In the previous blog we completed assembly of the chair and applied a soap finish. The last task is to weave the Danish cord seat. I decided on Danish cord as it seemed to be in keeping with the Scandinavian background of the chair and also because the textured weaving pattern would enhance the appearance.
I have not used Danish cord before so I did extensive research on the internet beforehand, but even then I had to experiment with different weave tensions before getting a satisfactory result.
Danish cord is formed from brown paper twisted and plaited to form a stiff cord which looks similar to sea grass. Seating with rush or sea grass can be a little tedious as it requires one to pull through long lengths of the weaving material with each line of the weft. The weaving method I chose used “L” shaped nails driven into pre drilled holes on the inside face of the seat rails, this meant that just a short loop of cord needed to be threaded for each line of weft making the weaving process much quicker. The cord comes as a large roll the end is pulled from the centre.
My research did not find any information on the spacing of the “L” shaped nails, mainly because it was assume one was replacing cord in an old chair rather than working on a new chair. I arrived at a spacing by calculation based on the width of the cord and the number of strands per hook. On the side rails I used a spacing of 7mm staggered between two rows and on the front and back rails 19mm and 14mm repectively ( there are the same number of nails on front and back but the spacing varies because of their differing lengths). The holes were drilled before assembly and the nails driven in to leave 6mm protruding.
The process of weaving is too long and complex to cover in a short blog, the photographs and captions below hopefully give you a taster. I plan to write a detailed article on this in the next few weeks.
When the weaving was complete I sealed the cord with two mop coats of bleached shellac.
