Spinning Chairs to Study –
To develop a good eye for chairmaking (or spoon carving or alligator wrestling), you need to study as many chairs as possible. Do it until your eyes glaze over.
Here’s a set of nice “Spinnstuhls” compiled by Rudy Everts in Bavaria. These so-called sewing chairs are from southern Germany and the Alps. These chairs are interesting to me in several ways. Some have a traditional undercarriage for chairs from this region – radical rake and splay, legs that taper to the floor, battens to thicken the seat – but some do not.
Check out the bent legs on a couple examples. A good guess is these came from a bent section of the tree, perhaps a branch or from the root section of a trunk.
Also, the variety of uppercarriages is fascinating. Some are joined, some look sawn from solid and some look bent.
Look through the gallery. Zoom in. Class dismissed.
— Christopher Schwarz
