Weekend Courses – what you can expect

Click here for directions to Clooneenagh House

We’ve been running weekend courses at Clooneenagh for a few years now.

The most popular course is the Beginners Upholstery and Antique Restoration weekend.

Click here for course details and prices

We take a maximum of five people at any weekend. We work through broken down and wobbly chairs and all sorts of scruffy or broken furniture.

Nigel guides through the various stages involved in the wood-work aspects: Pepie looks after the upholstery and natural fibre seating.

We put the tools in your hands and show you how the work is done.

Learn about the social history of furniture and how to interpret antique furniture. How the social, political, economic, religious and aesthetic history of Europe shaped our furniture.

You can learn how to distinguish between the genuine article and the fake.

Our courses are designed around novices but lot of people return with more challenging projects.

We start about 9:30 each morning and aim to finish about 6 ish but we don’t mind if anyone wants to work on longer with a project.

Pepie provides tea and coffee breaks and lunchtime is an opportunity for discussion about anything at all. Its also an opportunity to research aspects of furniture from the collections of books about the subjects of the courses.

Pepie does the upholstery in the old coach house. We provide the basic upholstery materials, springs, webbing and stuffing fibre. But we don’t keep a stock of upholstery fabrics so for anyone with definite design ideas its a good idea to bring fabric.

Pepie also does the natural fibre seating projects which includes cane-work, rush and traditional Irish (sugan) cord seats.

Click here for the natural fibre seating page.

Again we provide materials – the fibre in this picture is Seagrass, we also have 3-ply Sisal cord.

In this North Clare chair, the weave is started by winding from side to side and at every fifth loop, the cord is passed over the front spindle.

The chair frame is wider at the front than the back but as the weave is built up, the pattern will correct for that difference.

The cord is tapped with a wrapping iron to keep it tight of the frame.

To finish, the cord is looped from front to back.

We run other courses – Nigel and Austin do the clock repair and appreciation weekends and Nigel also does weekends on clock cases.

Nigel and Austin’s book about longcase clock maintenance and restoration was published by Crowood Press in July 2013.

Nigel is writing another book this time with Karo Ilmonen, about making and repairing clock cases.

The country chair making course is slightly different. A maximum of two people but it is done more effectively on a one-to-one basis.