Seven Pass Seat

Most cane seats are abandoned at the same moment: somewhere around the fourth pass, when the strands stop making sense and the holes all look alike. Seven Pass Seat is the friend at the bench who has done it a hundred times.

Measure the hole line of your chair, pick the cane size, and the app lays out the whole seat for you — how many holes, how far apart, where to start, and how much cane and binder to buy. Then it walks you through all seven passes, one at a time. Watch each pass weave itself across the seat, or trace it with your finger from hole to hole: the right hole clicks, the wrong one tugs the strand back. By the time you pick up real cane, your hands already know the way.

Weaving a new piece instead? Drag the corner of the frame to its real size — seat, back, armrests, a whole garden sofa — choose the ribbon or reed and the pattern, and see the length, the weight and the number of coils before you order a single metre. Checkerboard, herringbone, diagonal twill, open hexagon, braided edges and leg wraps each come with step-by-step drawings and the one tip that saves the most mistakes.

Natural rattan has its own clock. Drop your reed into the soak bowl and the timer counts the minutes its thickness needs. When you think it's ready, bend a test rod right on the screen: soaked enough and it curves clean, too early and it cracks — exactly like the real thing, without wasting a rod.

For old chairs that have seen better days, answer a couple of quick questions about what's broken — torn mesh, a loose wrap, a dried-out frame, a sagging seat — and get a repair plan with times and a shopping list to tick off as you go. Season by season, the app also reminds you what your furniture needs: away from the radiator in winter, out of the midday sun in summer, washed and covered before the frost.

If you weave to order, every project can turn into a quote. Material comes straight from the count, hours come from your journal, add your rate and markup, and the price tag tells you what to ask and what you actually earn per hour.

And every piece gets its own page in the journal: stages with photos, material used, hours at the bench, notes about the quirks of that frame. At the end, slide between the before and the after and see how far it came.

Made for restorers bringing back grandmother's bentwood chairs, garden furniture makers working in polyrattan, basket weavers moving on to stools and seats, and anyone who has ever stared at a box of cane and wondered where to begin.

Pull up a chair. It's the one you're about to cane.

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