Handmade Wooden Stools

Gifts Handmade Gifts Handmade Wooden Stools New product Woodwork

THE CREATOR

Rob, the creator of Handmade Wooden Stools lives a self-reliant lifestyle on a sparse hillside in the rural west of Ireland. Living off-the-grid and growing most of his own food, his is a quiet and simple existence.

For many years he has explored a variety of traditional crafts involving natural materials, through this he has gained an understanding of how peoples of the past must have lived off the land and also scratched many a creative itch.

He practised ropework for sometime, which lead to chair seating and then (when looking for a way to work from home) started making rustic stool frames so he could seat my own designs.  Modern computer technology that facilitates on-line selling has enabled this to be his full-time business and given a new lease of life to an old cottage industry.

Handmade Wooden Stools

STOOLS

His stools are 14 inches (36 cm) in each dimension: high, wide and deep. They are made from Ash wood which is strong, flexible, attractive and lovely to work with!

Rob uses only hand tools. This gives him a greater sensitivity and feeling of working with the wood and he can still listen to the birds sing, without pollution of any kind.

The legs of the stool are split from a single chunk of trunk, shaped, then put back together in the same orientation as the original tree. The joints are made without glue, instead the dry rungs are squeezed into holes (mortices) in the not-fully-seasoned legs; as the legs finish drying they shrink and therefore clamp the rungs securely. The finished wood is comfortable to hold but not perfectly smooth, knife marks are still to be seen on close inspection. Any small knots or ideosyncracies are left alone as long as they are structurally insignificant and so each stool is unique in character. The conformity of mechanisation is not to be found here.

The colour of the stools will naturally darken slightly over time.

Traditionally Irish chairs would have been seated with hand-harvested hay or straw. He has added oats into his vegetable garden rotation, but this yields very few seats. Locally, sisal twine became the norm for chair seating during the 1950's and this is the material he mostly uses. He has not seen exact historic examples of his seating patterns, although he sees no reason why previous countrymen would not have expressed their individual artistic flair similarly. However this is not merely aesthetic, a seat pattern that eliminates long unwoven strands is more hard-wearing and long-lasting.

STYLES

The Handmade Wooden Stools come in 3 different patterns -

O Sie Handmade Wooden Style

X Sie Handmade Wooden Style

Twill Handmade Wooden Style

Shop the collection at https://truirish.com/collections/handmade-wooden-stools



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