As our circle of friends grew in the crafting world, several people suggested that we make a traditional 3-legged stool, something that people who spin yarn would use. The project really kicked off when Spazspun of Etsy.com commissioned us to make one, and is actually made to be the right height for a spinning wheel, but could be used for anything.

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Here is the stool we sent her sitting by her spinning wheel where she uses it:

We started off by making a prototype with a pine seat, and legs made out of honeysuckle branches that we had in the shop:

We weren’t really thrilled with the outcome, so we went back to the drawing board and completely revised the design. The structure of it is really simple – a board with 3 legs – but there are a lot of subtle changes that can be made that dramatically change the appearance, comfort, and practicallity of the overall stool.

We went with oak for the seat and legs to add extra strength since there was no bracing or lateral support. Set at a slight angle, the legs protrude through the seat, similar to the tuam. Here you can see – amongst the clutter of the shop – a seat with the holes cut out on the table, and an assembled stool before the legs are trimmed flush to the seat and sanded smooth:

The next challenge was coming up with the artwork for the seat. We quickly discarded the idea of carving the seat, in part to keep the cost down, but mainly because sitting on a carved seat would just be uncomfortable. And after all, what good is a stool that no one wants to sit on. :-) Through a lot of trial and error and back and forth, we finally settled on this design:

This has been on of our more popular items, and have since made a few more batches of them: