Gluing a chair together

Well, here is the promised step by step photo tutorial on how to glue a chair together, for more information on how I made the parts, go to my side bar and click on Gothic Chippendale chair under the labels heading.

 I always start with the back leg assembly, I made a jig by cutting a piece of scrap wood to the inside shape between the back legs to help keep the angle of the legs correct while gluing. I then cut two pieces of wood and glued them in place horizontally to help keep the back seat rail and the stretcher 90 degrees with the legs.

A side view.

Once the glue was dry, I moved the back leg assembly over to another jig, here I am gluing the crest rail to the back splat. There are pieces of scrap wood under the bottom part of the back splat to lift it up to the same level as the seat rail. Next to the jig you can see one finished. Now was the time to do all the carving on the back splat and crest rail.

I then put the back legs back into the first jig and glued in the shoe where the back splat fits into.

After all the carving were finished I glued the back splat into the shoe and the crest rail to the top of the legs, a few rubber bands are keeping it together while the glue dries, remember these joints are all mortise and tenon joints.

Next I moved on to the front leg assembly and here are the only two straight forward 90 degree joints in the whole chair. I cut a scrap piece of wood to keep the front legs at a proper 90 degrees while the glue dried.

Here I am gluing the side seat rails into the front legs at an angle, the legs are butting up to the front of the jig to keep it square in relation to the seat rails.

I then put the front legs in place on the back legs and glued in the support piece where the upholstery fits in. This is the bottom view.

Because the sides of the chair is very thin and there is no place for the clamps to really hold, I cut another piece of scrap wood to fill in the space where the cushion will eventually go in to give the clamps a firm hold. This piece of scrap was used in the rest of the gluing process.

The next step was to glue in all the stretchers, in order to ensure that the stretchers were glued in exactly the same distance from both the floor and the seat rails I once again (yes, you guessed right) cut another piece of scrap wood to keep the spacing correct.

View from the bottom, I glued this in two steps, first just one of the sides stretchers and once that was dry the middle stretcher and the second side stretcher. At this stage I am only gluing the stretchers into the front legs as I still wanted to be able to have the back legs free for cutting the slots for the arm rests.

A set of arm stumps and arm rests pinned into place on the pattern while the glue dries.

And finally the front leg assembly and back legs are glued together. The same spacer woods are used again, here you can see there is a thinner piece just under the seat rails, this is to keep the back and side seat rails at the same level all around, if it goes slightly out in this step, your whole chair will be sloping over to one side.

Lastly the arm rests were glued onto the two carver chairs, here a few Lego blocks with a piece of scrap wood keeps the arm rests leaning out at the correct angle. And how do I keep the bottom of the arm stumps in place against the seat rail, holding it with my fingers for a few minutes, there is just no place for any clamps.

Now the arm rests just need a nice bit of shaping and all the chairs a finish. Stay tuned for the last post on these chairs sometime early next week.

Have a great weekend.
Elga

Stitching for the Casket

After a month of first truck driver strikes and then postal strikes that halted postal delivery for more than 3 weeks, some long awaited parcels are slowly trickling in. Last Friday brought one that I really was longing for, 90 count silk gauze that I was hoping to use for stitching the casket panels, depending on whether I could see it. The good news is that I can see the gauze or more importantly the holes quite well with my combination of glasses and magnifier lamp.

I spend the last few days stitching a small piece from the chart just to see which combination of threads would work the best and I am pretty pleased with the results.

Believe it or not but there are 930 stitches in that tiny piece, I am thinking of making a small trinket box and putting this little piece in a recess on the lid. The eyes are French knots and the mouth a back-stitch that I added after the petit point was finished. And in case you can't figure it out, it is a lady in her tent, actually to be precise Potifpar's wife from the Old Testament story of Josef, I have always liked that story and decided to stitch it as close as possible to the original casket in the MET museum, you can see the full scale casket back here.

And here you can see where it will be more less in the final piece of stitching on the back of the casket. I was pleasantly surprised that it took me only about 6 hours to stitch, that is 150 stitches per hour, I thought it would take much longer.

Elga

Arm Rests for the Chippendale Chair

When I made the first batch of chairs I never showed you how I made the arm rests, I am almost finished with an order of six of them and thought I would show you how I made the arm rests.

First of all 5 of the chairs, at this stage the front leg assembly is still not glued into the back legs.

Here you can see the jig for the arm stumps, the tricky part was cutting away the wood on the blank where it  joins onto the side of the chair rail, it needed to be at an angle and cut away before I pin-routed the final shape. I marked the line on the jig with a permanent marker and then worked out the angle.

I then cut a scrap piece of wood with that angle and placed it in the back of my drill press, I positioned the cutter for the final length of the cut out and then cut away little slivers at a time until the wood hit the stop in the groove on the drill press table. In the photo you can see the blackwood piece is still being cut while the mopane one in the front has been cut all the way.

Of course half of the arms needed to be a mirror image, so after I cut half of my blanks I flipped the angled piece of wood over and positioned it in the left corner of the drill press.

Next I pin-routed out the shapes, forgetting to take photos, oh well, here is one finished and glued to the arm rest just to show you how the line I drew on the jig lines up with the cutout on the arm stump. One thing I had to remember to do, was to cut half of the blanks with the cutout facing up and the other half with the cutout facing down in order to get a left and a right arm stump.

And in this photo you can see why I kept those funny little ears on the crest rail of the chair, I needed them so that I could put the chair back squarely onto the table of the drill press while cutting the slot in the back legs where the arm rest fits in.

The funny little ears are gone now! I am planning on scrutinizing my carving on the back again, sanding the back where needed, then gluing in the front leg assembly and then do the final fitting of the arm rest, it needs a bit of fine-tuning. Sometime next week I will do a step by step post on gluing this chair together which needed careful thinking out because of all the angles, there are only two 90 degree joints in this chair.

Enjoy the weekend.
Elga

The Sampler is finished.

Doing the last two motifs didn't take too long, so the sampler is finished, well almost, it still needs a frame, will see if I can make that over the weekend, I have the perfect piece of wood with a very small grain pattern that I think will look great for a frame.

The sampler lying on top of the magazine page.

And a close-up, I am very pleased with my first charting efforts, but this is not as easy as it might look, I have gained a new respect for people that makes charts for miniature embroidery.

Elga

Portrait Miniature

I knew there was an antique fair in Johannesburg today, but kind of pushed it out of my mind. At around noon hubby came back from a camp he went on over the weekend and asked if I felt like going out for a bit, so I said yes, I won't mind a quick walk through the fair, they do finish at two. Well, am I ever so glad for that suggestion, just look what I found.

A miniature portrait of apparently Mary Queen of Scots painted in the late 1800's, I got her for a very reasonable price, I think because of the damaged ivory frame, pieces on the edges are missing or badly cracked and also peeling off. She only measures 55mm by 45mm (2 1/8" by 1 3/4") together with the small inner brass frame. With the outer frame it is a bit big for a dollhouse, so I am thinking of trying to save the inner ivory oval frame and re-framing that part and then save the other bits of ivory for a nice little box, the dark parts of the frame looks like tortoiseshell to me.

Hope you all had as good a Sunday as I did with this nice little surprise.
Elga

Sampler Update

The sampler has grown quite a bit since you last saw it.

I have just the second bird, butterfly, bottom corner and side border left to do.

A close-up.

And here you can see some of my charting efforts, the letters were an interesting mix of styles, some round and others sharp, most notable on the rounded V and W, but sharp M and N. In the beginning I planned on just using the more rounded letters but later decided to change the M and N to look more like the original sampler, I ended up by just writing on the graph paper and then filling in the stitches until I was happy with the look.

The roses was a bit more complicated, I drew one on the graph full size and then scaled it down (this is also the way I scaled the cat down), but realized that there were too many petals on the rose to successfully down scale it, so I went to my stack of embroidery books and searched until I found some good looking roses that were more or less the size I needed.

I then positioned the roses on my chart, added in a few dots for the rosebuds and then copied the roses into a computer charting program where I could see it in color and started adding leaves, which took me quite awhile until I was happy with them, keeping in the back of my mind that it needs to be a contained in a circle, some of my leaves went right past the boundaries of the circle and then I had to redo them until they fitted. You can see the printout of the roses and leaves in the previous photo.

If any of you want to try this, first decide on how big you want your embroidery to be when finished, work out a stitch count and then, well just play around on a piece of graph paper. It does take time and even in stitching I noticed a few things that I wanted to change, so here and there I had to unpick and start over again, but in the end, well worth the effort I think.

Elga

A Birthday and another Box

Yesterday my husband and I went to a small town, Clarens, a 3 hour drive away from the city to celebrate my birthday. Clarens is well known in South Africa for both it's natural beauty and art galleries, and since my birthday fell on a Saturday this year we thought it a good idea to escape from the city for a few hours. We left home early in the morning just as the sun was rising on a cloudy morning and we stopped for a lovely breakfast on the way.

We arrived in Clarens shortly after ten, a view of the mountains in the distance from the bottom of the town square, it turned out to be quite busy in town as they celebrated the town's hundred birthday. The town also has a few antique and gift shops and I think we went into almost all of them. And then I spotted it, another box, in a shop that I think sold clothes and all kinds of other things (ha, can you tell I didn't pay much attention to those things), they had an antique table right in the back. Before we left home I did think I must look for a box for my new lace making tools but didn't quite expect to actually find an antique one.

I am not sure how old it is, but it does look Victorian, the inlay in the top is not real, just painted, but beautifully done. It is well constructed with dovetails in the back corners and splined joints in the front. It must have laid in a forgotten corner for many years, the molding was hiding under a thick layer of hardened dust.

The inside of the box. It has lost it's one partition on the right side, one can see a slot on the back where it must have fitted in. There was also traces of an old cream velvet lining that didn't survive the box's history. I plan on making a new partition and lining it again. Then a question, the finish is quite dull on the top and the paint work damaged, now I am wondering what I can use to protect the paint work and revive the finish, I thought of using beeswax but if anyone has any better ideas, please let me know.

By the way, bobbins turned out to be pretty cheap to buy in comparison with the effort of making them, so I just folded and bought some, especially when I discovered that some lace patterns uses over a hundred bobbins at the same time. So I am intending to spend some time next weekend and start making some beginner lace, now that I have all my tools.

We had a lovely day and a great pizza lunch, I took this photo just as we left town, the brown spots are cattle grazing. I really enjoyed the car trip as well, it has rained a lot this spring and everything is just beautifully green after a very dusty and dry winter.

I hope you all have a fantastic week.
Elga

Display Box

I think I bought the bargain of the year today, I went to an antique and crafts fair today and found this wooden box there for a mere $3, now who can say no to that, certainly not me, especially as I have been searching for a box just like this for a while now.

The box closed.

And with a few of my miniatures inside. I am planning on cutting most of the door out and replacing it with plexiglass (safer for travel than glass) and pulling the interior fitting out. I am thinking of using illustration board either in a room setting or pigeon holes as it looks now, depending on the kind of miniatures I want to display for a specific event like exhibitions at miniature fairs or Guild School or even non mini events to introduce miniatures to the general public. Removable fittings will also help in using appropriate wallpaper, etc to go with the period of the furniture. 

Have a great weekend.
Elga

Lots of little pieces

I spent this morning casting a few tiny dolls, the first time in my life that I did this, in my way distant past life as a doll maker I just used to buy the greenware, molds are too expensive if you only plan to make a doll once. I am exhausted right now, I think from the intense concentration when you take them out of the mold and then trim them, you have to be so careful not too squash them and those little limbs are tiny.

Now they need to be soft-fired and cleaned before the bisque firing, only then can you start painting them. Porcelain shrinks a bit in the bisque firing so they will be even smaller after the firing. Oh, boy, now I have to clean my kiln that I haven't used in more than 10 years and see if I can still remember how to set it up for a firing.

I made a little bit of progress on the sampler, I am really enjoying stitching this one.

Elga

Handmade miniature marble paper.

I so hoped my marble paper for the caskets would come before the weekend and it did!

Isn't that paper just wonderful, it is so thin, I am almost scared to touch it, but it works beautifully, the velvet paper will be used for the drawer fronts of the casket. The paper was specially made for me by Jemma Lewis in the UK and I am so happy with it. I spent a quick half hour in my workshop to test my ideas out for the casket and just love the results.

I lined the top compartment of the casket with the paper and the front that will be hidden by the sliding panel. I gilded the edges with aluminium, I chose aluminium because it doesn't tarnish like silver and I don't want the petit point to be stained or something after a while. I really like it and are eager to get my teeth into this project.

Have a wonderful weekend.
Elga