Homage to Craft; the Dignity of Working with Your Hands

I spent some time last week tearing down an old sofa which had worn out, and become a home for a couple of families of field mice. In the process, I learned a lot.

The sofa has been in the family for a very long time. My grandparents had it reupholstered, as it turned out, in 1938. It was in their living room under a floral print cover when I was a young child. I remember playing with a wooden play farm (fences, animals, houses and barns, and even people) on the rug in front of it while my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents sat and chatted over tea and cookies. When their household was disbursed to various and sundry relatives after my grandmother died, the sofa ended up at our ski chalet in front of the fireplace. It was a great place to stretch out and read, or to roughhouse and wrestle on and around, or to lean against while sitting on the floor playing Balderdash or Clue or Probe or Battleship. It made the long trip out West with my sister, where it survived a fire in her apartment building, and then endured a trailer haul down to California, where it adorned our family room for several years. Finally, it made the long journey to where it now sits, in the Eastern Townships, back to where it had been twelve years before.

I regret not having taken a true "before" picture - here I've taken off the cushions and started removing the (very strong) fabric. But you can get a sense for the size and mass of the sofa from this picture, as well as of the greenness of the area after a very wet summer.
Another view towards the house.
This is the coolest thing about this whole project - the two guys (I'm assuming they were men given the time period) who upholstered this sofa signed and dated their work! They were rightly proud of it - it was extremely well done, durable, and with great attention to detail. It survived generations of sleepers, wrestlers and roughhousers, neckers and lovers, babies and dogs, and took a great deal of effort to tear apart!
These are two views of the next stage - from the outer fabric, underlain by a layer of cotton fabric, into the ticking and batting. Note that all this work is a relic of a pre-petroleum product age - all the materials are natural: cotton, horsehair, straw, wood, some brown batting that appears to be hemp(?), jute cordage, steel springs, burlap, and all held together with hundreds of upholstery tacks, all nailed by hand - No air guns or tackers.
Look at the volume of cotton and horsehair stuffing:And here's some 70-year old straw:Three upholsterer's needles somehow left in the sofa:A view of the jute webbing under the seat springs:Here's a detail of the springs - note how they are all tied together by hand with sisal twine. Not a single spring poked through, broke, or came out of place in seventy years!
The job is done, and now to dispose of the remains. The nice thing about natural products is that they are all biodegradable. The three wheelbarrow loads of stuffing were spread over the woods, where they will provide bedding for fieldmice, nesting material for birds, and ultimately, food for moulds and fungi until they are returned to the earth.Only one small bag for the dump - the rest will be beneficial to the land and its wild inhabitants.Here are some shots of the stuffing spread over some logging slash - good habitat!