There are a few particular projects that I believe every fine furniture maker needs to design and craft at some point, the two that come most immediately to mind are a music stand and a chair. All of my favorite makers have done this and so I felt that I ought to begin my process. A few months ago I made the music stand and it came out great -- so I felt ready to step it up. The chair unlike the music strand needs to not only be functional and beautiful, it needs to be comfortable.
I bought and studied dozens of books on chairs and spent a couple of years planning and strategizing, then finally began the build a few months ago. After laying out my principles and intentions, I made dozens of designs, lots of models, and a few cardboard prototypes. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic and scarcity of resources, I couldn't make a plywood prototype. But also, because the design had all these bent elements -- it seemed like more work to build a prototype than just build the chair. So I just built the chair and figured if it all went south, I could use the bent elements for a table or stool or something. The experience was riddled with a multitude of the challenges, experiments, and discoveries -- but ultimately it came out pretty much exactly like I had drawn it months earlier and much more comfortable than I predicted it would. Not a bad work for a first chair. Walnut. Maple. Leather.
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