A Refurbished Ladies Chair

This intricate crest belongs to a dainty little ladies chair. It is so small that by our standards we would think of it as a youth's chair.  But then people are a lot bigger now then they used to be!  Now it is just the right size for an occasional bedroom chair  or for sitting in when you are putting your shoes on.  

The chair came to us with broken cane on the back.  Enough was broken that we really couldn't repair it, we needed to completely replace it.  It was woven with a 'blind cane' method, so the holes that the cane goes into don't go all the way through to the back.  This is much more challenging then regular hand cane.  Once the cane work was done, the 'blonde' looking natural cane needed to be colored to better blend in with the chair.

We also refurbished the chair.  This means that we refreshed the existing finish rather then applying a new one.  Depending on the method used, refurbishing isn't always a job that requires high levels of skill, but it does require high levels of labor.  For this chair we chose a wax color that would fill in where the old finish color had worn off.  This wax is applied by hand, left to dry, and then polished by hand.  This polishing process is quite labor intensive and not for the weak of elbow.  And in addition, this chair has so many little nooks and crannies that the polishing task was bumped up several notches in difficulty.  No one wants a glob of wax stuck in one of those pretty carved leaves!