The first part of our visit after leaving the car park was to visit the churchyard and see the grave of William Morris, it’s hidden away at the edge of the churchyard and took us a short while to locate.

The walk up to Kelmscott Manor is a pleasant one, though I’m guessing the locals get frustrated when it gets really busy around there. We’d arrived early so we had a walk by the Thames first.

We then wandered around the outside of Kelmscott Manor, the grounds and garden are very nice indeed, certainly worth getting their early to enjoy.

Once we got inside (you’re allocated a time slot to cut down on crowds), we could probably have spent all day in there looking around, the interior was one of the most inspiring houses I’ve visited.

For a while I’ve been looking for a reading chair, somewhere to sit away from distractions, where I can pull a good book from the shelf and sit back and just read. We searched all the usual places, and we searched a few unusual places. Then we hit the internet and searched there for suitable chairs, we didn’t find anything modern that fit the bill. Then we struck on the idea of a William Morris inspired chair, we refined our search and found nothing really that was both suitable and within our price range. The solution was simple (cough), just build one…

So we looked for plans online, but didn’t really have any confidence that they were going to produce the right chair, then we thought “hey Inki (of Dryad Studios) may be able to help” so we dropped her a line and a day later the email arrived with all the dimensions and details that we needed. After the plans were sorted it was time to visit the wood yard –

It was hard to imagine turning three planks and a couple of lumps of 4″ x 4″ Oak into a chair, but with the help of our friendly neighbour and his machine shop the rough cut wood was turned into usable pieces of wood. Along the way we changed the design a little to include curves to two faces of the legs, and a curved top to the spindles under the arms, then we had to decide on the finish. We experimented and in the end fuming the wood in Ammonia for a few hours gave a nice colour to the wood, a few coats of finish and it was time to assemble. The result, well, I’m rather pleased with it, we just need to get the cushions sorted for the base and the back before I can hit the books.