"Make a Chair From a Tree: Third Edition" is the culmination of a lifetime's work on post-and-rung chairs, covering in detail every step of the green-wood chairmaking process – from splitting and riving parts to making graceful cuts with a drawknife and spokeshave, to brace-and-bit boring for the solid joinery, to hickory-bark seat weaving.
With the help of Larry Barrett, one her students, Jennie Alexander worked on this new version of the book until just weeks before her 2018 death. Larry polished Jennie's final manuscript, then built a chair in Jennie's shop using her techniques and tools, taking photographs for this book along the way. Nathaniel Krause (another of Jennie’s devoted students), wove the hickory seat for this book. Longtime friend and collaborator Peter Follansbee helped to edit the text into the intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) words that ended up in this third edition.
"Make a Chair from a Tree" inspired Gina Siepel's piece Chair Study: Becoming (for Jennie Alexander), featured in their exhibit To Understand A Tree at the Museum for Art in Wood.
184 pages
Dimensions: 9.25" x 9.25" x 0.625"
Printed and bound in the United States on acid-free paper
