This is a story that starts with a chair — a battered old chair that Jerry Crist found in an antique shop in Norfolk, England. Battered, however, is a kind word. The chair was covered with the dust of centuries, the wood was dull and scuffed, and the caning was ripped, cracked and discolored.
But he liked it. Crist liked the sweep of the legs, and he imagined the chair all polished and repaired, the mahogany gleaming and the cane cream-colored and complete.
This was during the 1970s. Crist, 66, of Beecher was stationed in England as a fighter pilot with the United States Air Force. On leave, he and his wife, Nancy, traveled and shopped; their home in Beecher is filled with an ever-changing array of objets d’art acquired during world travels. So the chair joined the collection, and it stayed dusty and scuffed and cracked even after Crist retired in 1983.
“We moved 26 times” during a 30-year career with the Air Force, Crist said, and each time the chair, along with a 17th Century French rolling pin, a Buddha carved of soapstone, pottery from Borneo, a Burmese lamp, a glass liquor table from Amsterdam, and a hand-lacquered cabinet from China were packed up and shipped to the next destination. That included an assignment as a defense attache with the Foreign Service and a tour of duty at the Pentagon.
Seven years after his retirement, Crist finally unpacked the chair. He cleaned it up, removing the broken caning and stripping and polishing the wood. And so he had a beautiful and sturdy wood frame.
Crist called a couple of furniture restorers to find out how much it would cost to have the chair re-caned.
“The cost was prohibitive,” he said, with estimates for re-caning the back, sides and seat coming in at about $500. Machine-made cane mats in the traditional design are available for a fraction of the price; Crist, however, wanted the antique chair to be restored authentically. He decided to do it himself.
“It can’t be that hard,” Crist told his family. He ordered several hanks of cane — the stripped bark of the bamboo plant — from a manufacturer out East, and they included a set of directions.
You see where this story is going, don’t you? Crist gobbed it all up. The new cane cracked and split. His hands bled from dozens of nicks. The directions were complicated, and the traditional design he had attempted resembled the stubble left in a farmer’s field after the harvest.
Caning, as Crist learned, is hardly a hobby. Consider that the crafts we practice in our spare time were once the province of skilled tradesmen who employed methods they learned from master craftsmen. Caning is a practical skill, and Crist needed a craftsman.
Neighbors introduced Crist to Opal Beseke. She was known around Beecher for the various crafts she had mastered, and the neighbors remembered Beseke had restored a set of cane chairs she had inherited from her mother.
Beseke, 86, learned the craft about 30 years ago.
“Those dining room chairs were old when my mother bought them from a second hand store,” she said, explaining her determination to re-cane the broken seats. So she sent away for a booklet advertised in a craft magazine — Beseke doesn’t remember any names — and followed the directions.
“It’s not that complicated, but you do really have to be interested in it,” she said.
“She figured it out easier than me,” Crist said.
Beseke visited Crist’s basement workshop. She shook her head when she saw the chair and the numbers of holes through which the cane had to be woven.
“It looked like a nerve-wracking job,” Beseke said. “I wasn’t sure we could do it.”
But this story wouldn’t amount to much if they hadn’t completed the job. So let’s take a step back and find out more about the process of caning.
Caning is a tradition that reaches back to 13th Century Holland and is similar to rushing, which uses the bark of a marsh plant, and splinting, which uses splints chiseled from hickory or ash. Seats or chair backs were most commonly caned; the process provided an ornamental but sturdy touch.
Holes are drilled around the periphery of the area to be caned. The closer the holes, the greater the density of the weave. Density is also affected by the size of the holes; the circumference determines the width of the cane used in the weave.
Crist orders the cane in widths ranging from just under 2 millimeters to 3 1/2 millimeters. The cane must then be soaked in a mixture of water and a little glycerin or oil to make it pliable, explained Dan Brady, owner of Oddlie Ltd., a furniture restoration shop in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood.
The soaking takes several hours. “You want it to be like a wet noodle,” Crist said. “The cane needs to be wet so it doesn’t break.”
Next comes figuring the bridge, or center line of the weaving, and the filling in of the gusset, which is the side area that must be woven first to make sure the design is symmetrical.
“Sometimes you can eyeball it,” Crist said. “Sometimes you need a pencil and paper to figure out the weave.”
Crist begins in the center with a few pairs of vertical strands. The cane is threaded through the holes, and golf tees are wedged into the holes to hold the cane in place. That’s not a traditional part of the process, but Crist manages Golf Vista, a nine-hole executive course he designed in Monee, and finds the tees a handy little tool for keeping the strips of cane in place until they are glued.
Then he threads in pairs of horizontal strands and weaves them through the vertical strips. After several horizontal strips are in place, he begins to weave in single strips on the bias, running the cane over one pair of strands and under the next.
The last step is to make the spline, which is a strip of cane that holds down the cut ends of the weaving.
“Most caning is the traditional seven-step process” described above, said Brady. Other patterns include spider web and daisy designs. “It is quite decorative and more challenging to the weaver. And it is even more labor-intensive than the traditional.”
Crist, whose fingerprints are almost worn away from caning, put in 100 hours of work caning that first chair. It holds a place of pride in his home — next to the Louis XIV couch — and he credits Beseke with making sure the work was done right.
“She was my mentor,” Crist said. “I couldn’t have done it without her.”
“It surely wasn’t done in a hurry. But he did a marvelous job,” said Beseke.
After the first chair, Crist was hooked on the process. He has since restored dozens of antique chairs — each taking about 16 hours to finish — and his basement workshop is crowded with about 20 chairs in various stages of restoration.
Crist has tended to focus on certain kinds of chairs, which he picks up for a few dollars at estate sales and auctions. Known as pressed-back chairs, the walnut or oak chairs feature a design — usually leaves and flowers — stamped into the wood with steel dies, although the cane bottoms were hand-woven.
“They are one of the first instances of mass-produced furniture and are a direct result of the Industrial Revolution,” said Brady, who formerly taught caning techniques at his shop. These types of chairs, which include ladderback and spindle chairs, date from 1880 to 1910 and were common catalog furniture of the era.
“They could have been ordered from Sears or Wards catalogs,” he said.
The chairs lasted, but the caning did not. However, replacing or repairing the cane in the traditional method is expensive.
According to Brady, most cane chairs today are manufactured using machine-made cane mats, except at the very high or low ends of the spectrum. Inexpensive imports from countries where labor is cheap are often hand-caned, although the work may not be elegant, and one-of-a-kind designer pieces also may feature hand-woven cane.
Because of the time and the costs involved, there is little call for hand caning — although restorers like Brady are often called on to provide color matching of new cane to old — and few people carry on the tradition.
Beseke hasn’t done any caning in years; the process is just too laborious. And she and Crist are hard pressed to come up with the names of any other caners in the area.
Beseke, though, still uses the dining room chairs she re-caned years ago, and Crist has a dozen chairs in use in the dining room and kitchen. The oak dining room chairs feature a variety of stamped designs; the kitchen is home to a half-dozen ladderback chairs. “I think they make a statement,” he said.
But are they worth anything?
“Everything is worth something,” Brady said.
The chairs are still fairly common, especially in rural areas, and occupy a particular niche on the market; Brady characterized it as the “country” look.
Crist gives away most of the chairs he canes. His three children — John, 37; Kimberly, 33; and Ellen, 30 — have been the recipients of several, and he has loaned a few to the Iroquois County Historical Society Museum, near where he grew up.
But the story of the chair doesn’t really end here, because those in the know will continue to recycle this furniture.
“With the cost of new furniture, you can’t find a decent dining room chair for under $400,” Brady said. “These chairs have demonstrated reliability and craftsmanship. You renew those and pass on to the next generation or two to reuse.”
