Rustic Furniture

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I slit the branches lengthwise, cut around at each end, and pry the bark off in rectangular sheets. I also collect bark of dead paper birch and wild cherry trees I find in the woods. Often you can shake the punk out and carry home nearly perfect cylinders of bark. To bend any green wood, including supersupple willow whips, test a branch to see how far and how fast you can bend it before the bark stretches and splits on the outside of the bend, wrinkles and splits on the insider the wood itself splinters and breaks. You'll do best by bending slowly, forming each sixinch arc of each curve with your hands rather than trying to curve a long stick all at one by holding the ends.

To shape thin splits of dry wood such as oak slats for a chair back, set three tall nails or pegs into a stout board along the outer and inner faces of each arc of the curve so you can form the wood around them. Stuff one end of a length of auto heater hose into the spout of a steam kettle and run to a hole punched in the center of a length of stovepipe.

Plug the open ends with old towels and steam the wood (soaked overnight in a sink or bathtub) till it is supple. Then place between bending pegs and let dry. Don't soak the wood and heat it inside an electric heating pad or rolled-up electric blanket as sometimes suggested. You could burn your house down.

The casiest first project is to replicate a comfortable dining room chair in saplings. You'll immediately discover how complex the angles of legs and backs are, the dish in seats...the quiet result of 10,000 years of experimentation Icy mankind in pursuit of a dignified place to sit that's comfortable, attractive, and as easy to get out of as into.

If you read a few book, and keep at it, in time you'll learn instinctively to proportion furniture to room size, design for for mal or informal use, custom-fashion to users' height and leg length, and more. YOU will evolve your own ever-changing style too. I began building great clunky things like Medieval castle tables and trenchers from log., and have progressed to pieces inspired by whatever unusual pieces of wood I happen over. But, incorporating deer's antlers or a chunk of driftwood into the design of a settee and making them look right is something that only experience can teach (and I don't always succeed, I promise).

Design, proportion, and ornamentation differ, but the structural elements of furniture found in Tutankhamen's tomb differ little from the ancient Rornan, Henry VIII, Shaker, Danish Modern, or the solid cherry dining room suite you find at the local furniture store.

The Frame

The legs and rungs/seat supports form a crib that is much the same for any rustic chair, settee, or table—eight to twelve sticks. Four legs and one or two rungs at front, back, and on both sides are the basis of all rustic furniture. The more primitive nailed-up pieces are made four-square but are uncomfortable and look amateurish beside any conventional furniture. Building them is the same as building pieces with more comfortable and attractive angles in seat, back, or legs or all of them —as follows.

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