My last blog post describes the process of making my first ladderback chair from a log. I was inspired and guided by Jenny Alexander’s classic book Make a Chair from a Tree. That book recommends that the tree in question should be a clear and straight-grained log, usually of white oak. In this case I was working with a piece of bigleaf maple that was reasonably straight with some knots and mildly wobbly grain. But ladderbacks are vernacular chairs and they don’t aspire to perfectly clean lines. Besides, bigleaf maple has lots of character. This log had some spalting and a lot of curly grain. Interesting to look at but challenging to work with.

Not all Appalachian ladderbacks have bent back posts. But to my eye the bent posts look better and they are probably more comfortable. The best looking of the bunch is the chair described in Alexander’s book, often referred to simply as the Jennie Chair. That was the chair that I wanted to build. So bent back posts were part of the design brief. I can now say with confidence born of experience that steam bending bigleaf maple is a dumb idea and the odds of success are low. Amid a long string of failures, though, I did have three successful bends. Well, sort of. Two of those posts were a bit short. I broke both on the first attempt but I cut the broken bits off and tried again, this time bending successfully. I could have kept going in an attempt to get the parts I needed for a regular height chair but I decided to use what I had. So this chair was going to be just a bit shorter than the classic Jenny Chair.

Once the steam bending drama was behind me the rest of the process went reasonably well. The classic Jenny Chair has round posts and rungs but for this chair I left those parts octagonal thinking that it might look better given the wobbly grain. I also decided to colour the wood. First with red-tinted oil then with brown linseed wax, leaving the grain and figure showing. This was my second attempt at weaving a chair seat from danish paper cord. That seat is bit better than the first attempt, but still far from perfect.

Bigleaf maple, danish paper cord, pigmented oil, pigmented linseed oil wax, linseed oil.