There’s a beautiful new addition to the Penland Wood Studio, created during Ellie Richards’s spring concentration workshop “Freeform Furniture.”  Ryan Lutz’s bricklay laminated swing is here to stay, so next time you’re at Penland, be sure to try it out!

Here’s a review from wood studio coordinator Kyle Little, Penland’s wood studio coordinator,

It’s wild how we just don’t do the fun things we used to do as kids very often! I swung on it and it tickled my stomach and made me laugh out loud. Maybe we should all swing every morning and the world would be better off.

Thank you for this gift, Ryan! And for answering our questions:

How did you make this awesome swing?

It’s made using bricklay lamination. You pretty much make a ton of little trapezoids and then glue all those little trapezoids together kind of in a line so it’s like a skinny piece. So it’s made out of twelve of those skinny long curves and each one is routed to a template so it gets that nice clean shape. Then just put some rope in it and now we can have so much fun out of here.

What is it made of?

It’s made of maple and then the little colored sections are recycled skateboards.

It’s a prototype?

Kind of. I was using this to figure out the process of what I’m doing for my furniture piece. I wanted to make something smaller scale and Ellie suggested a swing and I thought that would be really fun.

What is the larger piece that this will lead to?

It’s a coffee table design and there’s a lot of curves in it. It will be a little more complex than this and definitely larger scale but maybe the same technique of a bricklay lamination.

How do you feel about leaving this swing here at Penland wood?

It’s so fun, it’s already gotten used so much. It’s nice to leave a little mark here that other people can enjoy.