The Desk Chair

Roosevelt's desk chair is a wonderful chair.  Forgive the black and white photo, but it was the clearest picture I could find of it.

The obvious challenge on this one is its beautiful arms.  I started by using Word's "remove background" feature to remove all of the picture except for the arm in the foreground.  I then set the picture color to the heaviest "black and white" color setting I could to turn it into a solid black image and sized it to fit my chair back.

I had the delightful delusion that I would just cut out the back as one piece.  Ha! Failing that, I was going to cut the arms separately from 1/16" bass wood.  Ha!, again.  Below you can see my efforts.  The arms are so small and fiddly, and my skill with a utility knife so lacking, that this was completely non-workable.  The same with my efforts (on the left) to try to reconstruct the arms out of strip wood.

If I had a laser cutter, I could probably have done it, but they are too expensive and would take up too much room in my workspace.  What I finally ended up doing for the arms and the "spokes" of the base was to cut them using my Cameo Silhouette.  Since it can't handle bass wood like this, I cut each piece from two layers of the thin chipboard it likes and two layers of wood scrapbook paper, then sandwiched them all together with tacky glue and skim coated the edges with stainable wood putty.  When the putty was dry, I sanded to get it as smooth as possible.  This made for some surprisingly sturdy pieces about the thickness of my original bass wood.

I did cut the back and seat from bass wood.  The back was soaked in boiling water before being shaped around a glue stick.  The top of the seat was cut from mat board.  I put one layer of batting on, then glued some fabulous lightweight stretch black vinyl from Joann's around the edges and trimmed it flush with the bottom of the mat board.  I finished with some black marker around the bottom edge of the mat board, to ensure a unified look.  I used the same vinyl on the seat back.

To make the base, I aligned my legs on the star pattern I had created and glued them to a piece of pared-down dowel left over from the Windsor chair.  That was by far the trickiest part, as the legs wanted to move around as I was trying to attach them.  Although it doesn't look like it from the picture, that piece of dowel is a nice, tight fit within the piece of hollow metal tubing I cut.  The "wheels" are size 15 brass beads glued to the bottom of the legs with some JB Kwik Weld (my favorite glue for gluing metal to wood).  To attach the base to the chair seat, I used my needle-nose pliers to flatten out the edges of a standard metal eyelet.  That was then glued to the bottom of the chair, also with JB Kwik Weld.  It fits perfectly over the metal tubing.

After I glued the vinyl to the (now stained) seat back, I had to recreate the nail head trim.  I considered micro beads but was afraid they would stick out too much.  I could have used tiny punched circles shaped on my craft foam, the way I do buttons, but my tiniest circle punch is way too big.  I finally decided to just dot on gold paint with the tip of a toothpick.  Not perfect, but it will do.   I glued the seat back to the seat, added the arms, and glued my eyelet to the bottom.

When the chair is in place on top of its base, it can actually swivel!  (However, you have to be careful in picking it up, or you pick up just the chair top without the base.  😊)

Now, Mr. Roosevelt can sit at his desk and do important government work.  (If you look very closely, you can see the tiny eyeglasses I added.)