Up close look at one of the new sack back Windsor chairs

During our recent annual winter pilgrimage to Greg’s shop, I made two new Windsor chairs for our growing collection. The first year, I started with a simple hoop back, and last year I made a continuous arm Windsor. This winter, however, I decided to make two chairs simultaneously — both sack backs. This proved to be a really valuable learning lesson for me. Doing two at the same time really cemented in some of those many detailed steps more firmly. It was twice the practice in one go.

Here are the results.

Sack Back Windsor Chairs

Like the other chairs I’ve made under Greg’s generous tutelage, these sack back Windsor chairs are made of three types of wood. The spindles are green white oak (that is, fresh split white oak carved on a shavehorse with a drawknife and spokeshave), the seat is seasoned white pine carved with a scorp and travisher, and the legs are hard maple turned on a lathe.

The two new chairs, side and side

The seat carving is my favorite part of the whole process, other than seeing the chair come together, of course. Making the spindles is a bit tedious, fun at times, but also just pretty repetitive. Making chairs is great fun partly because of the sheer variety of the work involved — splitting logs, carving, turning on a lathe, drilling precise holes, painting.

I’m not sure what my next chair will be, but I have some ideas. I’m hoping the next one will be on my own, using my own workbench…. which I’ll be building with Jacob in the coming weeks, actually. Hopefully I’ll have more on that to report soon.

Note the subtle red color coming through the finish

Since these chairs are something of a pair, I painted them in opposite but complementary colors. I used Old Fashioned Milk Paint — the first chair has two undercoats of red, with two additional top coats of black. The second is just the opposite. Milk paint is lovely stuff, and the beauty of doing two tones is that the undercoat subtly comes through the finish color when you do a final rub with steel wool. You can probably see what I mean in some of these photos.

The sack back is a comfortable, compact arm chair

Note the subtle black undercoat popping through the red paint