About books: Chair caning... only if I have to!

[Foxtower]

“The Caners Handbook” by Bruce W. Miller and Jim Widers
The Caner's Handbook

I never have and never will have any interest in chair caning. None, nada, nix! Yet twenty-five years ago I was married to a woman, who like me, was always trying new things and new business opportunities. She bought a book and decided she was going to make lots of money caning chairs. Good for her!

I still have her first chair, a lovely arm chair with bent wood arms and back. She let the cane soak too long so the seat sags a bit and there's a couple unnoticeable mistakes in the weave, yet she was then confident enough to to sell herself as a chair caner.

Next thing I knew the shop was filled with chairs! She was soon overwhelmed and while I thought chair caning wasn't really a good business idea I didn't want her to fail too bad. I used her book and while creating a weave was confusing at first I did figure it out and helped her by doing the tedious task of caning a couple woven chair seats. Unfortunately now that she had free labor it only encouraged her more!

She was only doing two types of caning. Weaving a seat that had holes or pressing a pre-woven seat into a groove. The chairs with grooves were really easy, just like mounting a canvas on a wooden stretcher or replacing a screen window. Unfortunately most of the chairs had holes that needed tedious weaving and I could only hope she would soon tire of spending so much time for in reality not much money.

And then came the loveseat, a beautiful mahogany brown piece that from the front looked like it was lots of holes, but then she discovered the holes didn't go all the way through. The book called it “blind caning”. I suggested she carefully drill out the existing caning. She didn't have much finesse with a drill and after drilling several holes through the wood she had sense enough to stop and ask for my help. I finished drilling out the old caning, repaired and disappeared her mistake and helped her figure out how to put a pre-woven seat into the holes using the blind caning method.

At that point she was finally beginning to realize that chair caning was not really a profitable business. Yet that loveseat gave me an idea! The next chair I did for her had holes, but instead of trying to weave I bought a piece of pre-woven caning that had approximately the same size pattern as the broken seat. I then lined up the weave with the holes and used the blind caning technique. Lo and behold it came out just as if it was hand woven!

I didn't tell her I'd found a quick easy way to replace a woven seat. I was glad when the last chair was finally gone! Thank goodness she had “The Caners Handbook”, now a permanent part of my library that I pulled out today for her to use. While no longer married we're still friends. She recently was given a rocking chair she would like to repair. She then discovered instead of cane it was “some kind of rope”. Hopefully she'll figure out Danish Cord and get her chair out of my shop soon!

[Jim]

Great story. I don't often find the need to cane chairs, thankfully. The only one I've done in the past couple of decades used the grooves & that was as you described. I even used a screen tool & pieces of screen bead to do it. The hardest part was getting the materials due to the company I used. I won't use them again.