Now we reached program 6 of Master Creators. This also became the program where the judges took the (electrical)power ;0)
We went back in time and used the old craftmanship. Never has there been so quiet in the workshop. And it was liberating and fascinating.
Anton and I both work with Christmas in ‘Den Gamle By’ in Aarhus, so it was obvious that the Christmas theme sooner or later found its way into the program. Without power, the old craft = > The Old City = > CHRISTMAS TREE ;0)
The stem of the Christmas tree is made of a beautiful old pool cue, the stand of old terrace boards, the branches of spokes from a bicycle wheel, copper wire from a tangled pile of copper and paper angels made of leftovers from our lamp and the angels heads of the edge from spare plates with gold trim from our mosaic table. Pure and simple recycling ;0)
The big task. Make a chair of an old carpenter’s bench!
It is not difficult to make a chair. You can sit on anything. But to make a chair that is comfortable to sit im and which is an architectural pleasure to look at is not an easy task. It is one of the hardest tasks ever. Having to devise and produce it out of an old carpenter’s bench, in just two days, is almost an impossibility, but from time to time, we manage to do the impossible.
The chair we consider to be our masterpiece. And we are quite proud of it ;0)
The very idea in the chair is the unbroken line that starts from the left front goes around the seat and to the left around the back and turns down to the right in the armrest and down and round to the horizontal leg, which rests on the floor. Most of all, we would have liked to have avoided the black metal pipe, which supports the structure of the chair itself. However, this would have required us to put a metal construction in the core of the chair and we did not have neither the time nor opportunity to do this. As you can see on the small model, we would like the armrest to have floated.
One of my favorite chair designers is Gerrit Rietveld. Gerrit Rietveld’s groundbreaking Red and Blue Chair designed in 1917 is amazing. Few would guess that this design is 102 years old. I am the lucky owner of a red and blue chair, which I never get tired of looking at.
If you look at our little masterpiece, you will be able to see the inspiration from Gerrit Rietveld. I think that good design is based on simple mathematics. Clean up the ideas and use the mathematical terms. Then there is a high probability of success with the design.
We chose to sew removable leather cushions, as the judges had emphasized that the chair had to have comfort. If we had been able to make the chair without the metal support, we would have liked to have sacrificed the cushions and let the chair stand completely clean as the miniature model.
The model is built in the scale 1-10 and it helped us many times to keep track of the pile of ‘Mikado sticks’ during production. Anton often said that he felt he was taking an apprentice test with the many assignments we got, but his true craftmanship test was this chair which truly requires skills in the carpentry profession.
Unlike Anton, I have ‘only’ 36 more years of craftsmanship experience, so I know what it takes to be able to do what he can. I have great admiration for Anton’s knowledge and technical gift.
The chair is built of an old carpenter’s bench, a used table top, a black painted water pipe, metal parts from the carpenter’s bench and leather from the back on an old leather chair. 18 pieces of wood in different lengths and thicknesses have been through the thickening plane countless times, and all the man-hours we had available are used to hone all the pieces so they stood quite sharp and got the most beautiful sounded out in the tree. In addition, the engineering work on sewing cushions, which stood as sharp as the chair.
We hope that you will be inspired by watching MesterSkaberne and getting the courage to rethink old junk into new design. It is fun and rewarding and it is good for the environment ;0)
Anton and Susanne
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