yolandeds
I agree with woofwoof. If you've seen this man's work and you like it, have him weave your chair seat. This type of seat takes a LOT of practice to get right. As I said, I've done mine five times now and it's still not as good as the original. I do a great job at other weaves, but this one is very difficult and is worth having a pro do it.
There's a woman in my area who has been doing woven seats of all types professionally for many years and even she says this is difficult to do. She has her husband help her by pulling the cord taut at the corners. I'll probably have her re-do my Wegner rocker someday.
Once you're in NZ, get some chairs with the other style of weave and have fun learning that. It's easy and very satisfying.
Ben R
The Wegner CH 27 has a woven rattan seat and back, doesn't it? I don't think they were ever woven with paper cord, though I have a nagging feeling that we've had a discussion about this before on this forum. Maybe it was another chair.
You should be able to get rattan. And though I haven't woven one of these seats before, I have worked with rattan on similar projects and it's not hard to do. Rattan isn't expensive and you can't damage the chair frame by trying to redo it. Might be worth a shot...?
Looks like rattan.
Beautiful chair!
http://www.modernity.se/20th-Century-Design/Hans-Wegner/ArtID/1681/Easy-...
CH27 by Hans Wegner
Hello Ben:
I have a pair of this CH27 and they need restoration. Even though, they were originally made with rattan i want to try to restore them with paper cord also. Have you started the weaving already? if so any photo or advise would be more than appreciated.
Regards
Mata
Spanky, thanks for the...
Spanky, thanks for the close-up.
The vertical back pieces are just cord. I'm curious about the weaving around this area. I have a feeling there is something going on to allow the horizontals to make a 180 and wrap back around the front so the strands can be continuous (might be something behind the vertical strands). I'd like to try this on one of my chairs (normally binder cane), I'm hoping to figure out how the CH25 is done.
Thank You
I came across your directions a few months ago when I needed to reweave some Moller chairs. It was amazing and so helpful, much more then the books I bought. I was looking for an e-mail link so that I could thanks you earlier, I just came across this. THANK YOU!!!
Now I need your expertise for the Wegner Wishbone chair. It's a very difficult chair to reweave and I am approaching it blind because I haven?t been able to find instructions for this particular chair.
I know you want to post instructions for this, here is the perfect opportunity. LOL
Wishbone chairs
The seats on Wishbone chairs are just as simple a weave but much, much harder to do well. As mentioned above, I've rewoven the seat of my Wegner rocker at least three times and it still looks like crap. I've done this weave in seagrass on some Mogensen chairs and it was a lot easier, but seagrass stretches with use and anyway, it wasn't what Wegner used on the Wishbones or rocker. Rush (paper or natural) may work better, but again, not what Wegner used.
The problem is that papercord is stiff and you need something soft and flexible to do all the 90 degree bends in this weave. It might help to soak it first. I tried that and it helped but I still couldn't get the perfect 90 degree accuracy. Maybe I didn't soak it long enough...? I seem to remember that there was a fine line between soaking just enough and soaking a little too long---like the cord started to disintegrate when too wet. It's been awhile and I don't remember the details.
The other tricky thing is getting the four lines of intersections (?) straight and true. For some reason that I don't understand, two come out very nicely and the other two are invariably crooked. The photo here is of rush fiber, which is more forgiving than papercord. The uneven intersections would be much more noticeable if this were done in papercord. (The unevenness is all on the left side of the chair seat and it's not even that bad. Mine looked much worse, even after I'd had some practice.)
Anyway, good luck if you attempt this. And please report back! I'm thinking about giving my rocker another go but I'm also really tempted to just pay the local expert to do it (probably $150 minimum).
Thanks for the input. I?m...
Thanks for the input. I'm going to try in a few days. Last night when I did it and shamed myself to myself I also had a difficult time figuring out the actual pattern as the Wishbone chair is woven differently then other chairs with the same basic pattern. The pattern I came up with looks correct to me but I just can?t tell as the chairs I?m re-canning were re-caned incorrectly some years back so I have no frame of reference. I would draw out the pattern I used but then I would shame myself again.
This is a place I just came...
This is a place I just came across that also carries Danish cord and nails. They have genuine Danish nails for a pretty good price. About $8 per 100. caning.com
Edit: It appears this place is run by one of the co-authors of "The Caner's Handbook", Jim Widess
http://www.caning.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=C...
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