For my 16th year teaching at Rosewood Studio, in the beautiful town of Perth, Ontario, two classes.

CHAIRS

Chairs are enough of a challenge that many woodworkers avoid building them. So let's be honest, a week class isn’t long enough to complete a chair, at least not one you would be happy with. But we can explore many aspects of making chairs such as comfort, elegance, and strength. 

Your work will be drawing, making parts, and cutting joints for your own prototype chair. My goal is to teach you the necessary skills so that you understand how to go about designing an attractive and comfortable chair, draw it full scale and use that drawing to produce patterns and shape parts, and then engineer and cut durable joints to join it all together.  I want you to know which materials to use, critical dimensions and angles, about steam bending and laminating to make extra strong curved parts, and even about making a seat frame for upholstery. I’ll bring along a started chair and use it to illustrate some of these important ideas.

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Saturday/Sunday June 29/30
DETAILS 201

Let’s assume you know how to make a scratchstock, can make a clean inlaid line (a string inlay), and have some experience with inlaying pieces into a surface. Hopefully you have taken DETAILS 101, but if not we can do a quick refresher before we explore and expand on these basic techniques.

We can try some curves (against a pattern), some new ways to highlight an edge with a diagonal or solid wood inlay, use bone, shell, and metals, and create some fans or other shapes to inlay. We will do a lot with panels inlayed at the top of a leg or into a tabletop, since they are particularly good places to creatively combine different materials. And we could make some complex bandings. There is so much to explore, what are you are curious about? 

We will work almost entirely by hand, so naturally sharpening, tuning, and using hand tools will be an important emphasis. We will make small sample boards to practice designing and using these decorative techniques. Bring along any interesting materials you would like to use, and I’ll have some on hand too.