Made by HandYear round

Chairmaking

Older than the flat-pack

Sweden has a furniture tradition older and stranger than the flat-pack one it is now known for, and a green-woodworking revival has been quietly rebuilding it for two decades — chairs made from a tree felled that season, worked wet, with hand tools and no glue in the joints that matter.

The principle is that wet wood is soft and shrinks as it dries. So you cut the legs wet and the seat dry, drive one into the other, and the drying does the clamping. A chair made this way tightens for years instead of loosening.

You will spend the first morning with a drawknife on a shaving horse, producing a leg. It is physical, it is meditative, and your forearms will inform you about it tomorrow.

A stool is a day, a chair a week

A stool is a day or two. A chair is a week, genuinely, and the people who run these courses will tell you that rather than sell you a chair you will not finish.

We would push most people towards the stool and a long lunch. It teaches the same three skills, it goes home with you, and a week of joinery is a holiday only for a specific kind of person.

Year round, though the wood is cut in winter and the best courses run in the months after — the material is at its most workable and the workshops are not hot.

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