Silkscreen artist Judy Perlow was pretty comfortable working with her hands. So how hard could it be to whittle a 26-inch-long strip of red oak into a tapered spindle?

Especially since chairmaker Craig Smith made it look sooo easy. A few steady strokes along the grain with a draw knife and -- voila! -- the wood morphed from a rough blank into something resembling a candle, the first step in Mr. Smith's Windsor chairmaking class at the Society for Contemporary Craft in the Strip District.

Mrs. Perlow, 52, who had previously taken one wood-turning class, quickly discovered spindle-making is a lot tougher than it looks. Not only was the draw knife an unfamiliar tool, but also pulling its super-sharp, double-handled blade toward her belly was hard work. Soon, arm muscles she never knew she had start aching. By 4 p.m. on the first day of this weeklong class, the Squirrel Hill woman was beat.

"I don't think I have the strength or energy to do this," she confessed with a weary smile.

However, she stuck with it, as did the five other area residents who took the class. Mrs. Perlow -- the only woman in the class -- finished four of the nine spindles and, with the help of a classmate, shaped and planed the long strip of oak that would be steamed into the chair's bow back.

"You learn faster than you think," she said.

It might seem odd that a rank novice would try her hand on such a labor-intensive piece of furniture. But when Mrs. Perlow saw the class advertised in SCC's summer workshop program ($475 including materials), she couldn't resist.

First made in 17th-century England, Windsor chairs were a staple of American Colonial furniture, thanks to their sturdy design and affordability. Pittsburgh chairmaker Thomas Ramsey, for instance, specialized in the production of Windsors in the late 1700s. He sent dozens of chairs down the Ohio River on flatboats to settlements in the Northwest Territory before settling in Marietta, Ohio. The style didn't fall out of favor until after the Civil War, when chairs with cheap plywood, upholstery or machine-woven cane seats were mass-produced.

The art of Windsor chairmaking was resurrected in 1980 when craftsman Mike Dunbar, who today runs the Windsor Institute in Hampton, N.H., began offering classes. Since then, the 61-year-old has taught more than 3,000 people to make them using traditional hand tools and methods.

Mr. Smith is one of the 10 percent of his students who went on to become professional chairmakers. Before getting into the business about 10 years ago, the Penn State grad studied with Dunbar and Curtis Buchanan of Jonesboro, Tenn.

At SCC, last month's sold-out class had students of varying abilities. At one end was Mrs. Perlow; at the other was Andy Scott, an art and woodworking teacher at the Kiski School in Saltsburg who has a master's degree in furniture making from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

"I've always wanted to build a Windsor because technically, it's very challenging," said Mr. Scott. "It's a beautiful marriage of form and function."

One of the day's goals was to finish the rough shaping of the spindles and refine each one's taper from 5/8-inch to 7/16-inch at the top. Wood takes several weeks to dry on its own, so Mr. Smith speeded the process by drying the spindles overnight in a small kiln he keeps at home.

Students then went out to the parking lot to steam-bend the back bow they had planed the day before. After letting the bow "plasticize" for about 25 minutes in a steam box, students had only 30 to 40 seconds to force the bow around a U-shaped form, tap it into place with pegs and tie the bottom off with twine. Hesitate even a few seconds and you risk cracking or splitting the rails.

After lunch, the students started rough-shaping the edges of the seat, which they had cut from a 2-inch-thick block of poplar with a bandsaw. A Windsor derives much of its charm from its curvy, turned legs and delicate spindles. But it's the hand-hewn seat that serves as its heart because everything -- legs, spindles, back bow -- rises out of it, Mr. Smith said.

Vises on the worktables help keep the wood firmly in place, but there's a real art to sculpting the square edges into an attractive "S" curve with hand tools; so much of it, said Mr. Smith, is simply "instinctual." He urged Mrs. Perlow to keep moving the seat in the vise so she could always see -- and feel -- its curves. It was tiring, exacting work, and by 4:10 p.m. Mrs. Perlow was thinking about calling it a day.

"You know it's time to quit when you're making more bad cuts than good cuts," she said.

The first step in "saddling" the seat -- hollowing out the middle to make it comfortable to sit on -- is downright scary. It requires holding the seat in place with your feet while swinging a 3-foot-long gutter adz into its middle. Then, the rough surface must be smoothed and refined with a razor-sharp scorp, a travisher and a compass plane. Mrs. Perlow started full of gusto, but she was still surprised by how strenuous it was.

"This is a two shower day!" quipped classmate Dave Reiland, 60, of Perrysville.

Once the seat was hollowed and its sides sculpted, students used a veining tool to carve a 1/4-inch decorative groove, or "rain gutter," along the edge of the dished area. (Windsors originally were garden chairs.) They also started drilling the holes for the spindles and chair legs, which Mr. Smith had already turned. But for Mrs. Perlow, those details must wait. Even with her instructor's help, it was slow going.

All that whacking, scraping and smoothing was taking its toll. Mrs. Perlow showed up with her right wrist wrapped in an ace bandage. But she gamely continued work on the seat and by lunchtime was ready to start on the holes. This step is as technically complex as saddling is physical: most of the holes are tapered at different depths and angles. It looked like another late night.

"I should have learned to measure better," Mrs. Perlow said. "I didn't realize how precise and exact each measurement is."

Everyone was supposed to finish putting together their chairs, but all six were in various stages of disassembly. Mrs. Perlow's main goal was to "bottom up" her Windsor, or place the legs and stretchers in their holes and secure them with glued wedges. She also had to drill holes in the bow back for the spindles, do some final shaping of the spindles and score the front of the bow with a scratch beader. Mr. Smith decided to hold a sixth class the following Tuesday.

"This is my baby," said Mrs. Perlow, laughing. "We don't want to ruin it by rushing."

After a weekend to recharge, students came ready to finish. Helping each other, they set middle spindles in the bows and seats, steamed and bent into place four side spindles and smoothed rough patches with hand planes and scrapers.

"I think I'm not going to be so fussy," Mrs. Perlow said as she chiseled the tenons of the bow back. "Fussy is overrated."

The last step was choosing the color of milk paint, a traditional finish that improves with time. Mrs. Perlow was already thinking about another wood-turning class.

"It was a lot of work, but I learned a tremendous amount," she said.

Craig Smith will hold his next Windsor bowback chair-making class July 20 to 24, 2009, at the Society for Contemporary Craft, 2100 Smallman St., Strip District. Information: 412-261-7003 or www.no-wood-unturned.com.