Since we have introduced various repairs to woven items on other pages, this will be somewhat of a catchall page of a variety of types of repairs to a variety of types of materials and pieces. Hopefully it will make it abundantly clear that if you have items of woven furniture that are no longer in great shape, replacement is not your only option. We can help you by restoring your item to a condition of usefulness and beauty once again.
The light colored spokes you can see running diagonally lower left to upper right are the strands we replaced. Tricky!
Below you can see this buggy top down. Get them used to riding in a convertible early, serve them well later in life!
Repairs are lower left corner.
The left photo shows two things. First, because more dramatic in appearance, is the repairs in progress on the back. Second, is the newly rewoven seat, waiting to be colored as it has been in the photo to the right.
The thing we want you to see is that repairs to broken cane can be done. Repairs like this are rarely worth doing however. The price per strand is high enough that it can quickly become close to the cost of recaning the entire seat or back. If you wonder about your item, look at the back and count the breaks before you call for pricing.
Shortly after this customer picked up a set of these chairs just rewoven with cattail, an expensive job, this one came back with a broken front rail.
This should be featured on our "impossible repairs" page! All the joints on this chair were tight, the cattail was fresh and tight, how were we going to get the old rail out and a new rail in without either taking the chair apart or reweaving the seat? Well, it was difficult, but we did it as you can see to the right. There was some visible fraying to the cattail under the point where the rail was broken. We actually had trimmed some and glued more to limit the apparent damage to this degree.
The end result of our work was to create a chair that was once again strong with very minimal distress to the cattail or eye of the beholder.
This is a stand to a bassinet. The curved sections are the hoop which holds the bassinet securely in place. They are clearly broken. The cross support pieces at both ends have pulled away from the right side legs. The supports under both ends have also bent and broken away from the right side legs. The cane windings are missing in places.
The last mentioned item was not a concur to the customer. She intended to paint the entire piece herself and thought the windings unnecessary.
Everything else we repaired and replaced as you can see to the right. New hoop at the top, new supports under the ends, and the supports were reattached to the legs and held in place by a screw.
For some reason the interplay of colors, interwoven patterns and lines in this sofa seat really appealed to us. We notice interesting designs and to us this sofa seemed almost to be a very sophisticated design statement. We have attempted to capture some of the beauty of what we saw in the photo below.
This sofa did have fabric cushions to sit on, but the foundation was cane woven in the box weave pattern, which is not known for strength. There is a separate woven base underneath, made from buri sticks, but the cane still supported the weight of the seated person.
What made this job difficult was that the cane was woven around the innermost hoop which was then attached to the outer hoop by cane windings which were in turn bound to the front rail and the back strands. Our challenge was to reweave the cane without being able to remove the inner hoop. We found a way to do it and it turned out well.
We have hidden this photo down here at the end because we really don't do repairs to basketry–unless you ask. One customer did. She really liked this item but it was coming apart and needed some reweaving. Our versatile weaver did a great job of making it look like new. If you could go back to where this was purchased and buy it again, you probably could have bought ten of these for the cost of the repairs. If you can't go back, the repair cost may sound like a bargain.
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