Let’s Build a New Chair Together

With “American Peasant” off my plate¹, I have plowed into other projects, especially the Stick Chair Journal No. 2. The chair plan in the forthcoming issue of the Journal is based (loosely) on a chair that Bilbo Baggins sits in at the outset of “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

The chair is a mashup of Alpine/Germanic chairs with British and Irish details.

I’ve built this chair four or five times before, and I’ve just completed a new prototype (shown above). This week I made updated patterns, and I’m just about to build two more chairs in old mahogany that has been in the cellar for a decade.

Wanna join me?

For the next week or so, I’ll detail the steps to build this chair with photos, drawings and text. Most of the basic techniques for making a chair such as this are shown in “The Stick Chair Book,” a free download here.

Battens, sticks and hexagonal legs.

This chair, however, has a few tricky bits, including the 12° angled mortise-and-tenon joint through the seat. Plus joining the curved armbow to the angled and flat backsplat. (It’s easy when you know the trick – a half pencil.)

To get us started, I’ve put the cutting list and a pdf of the chair’s full-size patterns behind the paywall below (I know… boo, hiss). The patterns are on a 22" x 34" sheet you can get printed at any reprographics firm (or Staples).

And in other news, I just finished designing a new stick chair merit badge.

So stick around.