Weaving a Danish Cord Seat

I've wanted to do something like this for a long time.  In Richard Maguire's latest online course, he builds and weaves the seat for a Danish stool.  I won't be writing about the woodwork here - only the weaving.  I will say that even though the woodwork was fairly straight forward, there were challenges due to the angles involved.  I made a couple of mistakes, but hid them well and overall was very happy with that part.  The wood is red alder and it was finished with shellac before the weaving.

The completed stool

This type of weaving uses Danish cord and 90° nails.  I got them from Peerless Rattan, who I believe is behind the videos that Ed Hammond does on YouTube (nothing sponsored here).  My understanding of this cord is that it is paper that is twisted into a fiber, then three of these fibers are twisted (not braided) together to form the cord.  It's nominally 1/8" diameter, but is slightly larger.

The paper cord

The nails are L-shaped, the long side a strong 3/4" and 5/64" diameter and the flattened short side 3/8" long.

The nails

Before weaving, install the nails.  For the stool ends, there needs to be an odd number of nails so that the weave parallel to the ends will exit the first and last weaver the same way.  The spacing is determined by the length available and the desired distance between weavers.

Used a stick marked with the 15/16" spacing to transfer to the upper side rails

Marked a scant 5/16" from the underside to complete the crosshairs.
In retrospect, should have gone no more than 1/4 up from the bottom, as
these rails are 3/4" thick and the short leg of the nails extended close to the top of the rail. 

I pre-drilled 1/16" holes for the nails about 3/8" deep (should have gone a little deeper) and also blunted the nail points to avoid any problems with splitting the wood as they are hammered in.  Nails on the front and back rails were done with 5/8" spacing (interrupted by the legs), and were placed about 1/2" from the top of the rail.  That spacing probably could have been a tiny bit smaller, maybe 9/16" to make the front-to-back weaving easier.

The weave starts on the stool's long axis.  Because each weave of cord is wrapped around a nail and returned to the start location, the weavers become pairs of cord.

View from above after completing the long direction weavers.
The following views from below show more detail.

The starting end

The far end: you can see how the cord goes over the rail to the bottom, hooks on the nail,
then returns back over the rail and back to the starting side.

The next part fills in the gaps between these weavers on the upper side rails and uses a cut length of cord, as opposed to weaving it directly from the spool.  I used about 28-30 feet for each end, but had about 5-6 feet left over.

The "infill" wraps, filling between the existing weavers.
I usually got 5 wraps between pairs of long weavers - a few times only 4.

View from below: one crossed wrap on the bottom.
No biggie - it won't be seen.  The other end was better.

Getting the cord not to overlap on the bottom of the rail was tougher than it sounds.  It was challenging to get the cord from one infill area, past a pair of weavers and to the next infill area without overlapping another cord on the bottom.

The front to back weaving started with the areas outside of where the legs join the front and rear rails.  

One end complete: over, under, over, under, hook on nail, come back to front.
Repeat for next row, but go under, over, under, over this time.  Repeat.
The last row (nearer the center of stool) is woven between the two strands of each pair of weavers.

The underside: it gets a bit busy

I added a 4th nail on the other end and that helped keep things more orderly.

End sections complete

The middle section was tedious, but went along well.

About 1/3 complete

Weave completed

It wasn't until I was done that I saw the mistake.  It's easy to get sucked into a rhythm and not see it when it happens.  But I missed an "over-under-over-under ..." and ended up with an "over-under-over-over".  This happened 8 pairs of weavers from the far end.  It's easy for me to see, but so far nobody I've shown this to has noticed, so instead of pulling out the last 8 rows, I just left it.

Zigged, when I should have zagged

Two last things I'll say about this.  First, it was very helpful to have the spool of cord on a stick that I chucked into the vise, allowing me to pull cord as the spool turned on the stick.  A rotating device might have been nice, but this worked.

The spool was about 4-5 times larger than this at the start

Second, this was hard work!  I found myself really tired after a couple hours of weaving.  I kept a lot of tension on the cord (maybe too much?) and it was taxing on the muscles.  And it's tough on the hands and fingers!

Overall, this was very satisfying.  Another thing off the bucket list.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to do more weaving in the future, perhaps with different materials.