Some different patterns for seat weaving

they're not new, I'm just re-learning them

[note: from time to time I try to make a post that’s free to all subscribers. Most are only fully-available to paid subscribers. This one is open to all - as are the first 10 and one or two others. That way anyone who’s curious can see what it’s all about.]

I wove two seats in hickory bark yesterday and today. I was aiming for a diamond design that I used many years ago in Shaker tape. I first saw it on a Dave Sawyer chair and adapted it for this rocking chair that I made about 1990:

The pattern is easy to see in 2-color tape like that. I pulled down some perfect hickory bark that I cut last spring - 40’ strips. I like to peel the bark’s thickness in half and use the “bottom” half of that split. (the top is useful too - but I like the bottom best).

I soaked and prepped the bark, trimmed it to 3/4” wide and wrapped the warp front to back - then it was time to begin the actual weaving. And I booted it - got a beautiful seat, but not the pattern I wanted. One thing about weaving like this - I never notice that I’ve gone awry until the next row or even the one after that. By the time I found out I messed up the pattern, I decided to keep going. For one thing it was beastly hot and the bark was drying pretty fast. So rather than unwrapping it and re-soaking it, I kept going. The mistake was just starting off on the wrong foot - so instead of a diamond, I got 4 triangles pointing at each other. It’s a fine, no, excellent seat. It’s just not what I intended. (the pattern show up better if you squint):

Here’s the diagram of that design - so you can weave it & say “I meant to do that.” You need an odd number of rows both ways for the best results. Here it’s drawn for 15 rows - if for instance you had 13, you’d knock off the top & bottom row. Same thing left to right. This pattern emanates from the middle, but that’s not how you weave a seat.

Today I wove it again - got it right this time. (the chair on the right below) But this bark is a mixture of shaved and split bark - so different textures and a different look. And it’s still wet. But as it dries it will tone down a bit and use will burnish it too. That’s one of the great things about hickory bark seats, they look better and better the more you use them. That’s not the case for something like the Shaker tape in the top photo.

Here’s the diamond pattern. For both of these I wove a regular herringbone underneath. The pattern is drawn for 17 rows of weaving, but I only used 15 - so I started at row 2 and stopped at row 16. But then to further confuse the issue, there’s two side strips woven in after the fact. They don’t reach all the way to the back of the chair. Remember, the seat’s a trapezoid.

Dave Sawyer sketched it for Jennie Alexander when they were first corresponding in 1976 - to my knowledge JA never tried it. Seat weaving was not her favorite part of chair making. But it is one of mine, I really like it.