The finish is probably the toughest part of making something. The lines between amazing, interesting, stupid, and boring can get pretty close, and if you make a wrong decision, well sorry, you have to live with it. That being said, the new chairs I made the other week as part of a design experiment and now continuing their guinea pig existence with the finish. I decided that one of the chairs would be dark, the other light, and here is what I came up with for The Man in Black:

1.) Yes, the name of this guy is stolen from LOST (the lighter one will be named Jacob!). 2) The finish: Sumi ink, applied liberally with a rag, and gloves, because I did not need black hands for a week. After the ink, a trip outside for a few coats of gloss lacquer.

The seat will be padded and wrapped in blue flannel, and the back, well that’s where these guys come in:

Those are scraps from old pine beams reclaimed from a building in the Philadelphia area, which you will be seeing more of in the future. This time around, I took a torch to the surface, which resulted in portions of the grain getting toasted, and the sap heavy lines remaining red. I’m pretty into it. These guys also got hit with a few coats of glossy lacquer.

Up next, assembly. Then onto the Jacob, and if I like the design enough, we might end up with the whole cast of LOST furniturefied. Which, I realized, is kind of the point of this chair design: something that can be styled and in multiple ways, resulting in several different chairs derived from the same foundation. Kind of like humans, or something.

See you soon, friend.

Cheers,
Shaun Baer