make a champagne chair

Duut. Duut. There are two weeks left to enter the contest. A new thing from last year is that you can opt to pick up a free champagne kit (no excuses for not entering now!) at one of their dwr stores. Enter to win here. Check out last year’s chairs here.

At one-ish Thursday morning, when the tools were spread out on the floor and I started making what turned out to be a Baroque chair, I wasn’t sure if the little thing would make it to the DWR studios the next day. But thanks to the fabulousness of Express mail, Festen made it, and well before the five o’clock deadline.

My demise can be attributed to the materials. Champagne wire and cork, as it turns, are not all made equal. Shaving my champagne cork seemed to be a dead end, soaking it in water helped, but ever so slightly, and given the nature of my procrastination, I couldn’t sit there and slave patiently away for hours on end. Also, the flexibility of the wire was very low and difficult to ply to a smooth, clean line. This year, the goal will be to find a high flexibility and smaller gage wire with a softer cork so that I can make the modern chair envisioned, instead of my Baroque silliness.

Festen on the middle is mine. My excitement rubbed off and so my sister made her own, on the left. The other is a sketch.

About Festen: Celebrations, champagne ones, are seldom celebrated by one person alone. It’s more fun when others are involved, hence the concept for my champagne chair: a chair for two. Two friends, two lovers, two strangers, two anythings in celebration of something.

Every year, I sort of tell myself that I’m going to participate in DWR’s Champagne Chair Contest. And then the holidays happen and I miss the deadline. So this year, I am making a conscious effort and I have this goal to remind me.