We were due to go over to New Zealand to be there for the birth of Jessie and Rikki’s first baby (Ruby). I had this mad idea of giving Jessie a rocking chair to nurse in. Amazingly there was an event called Creative Matakana and Richard Hare was running chair making courses at it.
The wood in NZ is wonderful in many ways, but it does not make chair making easy. I visited Richard before the course to discuss what I wanted to make as it was beyond the dining chair that he was expecting to teach. I watched him trying to split big logs into smalle manageable chunks and knew this was going to be different.
Luckily he had managed to obtain some ash for the bows. He also has a different way of dealing with rockers, so I gave it a try. The wood is beautiful once it is finished.
It was a great week. Once Richard had realised I knew what I was doing, he let me get on with it and we worked together nicely all the way through. He has some amazing bodger’s benches and a multi-person work table that is great too. I even had time to make the footstool out of bits that would otherwise have been used for firewood.