First Look

First Look

Here it is, the first look of the stool with a completely woven seat.  You can see that there are quite a few "whiskers" that will need to be clipped off with fingernail clippers.  That will be tomorrows first task.  That will be followed by coating all of the seagrass with a very thinned down application of varathane.  Once that's dry there'll be a second clipping of whiskers followed by a second coat to seal the grass.  How hard was this? Well, it was not without its challenges and looking at it I can find some flaws but that's only because I'm the one that spent hours doing the weaving.  Using seagrass was good and I enjoyed the process.
 My first go around was to use a #7 size seagrass which looks like this:

# 7 Seagrass

This is actually one roll of it but as I wove it, the more I did the less I liked it.  To my eye it's just too big for the rest of the stool.  Doing the recommended process I left it on, critically looked at it several times, slept on it, and then cut it off the next day and ordered the #4 seagrass instead. Design wise, I think the first look picture is much better.
One of the challenges to weaving a seat is keeping the weave going correctly and believe me, it's very easy to run a course the wrong way or forget which rail you should be going to!

Tangled!

Another challenge that arrises is that because the seagrass is twisted into a single strand, as you weave under, over, around, and through you're constantly untwisting it which creates a jumble!  Then as you weave the center part you must pass the weave around first the back rail, then the front rail in a figure eight pattern.  The more you weave, the smaller the hole in the middle of the chair becomes.  What tends to happen then is that the seagrass catches on the sides of that hole and untwists itself.
Whew -- really not complaining, just sharing the trials and tribulations of weaving a seagrass seat.  All in all, I'm pretty pleased with this project and look forward to placing it where it belongs in the house.  What the heck, if I really want to I could cut it off and go again but doubt that will happen any time soon.