Chair seats can be created by using a variety of techniques and materials. Four types of seat weaving are:

Caned chairs became popular between 1840 and 1890 in a type of furniture called Eastlake Style. A seat is woven in a distinct pattern through holes that have been drilled around the perimeter of the seat. Cane comes from a class of palms called rattan. The long stems grow 100 to 300 feet long.They are cut down to 20-foot lengths for export. Rattan comes from China and India. The cane is workable after being soaked.It takes, on the average, 10 to 12 hours to cane a chair depending on the complexity of the seat or back to be replaced.

This is woven with long lengths of thin pieces of oak, ash, or hickory, which were hand split from tree trunks. Splint was often used in early American ladder-back chairs and rockers. Today splint is made with the help of machines and even made of paper fiber. The pattern is usually a herringbone, but other patterns can be done such as a diamond pattern. The splint is soaked for a short time before use. When it is dry, it is coated with boiled linseed oil as a preservative. It takes about 6 to 7 hours to replace a seat or back.

The material used for this seat is cattail flags. They have to be twisted to form short lengths of rope. London museums have an Egyptian chair dating back to 4000 B.C., which has the remnants of a rush seat. The use of rush began in England in 1720, France in 1750 and colonial America prior to 1776.They were used in functional chairs, not upper class chairs. Substitutes are now used in place of the cattail flags. Seagrass and raffia paper fiber are used and make it much easier to replace the seat. Long lengths can be used and wrapped around the dowels on the chair in repetition to form a seat. The finished product gets two coats of shellac for protection. It takes about 5 to 6 hours to replace a rush seat with the paper fiber.

This is cane that has already been woven into a sheet. The manufacturing of pressed cane was developed at about the turn of the 20th century. The sheet is forced into a groove that follows the perimeter of the chair. A solid piece of wood called a spline is hammered and glued into the groove. This process is much faster and depends on how hard it is to take out the old woven sheet. This type of material can only be used on seats and backs with the groove. Chairs with holes drilled around the perimeter must be caned by hand.