Wegner Wishbone Chair Restoration  

Fuming is the term -- I tried it once but didn't get much of a color.  The books say that the makers put a pile of oak furniture under a tarred cloth tent, with open dishes of ammonia.  How long it was left to work I don't know.  I spoke to someone making reproduction Stickley chairs and he said he did it, but augmented the color by means unknown.
"Staining" is what many laymen say, when they mean any kind of finishing, I find.  It appears that staining is an indispensible part of furniture finishing, to many ?  Decorators certainly take it for granted.  I try not to think of myself as a wood snob, but finding the right material and clear finishing it seems both easier and more desirable, to me.  Those producing furniture in quantity would be excused from agreeing !
 
The tobacco (?) color of those oak chairs is certainly lovely -- and indispensable for an Arts and Crafts interior.  A guy I worked for had a prototype table in his office, of the most remarkable dusty rose color. He said it was ash, with no finish whatsoever -- just time.  I wondered what it would look like with a clear finish . . .

tchp, I had one of those chairs too---it had been painted and I got it at a yard sale for $4.  I stripped it and found the Stickley mark on it.  Unfortunately the chair had an old repair that had not been done very well.  I eventually sold it on ebay to some guy who was excited about fixing it correctly.  
I had a fumed oak desk once, too--really nicely made and the color was very, very dark.  I got it when I graduated from college---$60 in a junky antique store in NYC.  Those were the days.
Leif, nice work on the repairs!  How did you get the weave to end up like that in the center, though??  Every Wishbone I've ever woven--or seen, for that matter--has had about 1 3/4" in the center where the strands go from front to back only, not the whole cirucit.  

Spanky: no idea how I pulled that off.  There are maybe 4 strands of the usual front to back figure-eight weaving.  But it is packed in there so tight I couldn't put any more if I tried..  I was expecting an inch of so of it.  But that is how it turned out.  It is a nice effect though, with the diagonals meeting in the middle.  

Huh.  I think you would have had to pack the cord way tighter on the front and back than on the sides (or maybe the other way around) to end up like that, but it doesn't look that much different in the photo.  
I noticed you have an extra wrap or two on the front ends of the side rungs--was there a reason for that?  It's not enough to result in the center ending up in four points.  I just noticed it and wondered about it.  
Oh...also looks like you have more than the usual 13 or so wraps on each end of the front rail?  Maybe that's the answer?  

On the Stickley tangent, a few months before I left Massachusetts for the Left Coast I found a handsome L & JG Stickley rocker, sitting in the rain in front of a junk shop/antique store in Plymouth.  I rescued it (without seat) for $25.  After it sat in my living room for a couple of weeks, and dried out, the joints predictably loosened.  Intending to restore or at least renew it, I proceeded to attempt disassembly.  Partially disassembled, it came with me across the continent in a car.  It hung in pieces in my garage for years, as I did other things with my time.  Finally, forced by a nervous landlord to clear the gararge, I gave up on it.
The crest rail had dozens of nail holes where someone had attached a pillow; the rockers were  checked.  I was, nevertheless, sorry to see it go.  Some of you go-getters would have had it done in a couple of weeks, I'm sure . . .

Poor chair!  Mine was also the "other" Stickley, as I recall.  And  now that I think about it, it didn't have the same seat as thcp's above--it had round rungs meant for a rush seat and one of them was broken.  Thanks to the pegs going through all the tenons on the rails below the seat, I could not knock the joints apart to replace the broken rung.  It also had a weird, long, lengthwise split on one back post.  I remember being very puzzled about that and the guy who bought it had a lot of questions about it, too.  
What a handsome chair, though.  I wish I'd had the skills to finish restoring it.