Can you repair wicker furniture?

You have to know what you are doing, absolutely. We use a technique called back-weaving to go back and repair areas that have been punched out. I do the canning of chair bottoms; both the whole canning and the press canning along with rush bottom of the chairs. All of that I do here in shop. The "whole canning" is when the cane goes all the way through the seat. It pierces the seat, comes out at the bottom, turns around and comes back up through another hole. Each strand is individually caned and woven by hand. Press canning is when you buy the cane in sheets and there is a splaying going around the edge of the seat. It's pressed into a groove, then the spines are pressed down on that to hold it in. That's an expensive process, but you cannot change a chair from one type to another. It won't work because it weakens the chair. Rush is the type of bottom that you normally have on leather back chairs and you cannot see through it. It normally forms an "X" pattern and that's hand woven in also. Back weaving actually depends on what the problem is. But it is just like this analogy: you determine if your suit or nice dress is worth keeping by how much it would cost for you to go back and take thread and reweave over a moth hole or cigarette burn in it.