Curtis Buchanan’s new chair plans & videos

I’ve told some of these stories many times, but I’m still not tired of them. You might be. I first met Curtis Buchanan in 1987 when I was one of the students in his first class at Country Workshops. I learned Windsor chairmaking from him then, and made many chairs for about 5 years, when I veered off into oak furniture full-time and put away my scorp, travisher, reamer, sight-lines and all that jazz.

I was thrilled to bits last spring when Curtis came up to take part in our Greenwood Fest. There, he was working on a version of his “democratic” chair. The premise of this chair is two-fold – it can be made with a small tool kit; thus within reach of someone just starting out woodworking on a tight budget. And in theory anyway, it’s a building block of a chair. Learn this one & you can then go on to other more complex chairs.

He had two with him, while during the fest he made a third. I distinctly told him, “Don’t sell that green one (photo above) until you talk to me first…” On the last afternoon of the event, I was running around the site seeing to some of the tasks involved in winding that thing down. Didn’t get to Curtis til some time had gone by. Both chairs were gone. I asked what happened? “Oh, I sold both of those chairs…” just as matter-of-fact…turns out he cautioned the buyer that I might come for the green one. I did. Here it is again:

 

But now I can make my own. Curtis has just released a new set of plans; and a new video series. In the spirit of the democratic notion about this chair, he has set up the plans so that you can either buy them for full-price, or you can download them and pay what you can afford. He leaves it up to you. The full-sheets version is excellent; if I was buying them that’s where I would go. The chair is shown half-scale; the seat, legs, spindles and stretchers, bending forms are all full-sized. https://www.curtisbuchananchairmaker.com/store/c1/Featured_Products.html

 

 

here’s one of his latest versions:

 

here, he’ll tell you about the chair, then hunt down the youtube channel for him. He’s posted the first 4 videos for it, with more to come.

https://www.youtube.com/user/curtisbuchanan52/videos 

I made a “shaved” (not turned) Windsor chair 30 years ago; still have it kicking around, but it got bumped from the kitchen table when I inherited one of Curtis’ continuous arm chairs from Jennie Alexander. I made it based on Curtis’ sackback plans, but substituted shaved cherry legs, stretchers and arm posts. I got the idea from our friend Daniel O’Hagan who had one or more shaved Windsor chairs when I visited him in that era. This chair is cherry, tulip poplar, ash, hickory and white oak. When new, they looked very different, but 30 years of use have blended the colors pretty well. Patience.

Similar colors the other day in this view of a red-tailed hawk hunting over a marshy area nearby.

June 2019 with Plymouth CRAFT

 

Paula wrote somewhere that we’re all going to miss Greenwood Fest this year; but all the time she’s saved not organizing that event has allowed her to organize some woodsy classes as well as a new idea – Spoon Day. If you’re on Plymouth CRAFT’s mailing list, you got a notice about it today. If you’re not – we’re having two classes with Dave Fisher & JoJo Wood. These happen either June 7 & 8 or June 10 & 11. So what to do on the Sunday in between? We made up Spoon Day – one-day event wedged between sessions.  It’s all on the events page – https://www.plymouthcraft.org/events

 

Here’s the blurb about Spoon Day – we’ll announce other carvers we’ll have there shortly. https://www.plymouthcraft.org/spoon-day 

(but you there, block #3, watch what you’re doing! Is that you, Robert Newmyer?)

Tickets go on sale February 2nd. In case you didn’t hear that –  TICKETS GO ON SALE FEBRUARY 2ND.

Sign up for Plymouth CRAFT’s emails here – https://www.plymouthcraft.org/contact

Bedpost tops

Closing in on the end of this bedstead. It’s been ages; I have the best customers, so patient!

This week one of the tasks I did was cutting out the rosette-shapes on the tops of each bedpost. I carve the designs in them when the post is solid, then cut them out afterwards. The ash posts are 2″ x 3 1/2″.  It starts with some saw kerfs:

Then chisel-work down to that saw cut:

Here’s a closer view of some of that work:

To clean up those chisel-cuts, I pare across the posts’ thickness with a very sharp paring chisel. This leaves a faceted surface. If this one is like our bedstead, these will get a great patina from handling them.

I bevel the backs too – just to remove any sharp corners.

Here’s one from the foot of the bed:

We’ve had very few winter ducks this season so far. Today in the afternoon, there was great light on a female common goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) so I snuck (or sneaked) down to the river to take a few photos.

Cold Spoon Carving with Plymouth CRAFT

We just finished a 3-day series of spoon carving sessions through Plymouth CRAFT this weekend. https://www.plymouthcraft.org/ I didn’t shoot many photos; so I’ll swipe some from Marie Pelletier. Overbrook is a venue we use a lot, and there’s a wood stove in the dance hall there where we hold some of our classes. Usually, it’s adequate to keep the room comfortable enough to work in. This time – it was tough. But our carvers were tougher…if you count the layers inside my sleeve there – and add the vest, you get an idea of how cold it was on day 3.

The first 2 days were our “usual” class, geared towards beginning spoon carvers.

I had some able assistance from Jay Ketner. Kate here is not as maimed as she looks, she just had a small cut that was in a hard-to-wrap spot.

Then the 3rd day was “advanced” – meaning it was a class for people to fine-tune some of their skills, or spoon design. What it really boils down to is carving spoons from crooks. We had a pile of crooks, mostly large, mostly cherry.  Here’s a normal-sized example.

One of our samples is a new one from Jogge Sundqvist that belongs to Pret & Paula

 

I continue to be amazed at the spoon-carving explosion; and grateful to all the students who keep coming back to us at Plymouth CRAFT. Thanks everyone. Closing with frost on the window, not the pumpkin.

Two boxes for sale

 

Two boxes start off the year for me. I’m about to start a few large projects;  but in cleaning up the shop after delivering the square table I came across some wood that wanted using up. The bottom one is a box made of quartersawn black walnut. The top one a dovetailed box with sliding lid and drawer in catalpa. Both of these boxes are available if anyone would like them. Email me if you’re interested; new address is peterfollansbee7@gmail.com

Both of these showed up on Instagram as I worked them, but I still favor the blog – more room for details and text. I have had the catalpa hanging around as two thin boards for over 2 years. I used some 2 1/2″ thick catalpa when I built the shop, seen here as the carved spandrels around the doors:

CATALPA BOX:  SOLD
5″ high, 6 3/4″ x 15″ overall. White oak bottom; riven, quartered. Drawer is 2″ high.
$600 plus shipping.

The box is loosely based on Scandinavian examples; but only in a very general sense – the carving patterns and the basic format; I never studied any originals in detail. It’s

Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) is a very interesting wood – not native to New England but it grows here easily. Ring-porous; splits easily, very decay resistant. Very light weight. The tiniest band of sapwood in the log. A friend sawed up this log, it was the straightest either of us had ever seen of catalpa. Usually the trunk is curved, twisted, knotty, etc. I think that’s why it’s rarely sawn at all.

I made the sliding lid from the best piece of the batch. But when I got to rabbeting it for the tongues that slide in the box’s grooved sides, I was concerned that it wouldn’t hold up. And I was right. So I made an oak sliding lid, and planed down the catalpa carving and glued it to the lid. Best of both worlds sort of thing.

The drawer is locked by a little ash pin that slips down through a hole in the box front that relates to a hole in the drawer front. There’s a notch in the pin to sneak your fingernail in to slip it up & out.

It was getting pretty dim in the shop when I shot these photos; this is a better representation of the color:

WALNUT BOX:  SOLD
H: 6 1/2″  W: 16 3/4″  D: 12 3/8″
$900 plus shipping.

The walnut one is a pretty straight-forward 17th-century style box. I re-sawed all the walnut from 3 pieces that were 1 1/4″ thick; but nice & straight quartersawn material. I sharpened the saw first. A good way to warm up on a cold morning.

The box is glued & pegged at the corners; the bottom is nailed on. Top is hinged with wooden cleats and pintles. Arcading design on 3 sides; carved, punched & incised decoration on the lid. An ogee across the front edge.

Inside is a till made from walnut, oak & American sycamore. Every piece of wood in this box is quartersawn – except the till bottom, which is better – it’s radially-split oak.

A detail showing the side carving and the lid’s cleat that forms part of the hinge.

Linseed oil finish on both of them, I just need to add a 2nd coat next time I’m in the shop.

A Lego plea

Another rare guest post on my blog. Daniel owes us an update on the wildlife camera, which he swears he’ll do soon. Meanwhile, he & Rose have this to tell you about:

We were waiting to turn 13 so we could enter a product idea to Lego Ideas; a website where you can post a Lego project that you made and that you would want to become an actual Lego set. After you post a product idea, you have 60 days to get 100 supporters and then if it gets that many supporters, you get a year to get 1,000 supporters and so on and ultimately you need 10,000 supporters for your product idea to be reviewed to see if it will become a Lego set.

Our product idea that we submitted to Lego Ideas is Camp Half-Blood from the Percy Jackson, Heroes of Olympus, and Trials of Apollo books by Rick Riordan. Our set idea includes 10 minifigures, 12 cabins, the Big House, a Pegasus, Thalia’s pine tree, and a chariot.

We have 16 days left to get 100 supporters of our idea. We need 76 more supporters to be able to get to the next step, so if anyone in your household likes Lego or Percy Jackson, and if you have time, please look at our product idea at:  https://ideas.lego.com/projects/f80a290b-a3be-4c78-892e-18e1a5c8338e and if you like it you can create a Lego account and support it.

Thank you!.

 

 

Squiggle paint; table done & gone

I shot some photos as I painted the table frame last weekend. Above is a detail of the squiggles; these are based on a table at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; but squiggle painting appears on several pieces of furniture from late in the 17th century. First, I had to alter a brush to make a series of parallel stripes. I just snipped some of the bristles with a tiny pair of scissors. The brush below turned out to be no good, the bristles were too soft, so blended into a solid black line instead of a sequence of lines. But this is the idea. The brush is sitting on a photo showing a detail from the Met’s table.

This time I mixed the dry pigment in thinned hide glue. I needed to keep it warm, if the glue cools it gets too thick to paint with. I ended up with the glue/water/pigment mixture in a small glass jar sitting in dish of very hot water. Worked fine that way.

 

It’s a bit daunting painting this stuff – to look right, it needs a pretty free-hand flair. But it’s scary trying to just wing those curvy lines across all that blank oak. Below you can see the brush I switched to – it’s stiffer so does the trick better. I found I was getting about three passes with each charge of the brush. If I kept going past that point, the paint started to look too thin, instead of a bold vivid black.

The first side of the table was easy, but soon I needed to prop it up so I could get at it, without laying the freshly-painted surface on the floor. I found I could just lean it against the bench and carry on. By the time I was half-done I had the confidence to just paint quickly and freely.

This paint dries very quickly, but I still left it another day before working on it again. Then I installed the top. I set the top in place, adjusted it until I had the overhang the way I wanted it (just-about-even on every side in this case) and then clamped it in place. Then I cut strips of matboard to the same width as the overhang, and laid them on top of the table. This showed me where the stile/frame is. Then I could eyeball boring the holes for the pegs that fasten the top in place. There was too much sun to get a good picture; but you can see the matboard here. The cleats on the ends have not been trimmed yet.

I pegged into each stile, and also one peg in each rail. So eight altogether. With a quartesawn top, I don’t expect much movement, and none of consequence.

I moved the lathe out of the way, so I could shoot this table (& build the bedstead that’s next up for completion).

 

The table top is 43 1/2″ square, and the whole thing is about 29″ high. It’s heavy. Stiles and stretchers are 2 3/4″ square.

Here’s the table and two joined stools that Daniel & I delivered to Cutchogue, Long Island yesterday. These are part of a series of things I’m making for the Old House there. The stools are based on a Long Island example in a private collection. Straight in all views – no canted or raked angles on these stools. Unusual that way.