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Designing & Building Chairs

Wednesday, July 20 from 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Session Code: WE24

Track: Handcrafted Furniture

Speaker: Jeff Miller, J. Miller Handcrafted Furniture

Few pieces of furniture are as intimidating or pose the challenges that chairs do –for even the highly skilled woodworker. But adding chairs into the mix can open up new opportunities for your business. With the right approaches and tools, chairs can be fun as well as profitable. This intermediate/advanced seminar starts with strategies for meeting the basic requirements of a successful chair, in its structure, comfort and visual appeal. A variety of techniques for overcoming the intimidating parts of building chairs will be discussed and demonstrated. Proper wood choice, shaping and/or bending of parts, a variety of joinery methods and strategies for building chairs in batches will all be shared. Attendees learn to de-mystify the building of chairs; gain a variety of methods for exploring issues of comfort, structure, and appearance when developing a chair; and get a wide range of techniques and strategies including optimal wood choice, joinery and dealing with curves.