My Favorite Chair Is the Eames Lounge and Ottoman, What’s Your’s?
bronze, brass, copper, sterling silver
3 x 6 x 0.04 in.
The card scraper is a simple, cheap, and highly effective tool used in fine woodworking to clean or smooth a surface. A piece of thin sheet steel is filed on its edge and burnished to produce a bur on one or both corners. This bur gently removes a very small amount of material and leaves a near finish-quality surface. The card scraper is most effective when the user holds it with their fingers on either side and their thumbs in the center, flexing the metal to concentrate the cutting edge in a smaller area. The most common dimension of a card scraper is 3 x 6 in., though they also come in different curves. Because it is such a gentle and effective tool, it is often used for cleaning marquetry after it is glued to a surface to avoid scraping or sanding through the often 1/40 in. veneer.
I felt that delicate and decorative marquetry depictions of chairs required an equally decorative and delicate card scraper. My card scraper was made using the same techniques as marquetry and one similar to the marriage of metals technique in jewelry and metalsmithing. I hand sawed the image of the chair using the double-bevel method of wood marquetry then soldered the parts together into a flat sheet. With both the lack of spring in the bronze background and the image made of precious and semi-precious metals, My Favorite Chair Is the Eames Lounge and Ottoman, What’s Yours? forces the user to scrape gently lest they scrape right through that precious depiction.