Those darned cats!

If you count all the cats that I’ve had in my life since I was a little bitty kid who couldn’t even walk yet, the total number of cats in my life comes to somewhere around nine. And in the scheme of all things related to cats, nine is a very good number, don’t you think? After all, they say cats have nine lives, so maybe the number fits.

And, no, I didn’t make that up. I really do think there have been nine cats in my life.

I have loved every one of them. But I’ll tell you true, they can drive you nuts, no? Just look at the picture below. Two cats did that to a perfectly nice woven chair seat on an expensive chair from Denmark. In fact, those two cats did that to all six chairs in the set … egads!

And actually, the chair above was not the worst of the six. One of the chairs pretty much had no seat left. Yes, I had scratching posts, that I coated with catnip. I tried all manner of deterrents to keep the cats off the chairs … and enticements to get them to use the scratching posts instead … all to no avail. They wanted the chairs! Oh those darned cats!

Eventually the cats went to cat-heaven (I still miss them). And I was left with the chairs. Now what? Do I toss them out? Donate them and hope someone can fix them? I couldn’t think of an option that suited me.

So I started doing research. I knew the name of the company that originally sold this dining room set in the 1960s, but they didn’t sell this type of dining room furniture any longer and they had no contact information for the builder in Denmark since that Danish company had closed shop years ago.

So I researched some more. Hours and hours of online searching. Thank heavens for the internet. After wearing my fingers to the bone, I found the name of a man in Denmark who had worked for the company that built this furniture. The internet listed a phone number for him, in Denmark. After a bit of hesitation, I picked up my phone and called him.

He answered! “Ja, hej.” I thought that meant “hello”. I asked him “taler du engelsk?” I hoped that meant “do you speak English?” He answered “ja, lidt” which I figured meant “yes, a little.” So I started in VERY slowly to tell him my story about the chairs. He loved it!

He spoke much more English than just a little, although his accent was heavy. But I seemed to understand him perfectly well.

The short story is that he had indeed worked at that company, for most of his life in fact. The owner of the company had abandoned the company and had abandoned the “stuff” of the company. My friend on the phone had acquired much of it, neighbors of his had other items … tools, parts, wood, plans, etc … all stashed in their own personal storage buildings.

This fellow was so happy that I wanted to re-weave chairs … chairs that he very well could have built with his own two hands. We talked more, I emailed him photos of the damaged chairs, and then we hung up. He called me back a few days later. He had rummaged through the things he had, checked the dates and the part numbers, double-checked the style and the particular finish and … in the end … wait for it … yes indeed … he had weaving kits for my chairs!!!

He was ecstatic. Almost as ecstatic as I was. I offered money; he said no, absolutely no. He did say the weaving was difficult, but if I had trouble to let him know and he would try to help. Or … the woman who did most of the weaving back then was still there in that small town and he knew that she would be more than happy to help too. He mailed the kits to me and I got to work.

Wow, it was complicated!

The weaving kits came with the cordage of course. It also came with new metal pegs. It also came with detailed instructions and very good drawings.

But it was a lot of work to get those cords exactly straight, and the right tension, and wound exactly properly around each metal peg. (You can see a few of the metal pegs in the photo above … I replaced every one of them all around the under side of the seat.)

My hands hurt, my arms hurt, my fingers started to bleed. I tried wearing gloves, several different types, but the gloves just got in the way. But I seemed to be making good headway, so I just kept on going! Up and down, over and under, around and around … oops no that was too tight, unwind it and start over … or too loose. Tighten it up, snug it up, but not too tight.

About half way through the first chair, I had it figured out. It didn’t get any easier physically, my fingers still bled, but at least I figured out the process and the technique that worked for me. I still had the ONE chair that didn’t have much damage to it, so I could compare my work to that chair. To me, my work looked exactly the same as the original.

I emailed photos of the first chair I completed to my new friend in Denmark. He was so thrilled that he called me! He said he shared the photos with the woman friend/neighbor who had been the weaver and she said this about me and my work, “hun kunne have arbejdet her!” … “she could have worked here!”

I was pleased as punch. 🙂 Besides the fact that I knew I would have chairs that would look good again and be useful again, I had been praised by the very person who knew exactly what this work entailed and how it should look.

I must admit, I was doing really good work.

Eventually, I completed a second chair.

And then I completed four chairs (below).

A friend of mine had come to visit, specifically to see the chairs. For some reason it seemed that the chairs sitting there in that position needed some thing or some one in front of them, so I put my little carved wooden bear in front of them, facing them. But the bear kept falling over because the carpet wasn’t perfectly flat right there, so I grabbed the first book off the first book shelf that was handy, put the book on the carpet, and set the bear on the book. Perfect. The bear stood there quite elegantly. Doesn’t the bear look like it’s about to raise its arms and direct a church choir? And then I realized … the book I’d put on the floor for the bear to stand on was a Bible.

And then my friend had a somewhat irreverent thought, but a fantastically cute one.

Some of you readers will know that some Christians believe that the Bible contains “promises” of God … that if we trust those promises or “stand” on those promises, that we will do well. “Standing on the promises” is a term used to mean “trusting in the word of God”. And there’s even a Christian hymn titled “Standing on the Promises”.

And so here we are in my house in front of my chairs, with my bear standing on the Bible, “standing” as it were, quite literally, on the promises of God. My friend laughed and mentioned the reference to the hymn, and both of us, in the exact same moment, broke out in song … standing on the promises, standing on the promises, standing on the promises of God! 2, 3, 4 …

Hmmm, ok, maybe you needed to be there, or know the hymn. 🙂 But we had a good laugh.

In the end, I finished all six of the dining room chairs. I did a great job. But I must admit, by the time I was done, I hoped never to see another chair weaving kit in my life!

The photo below shows what each chair looks like from underneath. Each cord had to be absolutely precisely positioned with exactly the proper tension for the whole thing to work.

In the end, today, I have six perfect chairs that look perfectly original and I’m really pleased with the work.

And those two cats? Well, I still miss them. But if I ever see them again, I may just stand on my principles and give them a piece of my mind. 🙂