Danish Cord Seat - #6 Weaving in the Wefts & Footpads

Weaving in the weft is next.  That starts with a 50’ long piece of cord folded in half to make a loop set between the two side stretchers.  The two cord ends are run up through the loop and over the front top stretcher.  From there they alternate going over the first set of warp cords then under the next set and so on until reaching the other end.

At the other end the cord goes over the top of the top stretcher down the outside face then completely around the bottom stretcher.  From there the cord comes from the inside of the seat back between the two stretchers to the outside face then up the face and over the top stretcher.  The over and under weaving continues except this time instead of starting by going over the first warp the cord goes under it.

Here is what the first two woven rows look like.  To make it a little easier to weave and to reduce the wear and tear to the cord I used a thin lath to set their paths.  It preforms roughly the same function as a pair of heddles on a traditional loom.  It also allows me to quickly check to see if I get out of the over under sequence as it’s pretty easy to end up missing a change in direction and having the weavers go over or under a couple of adjacent warps.  From here on it’s a matter of weaving back and forth to fill in the seat area.  When the length of cording gets short new lengths are spliced in using almost the same process as before.  The difference is one of the weavers is added on the left while the other is added on the right.  It can get a little confusing with two active weavers and two inactive ones that I swear are working together to get tangled up and confuse me.

When getting close to the end where there are only a few more passes to go there is not room to use the lath to set the weave path so I switched to a 3/16” brass rod that gave me space for a few more passes.  Eventually there was no room for even the brass rod which means the weaving process slowed dramatically.  To weave a single row increased from about 3 minutes to 20.  That’s because only two of the warps could be crossed due to the friction of the weavers across them.  Then before going on to the next warps all the cord had to be pulled and snugged to that point.  I could have used a lot more force to pull the cords to cross more of the warps at a time but was worried about the stress and friction abrading the cord.  Remember that at this point there is still about 25’ of cord being rubbed across each warp as the weave progresses. 

One thing I did not expect was that during the weaving process the warps were pulled out of alignment into a slight curve.  After the last set of weavers are installed a small steel drift punch is used to adjust the warps to remove the curve and bring the warps back into a straight line. 

Also, as I made the weaves the spacing varied slightly between the alternating rows (warps) of cord so using the same drift punch the spacing got tightened up and made consistent.  When that was done another couple of rows of weavers were needed to fill out the seat.  Here is what the completed straightened and aligned woven seat looks like.

With the actual seat weaving done the finishing bit is to tie the weavers or wefts off.  That is pretty simple after the final weave the cords are brought down over the face of both side stretchers and under the bottom.  The inside weaver is then pulled between the upper and lower side stretcher and wrapped around the second weaver creating a loop that looks just like the starting one as seen here.  The loop cord is then pulled snug.

The seat is flipped over and on the underside of the seat the two weavers are tied off with a square knot completing the woven seat.  I did trim the excess cord a little more from what is shown here and added a dab of glue on the ends to prevent the cord from fraying.

Now, there is just one last detail left to address.  Since the seat will be placed on a wood floor a pad needs to be added to the bottom of the legs to keep them from scratching the oak flooring finish.  Keeping with the natural materials used in the project I decided to pass on using Teflon glides.  Felt pads were not used for appearance purposes and because the ones I have were either too thin to be useful or were too thick and looked bulky.  What did fit from an appearance and functional standpoint was some cork that I had left over from the Cam Clamps I made.  The left photo below shows the cork right after it had been attached to the leg bottoms using double faced foam tape.  The right photo is after going back and dyeing the edges black with the India Ink so they would not show up.

Here are a couple of photos of the completed seat.  The woven area is really not all that large at only 18” x 13” but there is still a whole lot of cord needed to make it.  The 2-pound bundle had about 360’ of cord and I used 342’.  For a while when I was about a third of the way through the weaving, I was worried about running short.  Fortunately, that did not happen.  One thing that surprised me was the sheer amount of time it took to do the weaving.  As I mentioned earlier after three hours or so of weaving and keeping a constant tension on the cording my fingers got tired.  Since there was no completion deadline I could just quit for the day and do other things, like work on writing this blog.  All told it took about 8 days or roughly 20 hours of work to do the full weave. 

Now that I have had a chance to use the seat for a bit it’s just the right height and size to sit on when putting on socks and sandals.  I suppose it would work when putting on shoes too but here in the desert it seldom gets that cold 😊.