Cementing an alliance

Last year (that's 2010) I wrote about constructing a stick stool. This is made, of course, of branches. At this time I was on a modern art kick and the stool was deliberately bendy-legged and bent. It's in the blog archives for July 24, 2010.
I repeat the picture here for context.

OK, Houston, we have a frame. But we need a seat. There are kinds of materials available. For instance there is hickory bast. None available for 4,000 Km, however. There is Shaker tape, advocated by Jennie Alexander, who I have mentioned before. But it occurred to me that I could use the humble blue jean material. If there is a country that does not covet blue jeans, I haven't heard of it. "Ubiquitous" is the word. So I went to the thrift store, found a pair of jeans, deconstructed them, and cut 5 cm wide strips. Then I hemmed them on the sewing machine, an ordeal, and thus the title of this post.
Here, a couple of completed strips. I am sewing the strip to the frame, looping underneath the frame. Tedious but doable. Sewing by hand. I see no way to put the whole stool under a sewing machine. And I have a little hand-held jobby picked up cheap. It won't fit.

So when we do the analysis, in our best managerial style, of this highly labor-intensive project, the bind -- the critical path, in managerspeak -- is making the strips. It is easy to cut them. Hemming them is the real bind. I am far from an experienced sewer. I had to bend the hem over, press it with a hot iron, and pin it with what seemed like a Kilo of pins. And then I had to sew it on the machine and take out all those pins. Half of them went on the floor. Then I had to pick them up... and now I have set the stage for the title of this post.

In the interval between 2010 and now, I had become acquainted with some marvellous gunk called fabric cement. This is super-glue for cloth (it also works on leather). It will glue fabric together wihout the benefit of stiching. So I had a plan. Do the hem with fabric cement, then sew it up. That will save the pinning, the ironing, the fingers, the trips to the floor to pick up pins, and frustration in general. Much to my surprise the plan worked.
But all was not perfect. The hem, which is much too narrow (I was obsessed with saving material at the time) tends to undo itself. Aha! Lady's Curler Clips (see post entitled Hold it! ) to the rescue. The world owes an enormous debt to curler clamps. I just have to get more. Observe the bottle of fabric cement. Another great modern invention. It is quite possible, if you believe the manufacturer's claim, that you could do the seat on a stool or chair without sewing a stich. But from long experience I am a bit doubtful about manufacturer's claims in general. And here's the current State of the Seat speech, er, picture.
Next job is to go to our trusty Singer Spartan sewing machine, made in Canada in 1954 (I was able to track it down on the 'net.). It sews a straight lockstich. That is all it will do. This is exactly what I do 99.99% of the time. It is indestructible and mostly it puts up with me. And I with it. A working relationship, indeed.
It is very difficult for me to operate this machine. For one thing, the foot switch tends to go immediately to full throttle and the machine runs away from me. This may be just the age of the machine. But I fixed it by putting a thick wad of cloth under the accelerator pedal. But also the strips are very narrow -- less than 5 cm in fact. So if you look at the feed dogs on the machine, the little toothed thingies that feed the fabric into the machine, you will see that they are something like 5 cm apart. So one of the dogs can't grip. Hence the strip tends to skew itself and you have to apply manual feedback. My seams are erratic. But I did it. The whole sewing operation took about 20 minutes on the cemented-down seams. No pins, no iron. And for posterity, here's the last seam.

Sewing machines are marvellous contraptions. This post is already much too long; but I refer you to the Wikipedia article on sewing machine history, well worth the reading, with some fascinating animations. Used sewing machines are very cheap. Mine cost $30 and it is an "antique," hence more expensive. Usually all that used machines need is oiling and putting the needle in the right way. For this you need the instructions. I think that Singer has the instructions for every model it ever made online. You will need instructions to thread it correctly and wind the bobbin. It is interesting to me that the instructions for their 1899 model and my machine are identical!

If you buy a used machine, be sure that you can find instructions for it online, or elsewhere. Without instructions the machine is of no use at all, unless you are a mechanical genius.

Stick Chair , more alder fantasies

Having done two stools, I thought I was ready for a chair. So, here beginneth the episode of the alder chair. I selected some alder. Now alder, I have remarked, is remarkably strong. But is is never, never, straight. Well, I thought, there is worse than that masquerading as "sculpture" in the MOMA.
Here the back legs are held in an invaluable "Alexander jig," a birdsmouth thing tensioned by rope and toggle. It allows you to rotate the legs till you get the desired effet. I am getting ready to drill the holes to connect to the front ones. Doing that gives us...
The next step is to connect front and back legs with rungs. I had just pruned my lilac tree (too big to call a "bush") so why not use it for rungs? Above you see Mr Chair still in his jig, with lilac rungs, ready for the next step. To wit, now mark out and drill the holes for the cross-rungs, joining across the two sides. Then we tap (actually, pound) the whole thing together with a mallet. Now, if I've done my job right, I've shaved the rungs to a "white knuckle" fit in the hole. So they won't go in very far. Just as with the stool, we subject Chair to torture. We have ways...
After sufficient moral persuasion is applied (the turn of the screw, as it were) Chair allows as how he will fit. Love the scritch sound of mortise going into tenon. Hate the cracking sound that means it split. I had to remake one front leg, split at the top. You can see I have started to put in the back supports, also lilac. I took pictures as I remembered, not as I should for a real tutorial. (I have yet to figure out all the modes on my new camera. Nikon supplies the user's guide on CD. This may save Nikon money, but it means I have to go through a rigamarole to read the user's guide. )

And finally...
In retrospect, I should have looked at it more closely when it was in its jig. The back is crooked. Well, it's all crooked! Meant to be. Art is neither straight nor square. I'll let it dry out a while, then rack it some more. Torture solves some problems, all right. But it is the first stick chair I ever made; indeed the first chair period. So cut me some slack; remember the Guggenheim has some strange things indeed in it. And we learn more from mistakes than we do from successes.

Stick Furniture, part I

OK, Blogger, I am seriously annoyed with you. Your unspeakable user interface deleted my entire last post. So I have to put it in all again from scratch. Your wonderful autosave feature autosaved the last word I typed in. And only the last word. Maybe you can split the blame with Firefox, but I wish you would stop fiddling with designer templates and get what you have working properly. I would trade every "improvement" you have made for the ability to insert an image where the cursor is! And don't tell me it's JavaScript's fault.

End of rant. Grrr. Anyway, stick furniture is furniture made out of branchwood, as opposed to stuff riven or sawed out of trees. I have loads and loads of alder that I accumulated when I cleared out the pasture. So, I thought, why not make a stick stool? Start simple, I thought. A stool. Four legs, eight rungs. How simple can you get? Now, you can find alder in any shape you can imagine, except straight. No such thing as straight alder. But that's OK, I thought. It will be artistic. Furniture as nature designed it. Guggenheim, here I come. Alder Fantasies. The next Alaskan dream!

So I hauled some alder from my brushpiles, cut four legs and eight rungs, onto the shaving horse, peel, and shave the ends of the rungs to a very tight fit on a hole drilled with a 15 bit. I think that's 15/16 inch in RGU, about 24mm. So assemble two legs and two rungs. Tap them in with a homemade mallet. You will find they only go in so far. So, as Darth Spader might say, "we have ways of making rebel rungs fit."
This is the torture rack. The Geneva convention says nothing about alder, so tough luck, Alder. Clamped to the trusty Workmate is a pipe clamp, acquired for a couple bucks at a yard sale (the pipe was a found item). I should make a fixture to hold the pipe in the workmate. Mañana perhaps. Anyway, you put the stool in the pipe clamp and turn the screw firmly. There is a wonderful scritch sound, and the rung slides about 5mm into the hole. Repeat with the other rung. Try to keep things square. I didn't. Bad on me. We learn, though.

To the right of the torture rack, we have the orange-topped story stick. This is a stick which records leg lengths, rung lengths, hole heights and diameters. Once you have built a stick, you need no other measuring instument. Big time-saver. Also to the right, two more legs awaiting torture.

Next episode in the tale is related in part in the post entitled "Invasion!" The kids wanted to help. So I had them peel and shave the remaining rungs. They were too loose a fit. I know, I should have checked. But with eight kids loose, just you try supervising anything! Anyway, the next step is to assemble (mallet) and rack the whole stool:You rack the thing until it is square. In stick furniture, there are no right angles and no straight lines, so it's all eyeball. The picture is of the second stool I made using the lessons learned from the first (and without kids to distract me).

Credit time. The racking procedure is covered in Mike Abbot's Living Wood book and Jennie Alexander's How to Make a Chair from a Tree DVD. Google them. Mr Alexander recently changed his name; formerly John Alexander; Google may not find anything under Jennie.

So what became of the first stool? Well, we put a top on it, and two little girls carried it off to their clubhouse!
It did not occur to me at the time, but an adult stool is perfectly adequate as a little girl's clubhouse table.