My Fourth & Final Apprenticeship Chair

I’m trying to be super chill about it.

The OG Bean chair sketch.

Mid September will be the one-year mark of my apprenticing at Lost Art Press. That means I need to start hauling ass on building my fourth and final chair, per the apprenticeship agreement.

I’ve been sketching my little heart out, trying to pretend I know how to design a chair.

My idea started before I even worked here with a sketch of a three-legged cat chair I kept drawing on everything. This was about six years ago and when my dad saw it he told me he could help me build it. It seemed impossible back then but now I can almost smell the chair…. When the apprenticeship was first being explained to me, it didn’t take me long to circle back to this three-legged cat chair, aka the “Bean Chair,” for my firstborn. The last chair I build has to be my own design and, luckily, Past Katherine already did that step for Present Katherine (high-five, twin!).

After building a few chairs I’ve decided to tweak the original design – partly for aesthetics and partly for stability. My original sketch mimicked a seven-stick comb back but now I think I want the comb to sit lower on the chair. I’m also rethinking the arm – do I want a full arm with a shoe on it, or do I want it to be more like a Gibson chair, with two disconnected arms? How should the hands look? How long will the comb be? How many damn sticks am I gonna have to shape?

I ran with a lowback idea for a little while.

And then a design more like the Irish chair I painted a hare on.

I also experimented with the height.

I want to have fun with this chair but I don’t want the chair to be funny. I’m not gonna go balls to the walls and make the hands look like paws or put a voice box in the seat so that it meows every time you sit in it (but I might give the chair a butthole… sue me). The chair still needs some sophistication to it so it doesn’t look like a total joke of a chair in 80 years.

Then comes the dilemma with a three-legged chair: wobbles. And to fix the wobble problem I have to have a particular seat shape. Stable three-legged chairs always have a triangular seat so that weight can be distributed evenly. This is not what I had in mind for this chair, but I’m committed to three legs so triangle-ish it is. Switching gears with the seat shape means I have to tweak the arms, too. I still need to decide how much of a bend I want them to have and how far out I should put them compared to the seat.

My biggest worry besides wobbliness is the seat being too shallow or narrow, but there’s plenty of scrap for me to make full-size prototypes and force everyone I know to sit in them.

I’ve been shaking in my boots about this fourth chair. Designing my own piece of furniture is the most daunting thing I’ve done to date. I find myself turning to Kale a lot, asking how they even began this process. In doing so they’ve gotten pretty good at telling me to calm the f*ck down in a polite way.

My favorite child at this point in time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just have to start the damn thing and fail until I succeed. There’s one thing that really keeping me going, though: the promise of getting matching tattoos of the Bean Chair sketch with my dad. It only took a decade to convince him it’s cool to get tattoos at any age. And yes, he seems a little nervous and is probably kicking himself about making this promise.

–Katherine