The ease of the instructions was misleading!

One of our first purchases that my wife and I made was a set of four kitchen chairs to go around an antique table that her aunt had restored and given to us as a house warming gift. That was over thirty years ago and although the maple ladder chairs have now low luster sheen from their years of wear, the seats, of woven rush have deteriorated.
Two boys, countless spilled glasses of milk, cups of coffee, years of dropped food, have turned the golden brown colour of rush to a filthy grayish black. The seats were covered with seat cushions that restored a soft mound to sit on.

Yet even then the some of the strands of rush had broken from constant wearing and we faced the choice of either throwing away those maple chairs or restoring the seats.

The decision was reached at Christmas that, that something had to be done. It was either new chairs or new seats.
A search of the Internet helped us buy a book on weaving chair seats. Then about two weeks ago we ordered the rush. The book said that you could reweave a chair in a couple of hours. Like all instructions about ease, the time was misleading. And when it was suggested a single person could do the work, I took it as fact.
The “rush” arrived for family weekend and my wife proudly told me that it would be a good family project for the long weekend. Little did she realize that it would take all three days to weave those four chairs.
Marnie began Saturday morning by cutting each individual strand with a pair of scissors. It left a big mess in our family room. When it came time for the second chair, I took it to the workshop and cut the strands with my serrated “Leatherman knife”. It was much simpler and cutting around all four sides the old seat then dropped to the floor where it could be picked up as one woven piece.

The four rails holding the weaving of the first chair sure looked naked. The experiment was under way. And I think at that moment we began to realize that the project was much bigger than we expected. It took until mid afternoon to finish that first chair. Our hands were red, dried and sore from all the stretching a pulling of the rush to keep the weave tight and square. And without the two of us working together on every corner and turn, the seats would still be needing repair. The idea that a single person could do the job was clearly misleading.
The chair wasn’t perfect, but Marnie and I had danced around that chair 25 times and wound out over 200 feet of rush. We were excited by how good it looked. The new golden seat gave new life to the chair and we had a rush of pride in our accomplishment.
Then we were on to chair number two. Our speed improved dramatically. It only took us three hours to finish the second. We were exhausted.

We began again mid Sunday morning. It was pretty evident that once the rush was removed, that all the glued joints had dried out. And so was the case of the fourth chair. Both required being pulled apart, being glued and then clamped. That took most of Sunday.
The chairs are now back under the table with new golden seats. Our lower backs are a little sore. We’ll wait until warmer weather to put the two coats of shellac of the chairs so that they can dry in the garage. The chairs look almost as good as when they first arrived. Well, the weave isn’t as straight but if they can last for another 25 years this family weekend will have been worth it.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher