Number 14

It's Monday already, and I'm just now getting a new stool up on the board, here. I was hoping to do one a day, then two a week, then one a week ... and now it's been 8 full days already. Maybe that means I should jack the price up on these things.
Nah, they're selling, but not like hotcakes, yet, so I'll stick to the $65 I started with.
For this stool, I thought I'd try something a little different. The legs and sides are made of 4 different colors of wood. There aren't four different kinds of wood, because actually, two of the colors are the same kind of wood. There's weathered popple (gray), unweathered popple (almost white), alder (reddish brown), and scorched maple (almost black), in that order -- unless you start with the black first. And the seat is made of a chunk of the riser of an ancient wooden ladder I found laying out in the woods as I was helping my neighbor haul scrap a couple of months ago. It was all covered with green moss on the outside, but sound as a dollar inside (even sounder, actually, ha ha ha.)

This time, I thought I'd add a couple of pictures of the actual construction process, before the stool was completely braced, wired, or varnished. As a friend of mine told me last week, "If you wouldn't have them tied together with wire, they'd look pretty amateurish -- like they're ready to fall apart if you so much as look at them wrong. That there looks like some old codger was in a shack out in the woods and wanted to make him something to sit down on, but didn't quite know how to do it."
Anyway, here are some pictures of the stool after it's finished. This stool is a perfect illustration of the old saying, "What goes around, comes around."

 And so on, 'round and 'round and 'round ...

This stool, its seat made of part of an ancient ladder, is also a good illustration of another old saying, "What goes up, must come down." I was thinking I could name this the "Karma stool".
It is for sale for $65. If you're interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. (Sorry, this stool is already sold.) For general information about this series of handmade stools, please see the Introduction to this blog.

Number 13

It's been a very busy week, as raspberries have been at their peak. I spent a lot of time picking them, and dehydrating a lot of them, to ship dehydrated ones overseas.
And what was a tree frog doing in the raspberries? Anyway, the garden work nearly prevented me from making a stool this week.
Still though, I managed to just about finish one stool. I cheated a little, using wood that was still left over from Stool Number 1. A lot of the wood was short pieces, too short to reach across the width of the stool -- so I spliced them together using nails and tying them with wire, the same as I do the other joints on these stools. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I was wrong when I said that Stool Number 1 was made out of balsam branches. After looking at the wood again, I've had to say: "This isn't balsam, this is Spruce!"

For the seat, I picked up a couple of bundles-worth of old lath that was lying along the edges of the garden, formerly used to nail some plastic netting to the fence. The lath is weathered, but still sound, as I determined by testing it for springiness over my knee. I wire-brushed and sanded it, then criss-crossed it so there are 3 full layers -- further braced from beneath with a partial 4th layer. This seat isn't going to break, even if someone stands on it!
I varnished it with several coats of water-based poly. The lath on the seat will still take a few more coats, which it will get tomorrow. It was shiny enough already to stick it up on this blog.

This stool is for sale for $65. Please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by emailing me at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. Refer to Stool Number 13.  (Sorry, this stool has already been sold.)
For general information about these stools, please see the Introduction to this blog.

Number 12

This is another stool made of apple wood. There is a large tree of little green apples in the back yard, with lots of little trees coming up underneath it. These little brushy trees coming up make it difficult to get to the main tree, and don't add anything to apple production whatsoever. So I cut a couple of them out to make a stool with.

Last time I made a stool out of apple wood, I used wood from a tree in the front yard that has little red apples. As I peeled the bark off the wood from that tree, I was surprised to see that the inner bark was bright pink. Now this time as I peeled the bark off the wood from the tree with little green apples, I saw that the inner bark is bright green.
I considered stating this as a general principle about apple trees, that the color of the apple is determined by the color of the inner bark of the branches, and vice versa ... but I'd really be talking off the top of my head if I stated that as a general principle, since I've only looked at the inner bark of these two trees, not really enough of a sampling. After I sample a few more apple trees, and ask around for other people's experiences, I'll be sure to let you know.

Be that as it may, I looked in vain in my pile of old boards under my work table for any wood that was the color of little green apples for the seat of this stool. I did still have some pieces of pine boards left that had been painted red over a coat of blue paint, though. The back side of those boards had been painted white at one time. Red, White and Blue are the colors of the flag, of course, which everyone knows stands for mom and apple pie -- even if the pie is made of green apples, not red ones, and even if this is a stool, and not a pie.
This stool (two photos below) is for sale for $65.  If interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. Reference: Stool Number 12. (Sorry, this stool is already sold.)

 For general information about these stools, please see Introduction.

Number 11

Stool Number 7 got a lot of compliments, so I thought I'd make another stool using scorched maple wood. This time I got a branch from a tree in the yard, and peeled the bark off of it immediately, instead of leaving the sticks lay out in the woods for a month first. Instead of taking days to debark enough wood for a stool, it took about an hour this time.

Then, since the weather was nice for a change, instead of having to scorch the wood in a stove,  I was able to scorch it outside over an open fire, which was a lot easier to control.
The next step was to carry the sticks into the garage, wash my hands and take a shower. Then I left the wood sit on the table for a couple of weeks while I did other things until I got interested in making a stool again.
To prepare the wood, I first scraped the charcoal off with a knife, then cleaned it further with a nylon pot-scrubber, and finally polished it with a soft cloth.
For the seat, I'd found a nice hardwood board still partially attached to some furniture discarded on the brush pile, that bore a sticker saying "Made in Thailand".
I looked around the Internet, and determined that this wood is most likely rubberwood. Anyway, there was just enough of it for one stool seat. 

This stool is for sale for $65. If interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. Reference: Stool Number 11.  (Sorry, this stool is already sold.)
For general info about these stools, please see Introduction.

Number 10

My neighbor has a nice grove of Staghorn Sumac behind his house, so I asked permission to cut a couple of sticks to take a look at it.

Unsplit, the wood with the bark removed is just a nondescript white color, interesting only because it often crooks off at an angle. However, it splits easily, and usually right down the middle, or close to it.

 

Once the wood is split, it shows lots of color. The center contains a very soft orange pith, which is easily scraped out, leaving a hollow, which shows a little darker than the olive-green grain of the rest of the wood.

 I didn't get back to my neighbor's house for about a week, and I was just itching to get some more of that wood, which I finally did. 
 The wood is rather brittle and hard to work with, so this stool took me a little longer and gave me a little more frustration than usual to complete. It seemed that even with all nail-holes pre-drilled, every time I tried to drive a nail, the wood would split, and the joints come apart ... but once all the joints are tied together with wire, the stool is almost incredibly tight and strong. The advantage of wire-tied joints is that if sometime in the far future a stool did start to loosen up at one joint or another, all it would take to re-tighten it would be to add another twist in the steel wire.

The seat of this stool is made of Western Fir, another of the old boards I found half-buried in the mud behind the garage this spring.
This stool is for sale for $65. If interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. Reference: Stool Number 10. (Sorry, this stool is already sold.) For general info about these stools, please see Introduction.