Some Chair Repair

We bought this pretty little side chair from a country auction house on our way back from dropping our son at summer camp several summers back. The wicker seat soon needed to be replaced. A couple of years ago in a burst of pre-Passover energy, I attempted to re-cane the chair. While doing the re-caning I soon realized why it is so expensive to have chairs re-caned. my not terribly good job began to fall apart.

Amazon.com Widgets

A recent sleepless night yielded a solution to the problem of what to do about the pretty little chair. I am now the owner of lots of spools of ribbon. I decided to weave a new seat out of ribbon.

It was a few hours of work, but it was far less hard on the hands than the cane. The ribbon does not have to be soaked in warm water to become flexible.

I was trying to figure out where I had gotten the idea of using ribbon to weave a seat and I guess it must be Shaker chairs.

I was so inspired by my success that I decided to try my hand on another chair that was in need of help.

I had bought this chair on Craigslist a few years back. The caning was already a bit saggy. despite several fixes, it was time to do a more serious repair.

First I cut away all of the cane.

Then I began weaving. I used a different weaving pattern than on the previous chair.I switched colors to amuse myself as I worked.

After a couple of hours, I ended up with this.

A chair strong enough to sit on.

Well, if this improvised bit of craftsmanship isn't impressive enough for you here are some details of a townhouse pair I passed yesterday just a bit downtown from my house.

It is so nice to see the level of workmanship possible back in the days when labor was cheap.

Comments

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog