Before I knew it, Sarah had enrolled us into a Windsor Chair making course. The sublimely excellent Howard Archbold generously made space for
us keen woodworking enthusiasts. You can always tell an expert at their field by a number of qualities: their passion, their pride, their subtlety, and their ability to think into and out of a creative situation (largely dealing with novices such as I!). The course was already full, but he staggered our entry so that we could fully attend.

So day 1. Horribly scary. Others were well into it, adzing, whittling, pole-lathing, and doing all manner of activities which in my head I thought was impossible to accomplish 4 days henceforth.

Essentially, we take raw timber and break it down to create the chair. The fact that we didn’t have to actually fell the tree was a great relief. And the mind is still boggling at the requirement for torches which proved unnecessary. We split a log to dimension and using a frow, we reduced big chucks of wood into less large sticks.

Next, on a drawhorse we used our drawknives to again reduce the diameter of the sticks so that they fitted roughly into the middle of curtain rings. The mind boggled as much from the pairing of new words to hitherto unknown objects as well as the neurolinguistic training in the use of said objects.

The trick to the drawhorse being to maintain foot pedal pressure. Failure to do so meant that the drawknife pull yanked the log forcibly into your stomach!

The point being that with each stage, one needed to get the timber to as close as possible to the next required stage, so as not to expend excess effort and energy with finer tools into coarser work.

And that pretty much took up the day. A pile of wood shavings later and we’re ready for beer and pizza.