KEEPSAKE CHRONICLES
Romancing the Past
Buttoned-up
Genes
The Stickley dining room table had been in the family since 1950. There had been many Thanksgiving and other holiday meals served on it over the last half century. It had much sentimental value so Catherine decided to have it restored and kept in the family as a gift for her grandson Phil, his wife Dede and their twin daughters, Lillian and Tracy. The job involved three components: refinishing and restoration, as well as a "time capsule touch." The refinishing phase of the process involved stripping the cherry table top and simulating a technique I had seen in France called "compression wood burnishing." I learned this technique at the restoration facility of Versailles when I had the opportunity to work on one of Napoleon's billiard cue stands. In prepping the piece, we used wood compression blocks to avoid any abrasiveness to the surface. Wood compression blocks are made of material harder than the wood surface so that they compress the wood fibers without changing the character of the piece, as opposed to sandpaper, which is abrasive. This "French Connection" gives the furniture a burnished look which is more authentic than the "new" look resulting from sandpaper abrasives. The purpose of this was not only to enhance the overall appearance, but to reflect Catherine's ancestry, whose family had emigrated from France around 1800 and had settled in New Jersey.
The commemorative phase of the project involved taking a few strands of Catherine's hair and weaving it with the hairs from her twin great granddaughters. I can still remember the looks of excitement in the twins' eyes and how they giggled as I snipped their hair. It's a way of including the family DNA into the project. We left them in view in the finish at one end of the table – a very personal form of Braille.
Catherine
had brought an old blouse at my request. I asked Lillian and Tracy to each
choose a button from their great-grandmother's blouse and then included them in
the bar strut on the pull-out leaf under the tabletop. We countersunk some
shallow holes and glued the buttons in place. As I told Catherine, "Not
only will a leaf pop up, but so will the memory of Great Grandmother over the
years to come."
