What I did on my Labor Day vacation, a story by me.

I started in on making the first of at least a few rapier hangars. Yay!

I'm using 4-5oz leather. I dyed it with Eco-Flo Water Stain (which according to my research doesn't need painting over with acrylic or anything), which was super easy to work with. (Maybe I'll try vinegroon soon, for more A&S goodness.) Some neetsfoot cream finished it (and made it smell pretty nice, too). The leather's a little stiff, but I imagine that'll break in with use.

I've got some rivets in the mail, and as soon as those get here I can assemble the whole thing, which will be pretty great. Then I can start in one the next one - I've got at least three I want to make, each of them being a little (or a lot) different in some ways. Actually, four - I think I want to make a yellow one for a Protege Rapier Hangar, for no good reason other than my own amusement.

I should grab some scraps and practice putting rivets in, though. You know, because. That seems like a good idea.

Leather flask, essentially done.

I made a thing!

Okay, so I need to get some rope and tie it on there, and I need to whittle down a stopper, but whatever. I made a bottel!

Like I said I was going to, I threw some thread up by the mouth of the bottel just to make sure it wouldn't gap apart. Nothing fancy there, and nothing weird happened.













Then I melted the cheese wax and poured it out of the wax pot, so I could melt beeswax. I ended up using two pounds of it, which seemed to be just the right amount to fill up the bottel and let it soak into the leather. Then I poured it back out, rattled a stick around in there to make sure there weren't any clumps of wax and sand, and did it again.

That's what I ended up with! The wings have no wax on them, and that's okay - I opted away from the full immersion method mostly due to available pot size as well as economy of beeswax. There's some clumping and blobbing of wax on the bottom of the bottel, but not unduly so.

Also, it seems like there's an uneven amount of wax on the sides. Like, on the surface that's not soaked in. Maybe this week I'll warm it slightly in the oven and wipe the sides down to remove it. Would that help? I think it might, but I'm not sure.

Right now though, I'm gonna let it sit, try and find some rope for it, and either repurpose a wine cork or get a dowel and shave it down, but I'm pretty much done!

Also, now I have a pot full of beeswax I can melt and make another one with, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Leather flask, part three!

Despite the terrible loss of an hour of sleep, I decided to take some time before I had to run out of the house today for guitar practice to get the next major step of the flask done - pounding sand.

In short, I needed to soak the leather and then force as much sand into it as possible to get it stretched into a bottle shape. Soaking it was easy. Happily, it took exactly as long as it took me to go grab a shower. Coincidence? Surely not! (Note the kind assistance of Darcy, our local helpful housecat.)

After that was done, the real work started. This took the following tools:

• A bag of sand.
• A funnel and scoop.
• A wooden spoon.
• A dowel.
• A hammer.

Eventually, I settled on a kind of system to maximize the amount of sand I could force into the flask, while minimizing what was scattered around the counter. I recommend starting by blowing a puff of air into the bottle to force the leather apart and give the sand somewhere to go. Then insert the funnel and pour in the sand. When it backs up, start using the handle of the wooden spoon to force more through the funnel.

That will eventually not work out anymore; start using the spoon inside the flask itself. Force it down, remove the spoon, repeat. Add sand as necessary. When it starts to fill up, use the dowel and the hammer. Don't be gentle here - I found that the leather was super resilient, stretched a great deal, and pounding as much sand in as I could was really entertaining. Seriously, you will use more sand than you think will fit. 

So that's all done. Now I'm just letting it dry, which will take forever. Once the leather's dry, I'll probably whip a little extra thread from that top stitch up on each side of the neck, to keep it from gapping more, but that's not a big deal. Then I need to get some beeswax. The plan now is to melt the beeswax, pour it inside, let it soak in, pour it out, repeat a bit, and to call it a day! I'm excited. 

Leather flask, continued.

I'm progressing on this little project and it's making me happy, so all of you get to hear about it and get proof of me learning things. Or something.

Anyway! I'd gotten my hands on a marking wheel, so I laid out one of the pieces of leather, put the pattern on top of it, and traced along with the wheel. Then I put the two pieces of leather together, got my leather awl, and drove holes.

I learned a couple of things at this point:

1. Using a marking wheel when there's anything more than a gradual curve in the seam is a giant pain in the ass.
2. I didn't use a groover, but if I did - even if only to just mark a line rather than carve out a groove - it might have helped with the above problem.
3. Alternately, just manually spacing out holes on a line I made, but that strikes me as painful.
4. Punching holes through both layers of leather worked fine on the top layer, less fine on the bottom.
5. I had a cutting board under the leather. Maybe if I had something with more give, more of the awl could have moved through and made clean holes in both layers. Maybe a wooden board of some kind? Or a thick piece of leather over a board. 
6. Make sure you keep the awl vertical at all times when punching with it.
7. Because of all the above problems combined, some holes don't line up. 
8. Cheap awls break.

So, yeah. I've got a newer better awl set on the way to me (thanks, Amazon!) and I'll be putting more holes in the leather soon. Here's a Value-Added Picture of how things looked shortly after I got going - I took a break on it yesterday evening and I was about halfway done stitching around the outside. I'm using what I think of as a two-needle figure eight stitch, because that's what my friend Alex taught me to do with leather.

Next step - finish the stitching and then go pound sand!

In which some non-weapon A&S is better than no content at all.

Man, I'm awful at this. So. Here's what I've got! I'm trying to plow through an Introduction to Fabris paper. It's... slow. I don't know if I'm just intimidated by writing it, or if I've taken on too much, or what. Either way though, I've promised to get this thing done and submitted for an A&S competition when it is done, so I've got to do that. Because promises, y'know? So that's a thing.

Therefore, instead of an incomplete paper, you get a couple pictures of proof that I'm engaging in non-weaponry related A&S! (Heresy, I know, and yet.) I've wanted to make a leather flask for a while. I've had the leather for ages, but I didn't do anything with it until I happened to ask Grim if he had a chisel I could use to make holes I could lace. I'd been looking for one that does multiple holes at once, so I can keep things even, and those things are expensive last I looked. But I'm being loaned one at Birka, so I can get on that next. For now though, I cut out the two sides I needed!

I'd printed out a pattern to use and after weighing down the leather to keep it flat, I used a totally not remotely period Sharpie on the rough side of the leather. I didn't have a real meant for leather knife either, but my roommate Marieta was kind enough to lend me a substitute. I put a cutting board underneath to save the table, and off I went!












After cutting one side out, I used that to trace out a second piece. Hopefully that'll keep things a little more even. It all went smoothly, and now I've got them sitting aside, waiting until after Birka. Who knows, maybe there'll be someone selling some leatherworking tools there that I can use to do this better next time! Regardless, I'm ready to score some lines in the leather, put some holes in it, stitch it up, and then go pound sand.