Eastlake chairs

[phil]

it's good upholstery weather now finding just the right fabric is a challenge. i have a really neat victorian chair and I dont' know what to use. I have a neat pair of sort of stickley or maybe mission style chairs that are very masculine with straight arms. I love them and I bought two leather hides to do the seats. I have two more with thick leather seats. weird but no padding or support , just super thick leather that you sit on. one is just ripped for about an inch and maybe i can sew it back together or something. I didn't want ot do an ugly repair.
Ive got a set of 6 carved gothic looking dining chairs from the 1800s with porcelain rollers on the front feet but i'm scared to use them on the wood floors and they need covering too. Ive got a set of 4 old english dining chairs that are really neat but they have rush covers and doing the rush covers is a lost art. I can get this rope stuff that looks kind of like rolled up cardboard that people use instead sometimes. one got burned when ahem "someone" forgot the kettle on top of the stove and the aluminum melted and fell on it. they are a bit rickety but to get them apart the rush covers need to be removed. ( it's a covering made from bullrushes)
I have a few more in hiding too. maybe a couple more sets of kitchen chairs.. I only have so many asses so I had to stick most of them in the attic lol..

[Lily left the valley]

phil, is the paper rush better than seagrass?

[phil]

from what I found out. the chairs are from England and they actually use a European bullrush and it is a different variety.
we have some secluded property and lots of north american bulrushes . they are actually hard to get as they can't be farmed because the environmental people don't' like that. and plus because there really isn't a market I guess.

I contacted a guy that does that sort of restoration but the costs were I think much higher than the value of the chairs and he wouldn't' use bulrushes but recommended this cardboard rope stuff. since that comes in a roll it's pretty much a matter of wrapping the chairs in a certain pattern and I found instructions but I'd need more of the rope.

I happened upon a roll of that rope. it would be enough for one chair but not all 4. It would look ok I guess but it isnt' very similar. the bull-rushes are all tied off underneath and it looks like it's pretty much a lost technique. the leaves are flat ,not round like the rope stuff.

they will have hide glue in the joints and they are not broken or anything but a little wiggly. it's impossible to take them apart to clean off the old glue and re glue without spoiling the original covers. I guess I could possibly inject more hide glue with a big syringe or something. I'm not sure how that would work out. if i used white glue it would probably be a one way street.

im wondering about using the bullrushes I can get and maybe then I could take a more restorative approach. the rope stuff really doesn't look much like the bullrushes but I guess that's how some people tackle the issue.

by seagrass I assume you mean the bullrushes? some call them cat tails.
they grow in shallow water in swampy areas. they will root near the shore and they float on their own sod too, and as stuff drifts in it becomes incorporated with the sod. Occasionally they break away and we've seen islands of them floating around. the problem with them is they can make the shoreline inaccessible and if you go to clear them on any large scale you can get into trouble as it's bird habitat. you can't walk on them , they will sink if you try. For us they are both a nuisance and a blessing as no one can build near us but they tend to accumulate and we loose shoreline.

I think chairs with the actual rush covers will become pretty scarce because they are hard to restore properly so maybe just holding off on recovering and passing them on to someone who would do it right is the best but I like them and I would prefer them to others in the "collection". I had one suggestion to find an Amish community as they might be the only ones that could do this stuff. I don't know if it was meant as a joke but we don't have communities like that near here.

It's a bit like basket weaving. You have to be shown how to do it right and since it's probably really labor intensive I sort of got stuck on it. though it probably isn't impossible and I thought maybe one day I will be able to focus on it and give it a try. I assume they are worked when green and then they dry.

[Lily left the valley]

One idea I had been toying with as an income source was learning caning so I could do repairs. That's when I found out about the paper based line and the seagrass on a materials site. From the look of the rolls of seagrass I saw, they remind me more of jute in appearance. I think it's imported, and not the hand twirled rushes. I was just wondering if maybe the seagrass was stronger/more durable than the paper.

I'd have to go back and look up exactly where it comes from and what the plant base is, but I think it's more akin to a long leaf variant of grass than using the actual stems of the cat tails.

I do know what you mean about the differences in finished appearance. I noted that when I was looking at tutorials for how to cane, and saw several sites that had info on the corded patterns as well.

From what I saw, you have a bowl near your weave area so you can keep your matter wet while working. I seem to recall from what I read about how bulrushes are twisted, they are dried before being rewet for the process. I'm guessing they do that because the shrinkage may be different from working green than rewet, and also harvesting the cat tails would be seasonal to a point.

I grew up on a barrier isle, and we had a small marsh at the end of our street where we'd ice skate when it was cold enough. Since it wasn't very deep, no one ever had to worry about much more than wet feet if you broke through. We didn't have any harvesting of the cat tails when I was a kid, but I didn't know anyone who did that sort of weaving on chairs either. It's quite possible they did such in Cape May (I was from the Wildwoods, just north), with the village there that had reenacting of Colonial life.

[phil]

sounds like you've lived in some cool places Lily ! so much history out there. Ive always wanted to drive down the eastern seaboard Just to see all the places that are so far from me, and to stop at all the antique stores and neat little places.

I really doubt I will master the art of restoring those chairs with bullrushes, so the rope stuff would probably be the most practical and at least then I could use the chairs.

I have 6 that are deeply carved. those are sturdy but the upholstery is easier but the rollers on the feet can't really work on my fir floors. I'm sure they would leave marks all over. I dont' knoiw if carpet is enough to protect the floor from those. Maybe if it were thick carpet?

[Lily left the valley]

Phil, it would take a lifetime to hit all the antique shops on the Eastern seaboard.

Are they metal wheels or a plastic variant? I've actually been thinking of something similar myself with our little half hoosier cabinet--the wheels on that are plastic. I was thinking to maybe get some craft cork roll to glue on the wheels. It might not be historically accurate, but it would be a sensible and green solution. I thought about felt too, but for chairs especially, I think it might wear down too fast.

One benefit of having moved as much as I have is you learn a lot of what works or not for you, I think. I know it's helped me a lot in our house search. Although I know I belly ache about the moving process a lot, part of that is because we are collectors so we have mucho stuff--even if it's pared down compared to the past.

I wonder, really, how preservationists both from the environmental side and the keeping old crafts alive side can meet in circumstances like the bulrushes. I think you're lucky in that you have the local source you could at least take a small sample from to try to learn how to hand twist them before deciding if it would be worth an all out historically correct project. We have some places here in MA that teach all sorts of weaving/caning, but they're all on the Cape that I've found so far which is not close to Gardner at all.

We do have a lot of lakes, ponds and wetlands in Gardner, but I'd have to contact the local wetlands preservation group to see if they have a policy in place for such. I won't be doing that anytime soon...but still, it's on the "Maybe in the future" list.

[phil]

the wheels on my chairs are porcelain. I bought them in an auction but I had gone to the same auction so many times and it was a family business for years so that auctioneer was also a real antiques expert. He imported containers from Europe and had a buyer over there. they sold mainly to local antique stores. He said the chairs I have date to about the 1800s because the wheels wouldn't' be porcelain if they were later. I should take a picture of one to see if others can reflect on the date based on the style.

one thing I have come to realize with antique collecting is that I try not to wreck antiques but I have no qualms about not doing anything and then passing them forward un-restored. I'd prefer to just feed and house them for a while than to do repairs I am not proud of.