Pizza and a hand made chair

Recently, we were having pizza (and a glass of wine) at the local winery when an email pinged into my inbox.  I resisted the temptation to look at it there and then, but instead resolved to look at it later as I was, at that moment outside  admiring at the owners 1974 blue Rolls Royce, which was parked out in the rambling grounds of the winery.  He very kindly allowed me to take it out for a spin, so I did. Carefully…

I do feel quite like an east end villain enjoying the spoils of my last ‘blag’

Not only does the winery do a very nice glass of sauvignon blanc but they make lovely pizzas in a enormous Italian oven that quite literally fell off the back of a lorry.  Apparently the leg of the oven had broken ‘beyond economical repair’ according to the insurers and the new owner acquired it for a fraction of its new price. The new supports for the oven didn’t look great and so it was bricked into the corner, where it does sterling service.

The pizza oven – boxy, but good… 

After lunch, I managed to check the email whilst sitting near the house greyhounds, who roam free through the dining area.  They are rescue dogs, who otherwise would have been put down and with the exception of “Psycho” who is wearing the blanket like a shawl, they are very good natured animals.

This sofa is not for sharing – dogs only…

The email was from Rundell & Rundell, the Kyneton company who had arranged the ‘lost trades fair’ I attended some time before.  I’d signed up
for a chair making course in the hope that a place would eventually become available. Lisa, the lady jointly in charge of the business and of taking bookings told me that there was quite a waiting list, but that she’d add me to it.

The email said that there was a cancellation, the first in around five years and could I get there the next week.  Yes!  I said, clearly not working out the logistics properly as I was in Singapore at the time.  My domestic suggestion that I would be coming home for the week to see them all and that I’d be making a chair whilst there was quickly seen through and it was pointed out that I was coming back to make a chair and that I might see them all whilst there.  Point made and taken.

Kyneton is a bit of a drive from home and so Mrs Jerry researched some B&B’s and motels in the area.  Sadly, the prices were around $200 plus for a night, so that was a non starter, I therefore persuaded Scarlett, my 1970 MG roadster to take me there on an almost daily basis.  She didn’t mind the cold mornings and with only one tyre blowout, she faithfully carried both me and ‘Q’, a local farmer, who was also attending the course, along the country roads and through the tiny villages that must have been social centres during the gold and wool rushes.

On the way – an autumn morning in the lovely hamlet of Glenlyon

The countryside here is remarkably English in appearance, but it’s obviously not England as the mobs of Kangaroos standing around in the fields demonstrate.  I love the cold misty mornings with the top down on the car (Scarlett’s roof is full of holes and so drafty that it feels just the same with the roof on or off!)  It’s funny how a car can make you happy though.  Driving her on days like that just makes me smile.

Delinquent sheep mugging a farmer 

I have to confess to have been a complete woodworking dunce at school.  Well, perhaps not a dunce, but I was certainly too busy acting out to have paid enough attention to the rules and niceties of working with wood.  Over the years I have turned my hand to making shelves, boxes, kennels and parrot stands, with varying degrees of success.  To be honest, my earnest efforts could have best described as ‘rustic’ and driven more by necessity than a genuine desire to create something unique and long-lasting.

The course I was about to embark upon was seven days long and was advertised as teaching a person how to make an heirloom wooden chair in the traditional way.   The kind of chair I was intending to make is known as a Windsor chair or ‘double bow’ named for the two bow shaped pieces of wood used in its construction – it’s a British chair, but one that is also known as a ‘sackback’ chair in the United States.  

The yanks named the chair for the burlap (or hessian) sack that they slung over the back of the chair to keep the draught away from the sitters body in the old houses.  When I first looked at the chair, I wasn’t sure how comfortable it could be, but I was pleasantly surprised when I sat in one.

The essence of traditional chair building is that you make everything by hand, use no electrical tools and certainly no sandpaper, because they didn’t exist back in the eighteenth century, but I have to admit that the legs were turned on a lathe and I used a power drill, for the angled holes.  Curved pieces of wood, such as the bows, have to be steamed and bent by hand, much in the same way that they would have been well over two hundred years ago.

Bending the top bow – fresh out of the steamer

Due to that lack of sandpaper, traditional tools such as draw knives, scrapers and travisher’s are used to shape and smooth the green and unseasoned wood.  

My Fijian mahogany seat, part way through being ‘dished’ and trimmed.

There are several parts to the sack back chair; the legs, the seat, the bows and the spindles.  In order to work the green wood for the spindles, it’s best to use it when it has been soaked for a couple of days and then cut into staves, around half a metre long.  There is a device known as a shave chair, which looks a bit like a cross between a ‘steam punk’ rocking horse and a medieval torture device.  The shave chair helps you grip pieces of wood while you are working them between a leather padded jaw and using a traditional draw knife, shape the wood to your needs.

Sitting at the shave chair, my position for several hours a day.  My ‘under construction’ chair is next to me. 

The thought of creating something literally from green wood was something that I relished, but at the same time, worried me because the thought of using such fine motor skills or truthfully, finding such skills in the first place was a little daunting, because my hands are to woodworking what boxing gloves are to flower arranging.   The traditional draw knives and spoke shaves felt very strange to me but even for a woodworking duffer like me, under the careful tutelage of the instructors Glenn and Peter, I soon got the hang of them. I did discover that I seem to suffer from a condition called ‘grain blindness’ (not recognised by the British Medical Association) – thats not something to do with home made alcohol, it’s just that I seem to have an issue with recognising which way the wood grain runs, not something that aids a woodworker, so things tend to take a bit longer than they might for other more able chair makers.

Drilling the back bow.  Note the mirror for checking the angle of the drill.  

Glancing around the workshop at my fellow trainee chair makers and seeing that they were all moving along much more quickly than I was, I couldn’t help but feeling  that I really could have done with an electric sander, but that just wouldn’t have been in the spirit of things.  I think that perhaps I could have made a small fortune selling small squares of #220 grit sandpaper though…

Everyday at around ten o’clock, Mrs Rundell came around to the workshop with freshly made cakes but one day, some fantastic home made doughnuts and jam appeared.  Her son Tom had knocked them up for us that morning and they were still warm when we fell upon them like hyena’s on an unattended fresh kill.

Warm doughnuts and strawberry jam – it doesn’t get much better than that.

Fuelled up by the excellent snacks, I got back to the pleasurable work of assembling the various parts of my chair.  Some fine tuning was needed to make sure that everything fitted as it should and muttered curses could be heard from more than one of us as we struggled to fit the spindles into the top bow.  Once we were all happy, we warmed up the traditional brown glue (allegedly made from cow lips and a**eholes) and sparingly dabbed the parts before fitting them together.

It was at this stage when I learned the meaning of bodging. Apparently skilled itinerant tradesmen in the Chilterns (a beautiful area of England) who used to turn chair legs using a bent sapling to power a lathe were known as ‘chair bodgers’ so, ‘bodging something together’ wasn’t originally a pejorative term, but when used to describe my earlier attempts at woodworking, it certainly could have been.

The very cool sapling lathe.  Note the beard required to operate one.

As I had seen at the lost trades fair, there was a whole subculture of traditional artisans who built stone walls, tanned and tooled leather, smithed metal and worked wood and as they called into the workshop to say hello, they looked the part too.  Beards seemed standard, as were sturdy boots and checked shirts.  The beard was sadly beyond me, but for a week, I got to be a small part of the community.  

The finished article – back at home

At the end of my seven days, I really felt that I had achieved something.  Because I wanted to get home, I missed the end of course cheese and wine party, but sitting at home on my handmade chair more than made up for that.