some household furniture

Jan 18, 2025

[other than making the windsor chair shown below, most of my shop work lately is making parts - chair parts and boards - from green wood. So the furniture will come later…meanwhile, some photos of a few pieces around the household…]

Most of you/many of you read Chris Schwarz’s blog & I think I read there recently that he doesn’t make furniture for his house - some of it ends up there, prototypes, etc - things that didn’t quite make the cut for sale. Though I did hear that Lucy claimed a chair he was going to sell - so some of his prime stuff has made it upstairs. I’m almost the complete opposite. My house is jammed with my stuff - but I make it in dribs and drabs - some pieces take years to get done. Like this comb back I just finished. This one’s destined for my desk. We had some chair-shuffling lately and my desk chair got bumped up to the kitchen table. So I’ve been using a 1989 sack back chair I made. The comb back is one I’ve been planning for ages.

Usually when I steam-bend chair parts I write the date on them so I know when they’re ready to use. I bent the comb in Nov 2022! (it was ready before I was, clearly.). Last June Elia Bizzarri was here for a few days and he & I made the strap to bend the arm. I don’t know when I made the seat - it was a couple of months ago at least. So two years in the making, longer than that in the planning. That’s nowhere near my record.

This chest of drawers (above) easily spanned 10 years. I started it in my old shop at the museum, quit my job, stuck it in storage and finished it in 2019. It’s not a copy of a period piece, but closely follows some that we attribute to Boston in the 2nd half of the seventeenth century. It’s a mixture of Spanish cedar, oak, pine, maple and rosewood.

It’s the second chest of drawers I made for my wife - this was the first one in about 2003. It is based on one from the same group as those large cupboards I made in the past few years. The turnings and some of the applied bits are maple, the rest is oak and pine.

This small chest is one I started for a taping of Roy Underhill’s show - there were two in progress when we taped the show - the first one was completely plain. Finished it & sold it umpteen years ago. I worked on the 2nd one off and on right after coming back from Roy’s - and added some gouge-carving. A lot of it. So it was somewhat finished shortly after. It was lidless for a few years. Then I slapped a pine lid on it & it became the “yarn” chest. It was in the shop recently while my wife was recovering from hip surgery - just to clear some space. I took the opportunity to shoot a couple of photos of it while it was there and now it’s back in the house. Looking all spiffy from a refreshed coat of linseed oil. It’s small and based loosely on an English chest I saw in an auction catalog 20 years ago. Size is H: 19” W: 31” D: 16”

If you have time to waste today, you can find the carving mistake in the photo below.

One other little thing - a joined stool that I made when Jennie Alexander and I were finishing up our book for Lost Art Press.

Joined stool frames don’t require any great amount of wood - but the seat is another story. To rive a single 10”-11” wide board for the seat you’re looking at a log about 24” in diameter - at least. Not easy to come by and even then, a lot of work. So one thing we did was make seats of two boards. I forget why now - probably a moisture-content issue - but we made them without actually joining them.

So this stool has a two-board top but there’s no connection between the two boards. They just but up against each other and are pegged to the frame - each board has 3 pegs; 2 in the stiles and one in the long rail. It worked fine, they’re perfectly radial boards, so very little shrinkage across their width. They weren’t sopping wet when they went on, probably well on the way to air-dried. These days I don’t do them that way, I just use quartersawn wide stock for joined stool seats. A simple solution.

Some people might be surprised to hear this - but I have none of my recent Jennie Alexander style chairs. All the ones I make these days get sold. I have a couple of mine from years ago up in the loft of the shop, two of Jennie’s too. But in the house, it’s Windsor chairs.

Tucked away in the basement is a joined form - I might have made it for the PBS show Colonial House - I forget. Whatever it was for, I kept it only because I figured that I’d probably not make them again - I did make a couple for clients 15 years ago. We dragged it upstairs for a couple of Thanksgiving dinners when our kids were small - but our dinner guests moved to Europe and our kids are bigger than they used to be.

I have a few carved boxes around the place, but most of them are 20 years old or more. The exceptions are two I made for the kids recently - they each got an initialed carved box. Here’s Rose’s.