My Rustic Chair.

I have had the most amazing weekend but I ache in muscles that I didn't even know I had!
My husband bought me a two day, chair making course, for my Christmas present and it finally happened this weekend.

The course was run by John at his lovely cottage - but  there is no point in me telling you all about the cottage because he is moving in two weeks! There should have been four of us but due to illness there were only two of us, and it should have poured with rain all weekend but apart from a couple of very short showers we were able to spend the entire weekend working outside in John's garden. Even during the showers we worked under a tarpaulin.

The entire chair is made out of hazel and willow,  all coppiced by John so thankfully we didn't have to chop down our own trees.

First we started with the front and back legs, selecting the right pieces of wood and sawing them to the correct lengths, then we cut the side pieces and to add strength and stability we put in diagonal supports. Every thing was nailed together and every nail hole was pre-drilled to avoid splitting the wood. So now we had a left side and a right side and under John's watchful eye we sawed and nailed and sawed and nailed some more, and eventually we had the framework of a chair.

Now we used willow to create the arms, each piece was individually chosen, cut to length and  fixed in place, then shaped into a sweeping curve.

Next we started with the first piece of the arch for the back of the chair, again this is made from willow so using a fair bit of strength it was possible to curve the willow right around the back of the chair.

This took the whole of the first day to build and trust me it was non stop - apart from the mid morning coffee and flapjack break, the lunch break and the afternoon tea and cake break. Cakes and flapjacks were made by John's wife, Helen, and they were delicious.

The day finished at 4.30pm and I was home by 5.00pm - and ready for bed, a mixture of fresh air and physical work meant I was exhausted and slowly beginning to seize up.

The second day was less strenuous, in fact all we had to do today was to finish the arch at the back of the chair and to fill in the struts on the back and the struts on the seat.

These struts are made from hazel and here is where you can put your own mark on the design of your chair. By choosing particular parts of the hazel different shapes and patterns can be formed and so each chair will be unique.

Simple though it looked and sounded (when John explained it), it took quite a long time to select and cut each particular strut and form a pleasing pattern for the back of my chair. At the same time the remaining back arches are fitted and again everything is pre-drilled and nailed into place.

Lastly the struts are cut and fitted to form the chair seat.

Finally you can sit on your chair!

Now I have my chair at home in my garden it seems to be permanently raining and a little overcast and dark, so the pictures are not very good, the chair is also quite heavy and my muscles are no longer working so I can't move it into a better position.

 

 

I think my chair is absolutely amazing, I am so proud of it and I really can't believe that I actually made it myself. I am so looking forward to some lovely sunny days, a large glass of Baileys and a good book!

If you would like a similar chair, I can highly recommend www.johnsrusticfurniture.co.uk

Impulsive Buying!

Do you ever buy things spontaneously, on a whim, knowing they will be useful for something, somewhere, sometime? 

I do, quite often!

Now generally these things end up being put away - to be saved for just the right occasion, and what tends to happen is they get lost in my house and I completely  forget all about them.

About 2 years ago, I was walking through Ikea – you know the place you go to not wanting anything, but always managing to come out having bought something. Well, I had almost got through the entire shop without purchasing a single thing - when there it was, this adorable little wicker chair

http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/90045457/

 If you saw it in real life you too would spot its adorableness!

I just had to purchase it!

I think that I may have been wearing my new Granny hat at the time, even though he was only 6 months old!

I put my new chair away to save it for that special occasion. Luckily as it was rather an odd shape it was quite difficult to lose in my house, so it was always noticeable and therefore not easy to forget.

Many months later I was rummaging through the fabric shop’s remnant box when I came across an off cut which I knew would be just perfect for my little wicker chair. The fabric was a print of Noah’s Ark and some of the pairs of animals.

 I scanned various sections of the fabric onto my computer and cropped and manipulated and cut and pasted …

 

 

I know it makes it sound as though I know what I am doing, but trust me, I have no idea! I kept all the images the original size, (not as shown here) but I could have altered them if it had been necessary.

I have a flatbed scanner so I was able to scan the fabric without first cutting it, I didn’t want to cut it as I was going to use it later. If you look carefully at these pictures you can see the images from the folded fabric beneath, luckily the scanner didn’t pick them up. I could have placed a white sheet of paper in between the fabric folds to prevent this, but didn’t think of that at the time!

Anyway when I had all the sections that I wanted scanned into the computer I then printed each section onto tissue paper. I used the sort of tissue paper that you use for wrapping, I cut it down to A4 size and stuck it with sellotape onto a sheet of A4 paper and then fed it VERY CAREFULLY (I did manage to jam the printer quite a few times!!) through the printer.

It took a while for the ink to dry because the tissue paper was not absorbent, but when it was dry I cut around the images fairly close to the outline but not too precisely.

In the meantime I spray painted the little chair using Plasti-kote Satin Super; I chose a pale blue colour to signify sky and water. TIP Don’t spray paint in a force 10 gale!

It took several coats of paint to cover the chair, but I was being a little too perfectionist and maybe 2 coats would have been just as good, plus I wasted a lot of paint in the wind!

I held the tissue pictures up against the chair to decide where I wanted them. Then using ordinary PVA glue, I spread some onto the chair where the picture was going, pressed the tissue picture gently into place and covered it (the picture) in PVA glue.  I did this with all the pictures and then left it alone to dry. When it was dry I re-coated all the pictures with more PVA glue, paying particular attention to the edges of the tissue.

 

 

When everything was completely dry I sprayed Plasti-kote Hobby and Craft Sealer all over the  pictures and lightly over the entire chair.

 

 

 

I cut some 1” thick foam into the shape of the chair seat and using the fabric, which I still had, I covered the foam making a comfortable chair seat.

 

I found the tiniest cushion I could and made a cover for it too.  

By the time I gave it to my grandson he was 2 ½. But he loved it!

 

So there you have it - impulsive buying, but worth every penny!!