My sister has knitted several Christmas stockings for us, so I thought she deserved something nice in return. This is a pretty faithful reproduction of a Shaker No. 0 armed rocker, sized for kids (or in this case, grandkids) aged from 2 to 4. The Shakers originally sold these to the outside world for $3.50 without arms, $3.75 with.

This one is based on drawings scanned from Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture, Volume 1.” To me, the trick is to make the rails of a length that will fit an odd number of tape rows running front to back (for a symmetrical weave) and also with minimal gap where the rails join the legs. These lengths then dictate the angle that the sides will splay out from back to front. A flashback to 11th grade trigonometry provided the answer, for this chair 7.73 degrees. 

Another issue is to proportion things so the chair retains some of the grace of a full-sized Shaker chair, without looking like a stubby kid’s version. A legs’ diameter of 1 1/16″ helps create that effect.

The back legs are steam bent and oriented so they bend slightly back and outwards. After drying, the springback was a little more than I expected so the result is pretty subtle.

Made of cherry and finished with a tung oil/linseed oil/varnish mixture rubbed on with 0000 steel wool.

Launch Gallery