weaving hickory bark again & thinking of Twain, Munch, Honest Abe and more
I’ve been working on another ladderback chair - I have a class coming up in 2 weeks and needed the practice. I assembled a chair yesterday, put the slats in it then began scraping and generally cleaning up the frame. I use a cabinet scraper to do the final surfacing of the assembled chair; clean-up glue and pencil marks and overall get the chair ready for a finish. Below, I’m using dry spokeshave shavings to burnish the posts and rungs (I’ll do the slats a day later - or so.)
These are great for this work - and abundant when chairs are underway in the shop. I try to keep a pile on hand all the time regardless. They’re especially good burnishing turned work on the lathe.
This afternoon I wove the first session of the seat - the bark I used is stuff Brendan Gaffney & I cut a year ago - it’s the perfect-est bark I’ve ever made. The warp strip was 34’ long - the weft was 39’. It will take about 6’-8’ more to finish it off. I had trimmed the width of these strips to 3/4”. So about 80’ to do the chair. One thing to remember, my rungs are shorter by a fraction than the sizes listed in the third edition of Alexander’s book. There, she switched from what we used for years to whole-number dimensions - 14” and 17” rungs. The reason for the switch was to accommodate 1” wide hemp tape that she used on some chairs late in her career. Because I make my seating material, I never switched.
As I’ve been weaving the seat I thought again of the hickory bark references in Mark Twain’s writing - and just yesterday found another Twain reference to hickory - this time about green wood used by coopers. In chapter 54 of Life on the Mississippi, “Past and Present,” Twain was visiting his boyhood hometown, Hannibal, Missouri and reminisced about his youth there. The section of the chapter is called “Dutchy’s Mishap” - about a good boy who drowned:
“Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and ‘seeing who could stay under the longest.’ We managed to remain down by holding onto the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count...
Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said ‘All right, Dutchy - go ahead, we’ll play fair.”
There’s a long section about how the boys were going to hide and thus play a prank on Dutchy - except once he dove under, he never came back up...after a while, they decided someone had to dive down to see what happened -
“Somebody must go down and see!”
Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task.
“Draw straws!”So we did - with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response - and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness.
The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there...
I started reading the new biography of Twain, where the author writes that Twain’s mother “recognized his instinctive tendency to embellish the truth.” She is quoted as saying “I discount him ninety per cent...the rest is pure gold.”
The other Twain/hickory bark references are in a post I did a couple years ago - when I was seat-weaving of course.
https://peterfollansbeejoinerswork.substack.com/p/hickry-bark-seats
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