Lots of house cleaning and dinner prep needs to happen today, and the red rocker that I started on has a broken spindle where the cane will be wrapped. Don on the Hill has been conscripted to come up with a solution for repairing the wood. I tried gluing it once with wood glue, once with epoxy, and neither held. I think between the 2 of us we have a better fix, but it will have to wait until he can get around to it.
I bought these 2 chairs shortly after I purchased the NJ house in 1992. They were white, and the caning was in bad shape. So I painted them a lovely Gumby green and got some assistance from Mark's grandmother in Riverton in figuring out how to do the caning. It's a lot like basket weaving, simple tedious work, but the getting started part is hard to figure out.
I caned the second one all by myself in preparation for The Husband moving in (1997) so that we could both spend some quality time rocking away on the front porch. Of course we spent very little time in the rocking chairs together, but at least they looked nice on the porch.Some years after that I painted them the turquoise color you see here. It was a good color for the dark cedar house in NJ, but not so great with our blue-gray siding up here. Painting them is something I have been meaning to do for awhile, but had to muster the energy to re-cane them at the same time because they are again in pretty bad shape.
Even though I did not seal the seats and backs like you are supposed to, they survived 20 years of occasional snow cover and rain. We'll both be 80 years old in another 20 years, and I think that will be just long enough. Maybe I'll do a few coats of sealer to extend their life since we might just make it past 80—I wish it were that easy to extend our life. I expect we'll have more time for rocking by then.
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