Rustic Furniture

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For most of us, rustic furniture will be made Adirondack- style from small saplings. Each piece will be unique and technique is as individual as style. Here is how I build mine. Other makers will disagree and, once you get into it, so will you.

Many books and articles claim that "anyone can make" twig furniture. This is nonsense. Anyone can build "ramshackle" as it was called in the old days or "shaky-twig furniture" that is casually deigned and quickly nailed up from green boughs. If it's rickety, as one book tells you, "just nail on more diagonal braces ...." Nuts!

The wood and the tradition demand more respect. To justify the time that goes into any piece of furniture, rustic pieces should be carefully designed and made of good wood that is soundly joined. It takes time and an intimacy with the wood, which is learned quicker than setting up close-tolerance power equipment to mill rock-hard, kiln-dried oak or walnut.

Choosing a Design

I'll not presume to tell you how to design your twig furniture. The best come from builders who let the wood design the piece around the sweep of a doglegged limb or the movement in a hunk of burl. But all furniture is designed within subtle but absolute limits and until you have some experience, do not attempt to extemporize—if you build by eye and from scratch, you may end up with a monstrosity.

The best advice on hand-building furniture I've ever read comes from Roy Underhill in his book The Woodwright's Shop: "pick a chair you want to copy..." Even if you have sticks that demand a quixotic or whimsical structure, copy a time-proven design for your basic structure and proportions—the relationship of a chair's back height to arm length as well as length and diameter of the wooden parts that make it tip.

Green Wood

You may read that furniture can be made with green wood. This is only if you are hand-forming parts from the dense heartwood of mature hickory or another very strong, dense, and relatively dry wood.

There is a product called PEG that will soak into chunks of green wood and replace the water. It is good for turning bowls and for carving but not for making rustic furniture out of whole branches or young trees.

Green saplings contain no heartwood worthy of the name, but soft and immature sapwood that is young and springy, soft, and pliable. You'd have to build with logs to keep greenwood chair legs from splaying out or cracking. And, as they dry, green sticks not lying flat and free of stress will warp and bend in all directions.

Green wood does debark easily and if you use a sharp knife and keep sap from building up, it carves readily. By all means, skin logs green and whittle rough tenons green. (You'll find that the hickory tenons that carved like Ivory soap when green need a diamond rasp when cured.) I save bark of the cedars, birches, and black cherry to use in veneering plywood and boards that go to make rustic tables.

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