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With cane, she's able

Kathleen Barnes takes damaged relics and weaves them back into the family heirlooms they once were. She sometimes makes them even better.

By BETH N. GRAY
Published March 30, 2005

	[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]
	Kathleen Barnes' hands fly as she works on installing a fiber rush seat on a ladder-back chair in her home near Brooksville. The seat is woven from about 2 pounds of fiber rush, which takes 10 to 12 hours to complete. Her dog, Britt, sleeps next to her.

BROOKSVILLE - Feel free to call her an artist, a historian, a practitioner of solid geometry. But Kathleen Barnes prefers, simply, cane weaver - albeit a weaver who restores new life to old, broken pieces.

Working in rattan, rush, reed, cord and wicker, Barnes replaces and repairs damaged caning in furniture. People come to her door from all over the state bringing family heirlooms.

"Most (of my work) comes from individuals. Usually, they're family pieces," she said. Antique shops and upholsterers recommend her to customers.

Barnes, plying the craft part-time for nine years at her in-home workshop on Old Crystal River Road, can weave octagon holes, solid triangles, tight herringbones and more. She has woven some patterns that don't even appear in textbooks.

She helped her husband, Tom, once cord with hemp rope a curly maple bed that likely dated to the early 1800s. Before bedsprings were invented, she explained, rope was woven on a bed frame to support a feather or straw mattress.

Tom, a self-taught caner for 20 years, enticed his wife into the handicraft when he owned an antiques shop in Indiana. Many antique furniture pieces of wicker or rush, or with cane inlays, suffered from aging and needed to be refurbished before they could be sold.

With caning popular from pioneer times, the Victorian era and into the mid 1900s, most of the pieces that clients now take to Barnes are antiques. They usually come with a family history.

A woman recently brought in a small wicker rocker, dried and cracked with age.

"She sat in it as a child," Barnes said. "It sat in an attic for years."

Another client brought Barnes a work-in-progress, a chair his father had begun to recane before going blind. Barnes completed it using the flat cane left over from the father's effort.

"When I was finished, I had that much left," Barnes explained, spreading her hands less than a foot apart.

The customer, who intended to give the chair to his daughter, was so pleased he wanted Barnes to sign it. Claiming she isn't an artist, she declined, but suggested a small brass plate be attached, stating the chair's history.

Another rocker, in a family since the Civil War, came to her shop in pieces. It could have been kindling except for the obvious shaping of the wood. No caning remained at all. Barnes has a photograph in her "Before and After" folio to prove it.

The chair reassembled, she then fashioned inch-wide cane into a closed "porch weave," authentic to the era.

On at least one project, Barnes performed some deconstruction of her own.

A client brought her a "very old child's rocker" with a broken rush seat in a pattern she'd never seen before.

"This is something you don't find in any book," she said, fondling the delicate relic.

Rather than cut the rush from the frame, she disassembled the struts and removed intact what was left of the rush. She hopes to duplicate the design some day.

Original rush is a plant product, but today's replacement is a twisted paper product.

"It's easier to work with and longer lasting than the natural," Barnes said.

In fact, much of Barnes' efforts yield a sturdier piece of furniture than the original. For instance, chairs of rush seating were originally padded for shape and comfort with straw or newspaper. Barnes employs more long-lasting corrugated cardboard.

She performs minor structural repairs to furniture when needed, but for major work she calls on artisan woodworker Lori Stanger of Al's Wood Art Inc. of Istachatta.

"We work back and forth," says Stanger. "We make anything that's missing, a chair leg, an arm. I contract her services a lot."

Stanger says Barnes' work is "meticulous, very, very thorough."

"She's very creative," Stanger said. "She will take a piece apart and reconstruct it."

Barnes' reconstructions cost $80 to $125 for a chair. Rocking chairs, which demand a curved back for comfort and "are a little more time intensive," demand a heftier price tag.

She advises clients that she works only part time - full time she's a receptionist in a real estate office - so a chair might take two to three weeks to complete.

"Most people don't mind waiting because they've kept these pieces for years and they're just happy to find someone who can do the work," Barnes said.

More than 20 chairs were stacked awaiting attention in her workroom and more were spilling into her living room.

"As you can see, I have plenty of work," said Barnes, 57, who hopes to retire in several years and devote her time to caning, with her husband continuing as assistant.

An interesting project on her horizon is restoration of a hole-caned reproduction Victorian sofa from an owner in St. Augustine, who mailed photographs showing rough-edged gaping holes in the sofa's caning. From those holes a couple of dogs peek out. Barnes can already guess the history there.

Kathleen Barnes may be contacted at 796-2871 evenings and weekends.

Beth Gray may be can be reached at graybethn@earthlink.net

[Last modified March 30, 2005, 10:30:57]