Maiyaan Stool

A maiyaan is a sort of bridal shower that precedes Punjabi weddings. The prospective bride/groom is sat in front of their family on a low stool, shaded by a red embroidered chunni, and rubbed down with a paste made of turmeric, flour, and mustard oil, a sort of ancient bronzer.

Now of course with modern cosmetics and the like, this ceremony is entirely ceremonial, but it persists to fulfil the aesthetic “bigness” of the Punjabi wedding, and therefore has evolved to an even larger, more ornate, more ostentatious event.

My sister’s was to take place in a transparent tent, strung with light braids and chandeliers, with a set: carpets, an archway, draperies, floral arrangements.

I was not satisfied with the stool. Maiyaan stools are typically of the typical Indian wooden stool style, a board held up by two boards across its length:

Simple Low Stool

Of course they are usually wrapped in a velvet and glittering gold ribbon, but still figural-ly unimpressive.

I’ve long admired the cabriole leg footstools typical of Victorian furniture, and I figured this would be a great opportunity to use that figure. In fact, I started design/construction with a sketch of the leg profile.

I modeled this component as well, that I may have the piece in my hand to critique its curves.

Fusion Embed iframe

Now we have to take a slight detour to talk about lumber. I wanted this piece to have special sentimental significance for my sister, as it is a symbol of her childhood home. The houses in our neighborhood all feature a Chinese Pistache in the sidewalk strip. Unfortunately ours, after 20 years was showing signs of disease, so I cut it down last year. I’d been keeping the trunk, ~12” of heartwood, in the shop for a special project and this seemed quite right.

Fruit tree wood is always a bear, tough, figured, with bark inclusions and young limbs swallowed inside, and this was no different. I tried splitting it into boards to no avail. I ended up ripping it into quarters with the chainsaw, before taking it to the bandsaw to resaw.

Here are some small boards left over from the project:

I printed off cutting templates for the leg profile and glued them onto the stock, and cut off the waste at the bandsaw, now with a 1/8” blade. This blade has far too many teeth inside the kerf, a recipe for binding and burning, but I took it slow and it all went without disaster.

The roughed legs were joined and glued to the stretchers with dowels. The stretchers had the joint chamfer roughed before glue up.

I shaped the round tops of the stretchers after gluing up. I wanted to incorporate any inconsistencies in the leg shapes smoothly from leg to leg, simple enough just by planing from one end to the other until I can take a continuous shaving tip to tip.

Perhaps the worst part of this project was creating the chamfers on the joint faces. Procedure: I used a groove carving tool to rough out the shape. I used a round file to take down the ridges caused by the grooving tool. I cleaned the file’s witness marks with sandpaper wrapped around a dowel. At some places the tearout on the interior was too great to remove entirely, but this is a foot stool; one would literally have to be a mouse to see this.

Now comes time for the upholstered top. I always dread upholstery, there are too many variables, and with a piece as small as this, any unevenness along the edge would readily reveal itself.

I selected this fabric for the cushion, keeping with the red and gold theme of an Indian wedding.

I used the denser blue foam and poly batting to ensure a smooth surface. I glued these down to a plywood panel, chamfered to ensure no hard edge would poke through the upholstery. The fabric is wrapped and stapled, a tedious process that I did in fact do twice. I covered the bottom in a grey felt to disguise the horrible stapling I did. I inserted a metal button and pulled it down with a twist of fencing wire through the plywood panel.

The frame was finished with boiled linseed oil and wax.