a seat!  I can sit on it.  and rock.  It works, so yay for success!  

The instructions called for several layers of shellac.  Perhaps that will improve matters.

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