Traveling from Southwestern Michigan with a retired school bus full of willow cuttings, Bim Willow brought his willow wood workshop, sponsored by the Eastern Pennsylvania Permaculture Guild, to the Kimberton Waldorf School in Chester County as a weekend class October 2 for those curious to hammer away some rustic, sustainably built sets of furniture in the outdoors.
Bim Willow discusses tips and smarts for putting together rustic, renewable resource furniture from willow limbs.
Meet Bim Willow
Willow admitted that he goes by what he calls his surreal name now, after spending his earlier years both as a clown and mime training under Marcel Marceau, with grayed and wild, curly hair making a home on his head. After a series of accidents led him to begin building furniture part-time because he no longer had the physical ability to perform anymore, the side income endeavor eventually became a full-time operation, with the part-time willow work dating back to 1972, originally. By 1985, Willow had taken his talents to a professional level.
Before Building
For the workshop offered at the Kimberton Waldorf School, Willow brought in sandbar willow branches in an assortment of sizes, explaining that in the Midwest, it’s a waste willow people try to get rid of, which leads it to be a resourceful asset to those with an imagination and drive like his.
Since as wood, willow is biodegradable, Willow recommended treating it with a mixture of boiled linseed oil and turpentine. But for a more natural approach, he said with ease that the best treatment is taking the eventual furniture inside, not leaving it exposed to the elements.
“It’s very comfortable, sturdy and can last for years,” Willow said about the furniture, with those at the workshop making end tables, benches, loveseats, ladderback chairs, trellises and a potter’s tables, sometimes called a baker’s table.
An in-the-works loveseat perches here waiting for seat-spots.
Tools & Seasonal Cutting Smarts
A reliable set of loppers, pruners, a pair of diagonal cutters, cheap nails and several sizes of hammers are essentials for building willow furniture, but Willow pointed out that most of the projects done at the workshop can be approached using all kinds of wood.
“The best time to harvest is in the winter,” Willow said, “because that’s when the bark holds tighter to the wood.” Spring and summer are not ideal because the wood can dry out so quickly, and it’s important to hold the moisture in the branches so that they’re more pliable and elastic for furniture-building, less likely to crack while being hammered.
Willow sourced this busload of branches from a three-acre willow patch in Kentucky, where he has been cutting and pruning what he needs for his work for 24 years. The willow grows back within a few years, which means it reacts well to the trimming and is renewable.
Easy as an End Table
Willow’s own pieces, as seen on his website and that of Lin McIntosh who books his workshops all around the country, with usually one to three per week scheduled seasonally, sometimes tagging along to help him with bigger classes, are of course incredibly intricate and elegant in their rustic looks, once in a while taking form as large animal structures made from bundled twigs.
But for the sake of this workshop, end tables stood (quite literally, too) as a very practical and even utilitarian means of creating something from a pile of sticks, to bring usefully into a home. For the tops of tables, Willow brought along pine from a lumber store, since it’s easy for first-timers to build with among branch samplings.
End tables are one of the more basic but still very practical possibilities in willow furniture work.
Workshop-goers pounded four nails into the underside of the pine, two inches away from each corner, only far enough in to be stable and sturdy. Willow then showed how to snip diagonal cutters to cut off the tops of the nails, then hammering chainsaw or lopper-cut legs lightly into the upright nails in a technique called blind-nailing.
Working Toward Completion
Most of the remainder of the lesson involved securing more branches to the sides and backs of sets of legs for better balance of weight from use or sitting, with basic nail and hammer efforts incorporated. Some more lopping off of ends of limbs gave way to better finishing touches, with Willow making his way around the newfound renewably-geared furniture enthusiasts to offer guidance and final tips in getting the pieces ready for a new life in the homes of their makers.
Future Workshops
Willow is scheduled to visit Longwood Gardens for another workshop in 2013, after completing one earlier this year at the arboretum in Kennett Square. If enough interest and demand stirs before then, he may be back to teach another workshop at Longwood Gardens in 2012. For information on scheduling a workshop or seeing Willow’s books about his approaches to furniture-building, contact Lin McIntosh.
