Chair Caning With Plastic Bottles

This was the idea I had for the recycling contest, since I have had this plastic “rope” for a while but had no idea where to use it. And then I accidentally stumbled upon a video on caning.

• A chair/an old chair
• Plastic bottles
• A drill
• Some basic tools as box cutter, pliers, ruler, pencil …
• Supplies for cutting bottles in string/cane: lumber board/plank, blade, screws

The process on how to get the „plastic cane” has been described in these

instructables previously:

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-Rope-fro...

https://www.instructables.com/DIY-ROPE-FROM-PLASTI...

https://www.instructables.com/Portable-Device-to-T...

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-a-Plasti...

For this project you must use cylindrical bottles only. Because even a little conical curve of a bottle will make the cane curl. Bottles with minimal surface relief are fine.

If you are using chair that has previously been used for caning, then skip this step.

This site https://www.wickerwoman.com/articles/chair-caning... has some basic instructions on caning and how to choose cane size versus hole diameter and distance between holes.

My „cane” size is ~ 4 mm, so based on that I chose the hole size (8mm) and distance between hole centers (2.2-2.3 mm). I must admit the distance between holes could have been smaller, but then again then there would‘ve been more holes and less holes is easier. My chair has 57 holes.

I am no expert in caning so I don’t have any exact instructions for this part and I think my hole placement could be better, but also my chair was not designed for caning, so I have to work with what I had.

Of course regular chair seat shapes are simpler to cane, but where is fun in that.

I followed instructions from these sites precisely:

https://www.wickerwoman.com/articles/chair-caning-...

https://www.chairscaned.com/7_step_strand_cane.ht...

Caning with "plastic cane" is not that hard and not different from regular caning (I guess). I found the youtube video to be the most useful of the three.

For the finishing touch in order to cover up the holes I used "plastic cane” from brown bottle.

It is possible that if the "plastic cane" had been more matte or not seethrough the end result would be more better looking.

That’s all, hope you enjoyed the idea.