X Sie Handmade Wooden Stool

X Sie Handmade Wooden Stool

My 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!

I use only hand tools. This gives me a greater sensitivity and feeling of working with the wood and I 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. I've added oats into my 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 I mostly use. I have not seen exact historic examples of my seating patterns, although I see 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.