Captain of the Anarquendor -- part 6
Jul. 5th, 2011 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzAfter showing you my undershirts, the gambeson mock-ups and the gambeson itself, the chain mail and the overcoat, you'd think I was done with making stuff...
...how very untrue.
((!! Warning !! Contains pictures of fur! ))
I promised you all a look at my accessoiries, so follow me behind the cut to see what else we've been up to!
With four weeks to go to the event, it is frankly a universal impossibility that I am done sewing and crafting stuff. There's always more camp equipment to be made, so off we went.
This isn't all made in the last week or so, thank goodness, but were mostly things to be done on the side when there was time. Since I don't yet have a picture of the finished chair you'll have to wait a little longer for that particular story, but I can kick it off by showing you our arrow barrel.
We ordered quite a large number of arrows for the group, and these will have to be stored in quivers when we use them. For the main battle though, we will also use large barrels to store the arrows in. Because we're talking larp here, and nothing is more funthan watching orks take their morning bloodbath than throwing bits of furniture at your opponent's heads, we crafted foam barrels. That way, they're safe to throw with!
Foam barrel pre-latex. We glued a bit of glass fiber rod in there to help it keep its shape. Of course, the foam will soak up water if we keep it like this, so we sent the barrels off to various Anarquendor to be latexed. Here's my handsome assistant and brother-in-the-making-of-chairs![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
twilightbanana modeling the barrel mid-latexing. Couldn't have done it without you, Twi!
We're also making a couple of chairs out of wood, (more on that in the next post I promise!), and these bits were left over.
Say, that's a nice shape. What if we drilled a hole in and put some text on it?
The text is (my own translation) in Sindarin. It reads "adab hûd" -- House of Assembly. It will be on our livingroom tent so everyone (who can read elvish) knows where we have our dinners.
The tree is a freehand interpretation of our logo.
Because Drachenfest is in July and in Germany, we expect high temperatures. To make sure everyone drinks enough, I should probably be, as their captain, leading by example and drinking enough. But water bottles are a pain because the standard bag we buy in larp stores is known to start leaking really soon, and anything else is just ugly. So I covered up a water bottle in leather myself. Mostly handsewn with thick leather-sewing thread.
The top of the leather folds down to give access to the cap. This leather will cover a 750ml Vitel bottle, but I've also seen Spa bottles in that same size and shape. And this leather stretches a bit, so I can easily replace the bottle should this one break. (I've fallen on top of a small drinking pouch of fruit yoghurt once while dramatically dying. It wasn't pretty.)
Meanwhile, I also bought a piece of dark green "crocodile" printed leather. Thick stuff. Perfect for scabbards. I have a long elven sword that is perfect for my character, but it needed a new scabbard to match the rest of the outfit.
The sword needs to be cushioned a bit, so after making a test pattern in printer paper and cutting out the leather pieces, I glued fake fur to the inside of the leather pieces using good old Bison Tix. The fur makes for excellent headaches, because with every pass of the needle you pull the fur outside the scabbard along with the leather cord I use to sew everything together...
The green leather with the gold-toned leather straps is beautiful but a bit boring. I make a copy of my captain's insignia in paper and go for it. The leather version is added to the tip of the scabbard and is held down by gold-coloured rivets. The insignia are in the small ziploc bag next to the scabbard.
Sewing everything together is messy, very messy. This is how my pants look after a while. Bits of fake fur that are pulled loose from the inside and bits of leather from the straps I use to sew everything together with.
Please excuse horrible fit of pants since I lost quite some weight recently...
And you can see Jan-Jaap in the background, sewing on his own project. If you think my pants look messed up, just be glad the floor is REALLY badly out of focus...
Here's the two finished projects. Jan-Jaap donated the rest of the gold-coloured leather to me, so I can continue with some more projects if I want to...
Scabbard details. The leather "fingers" on the scabbard are in one piece with the piece where it hangs from the belt. Because of the weird shape of the sword (and thus, scabbard) they fan out on the sides of the scabbard. This caused a lot of trouble...
An extra bit of fur is added around the opening to protect the sword and cover up the knots in the straps.
But we're not there yet!
We already have a working quiver pattern that is quite economical. It uses just little enough leather that I can make myself a quiver from the remains of the green leather!
I use the left thingy ("passer" in Dutch) to mark my holes with quite precisely. Then, I use the right sharp awl ("els" in Dutch, it's an awl with cutting sides) to puncture tiny slices in the leather.
Using two needles and special leather-sewing waxed thread, I sew in the bottom using a cross-stitch pattern. The threads pass eachother in each hole. Because the holes are punctured and tiny, it takes quite a bit of effort to pass the needle through.
Don't forget to attach all straps and belts before sewing the quiver itself!
I pull so hard on the needles at times, that the needle's eyes break under the strain. NoKey says I wiggle them about too much. I try to do better, because I can't find these size 18 needles in large enough (packets of 6) quantities anymore...
Sewing isn't the only craft where you break a needle every now and then!
Perseverance pays off! After finishing the sewing, I add a bit of bunny fur to the top of the quiver.
The fur is extremely soft and fuzzy. I use rivets again to attach it, but you can't even see them.
Don't worry, these bunnies had a great life in France and were a bit of a plague where they lived, so they're humanely killed for population control.
Rabbit fur is the only fur I'll use in costumes. Anything else I just can't justify, and I once saw a man wearing what looked like a wolf's pelt who was instantly on my "die, now, horribly" list.
This quiver holds 7 arrows in the bottom tier and an additional 5 in the top tier (stacking the arrows, foam head up)
And that concludes our dressdiary entry for today! I've been extremely busy this last week, but don't worry... I promise there is more. See you next time!
-----
Crossposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dressdiaries
...how very untrue.
((!! Warning !! Contains pictures of fur! ))
I promised you all a look at my accessoiries, so follow me behind the cut to see what else we've been up to!
With four weeks to go to the event, it is frankly a universal impossibility that I am done sewing and crafting stuff. There's always more camp equipment to be made, so off we went.
This isn't all made in the last week or so, thank goodness, but were mostly things to be done on the side when there was time. Since I don't yet have a picture of the finished chair you'll have to wait a little longer for that particular story, but I can kick it off by showing you our arrow barrel.
We ordered quite a large number of arrows for the group, and these will have to be stored in quivers when we use them. For the main battle though, we will also use large barrels to store the arrows in. Because we're talking larp here, and nothing is more fun
Foam barrel pre-latex. We glued a bit of glass fiber rod in there to help it keep its shape. Of course, the foam will soak up water if we keep it like this, so we sent the barrels off to various Anarquendor to be latexed. Here's my handsome assistant and brother-in-the-making-of-chairs
twilightbanana modeling the barrel mid-latexing. Couldn't have done it without you, Twi! We're also making a couple of chairs out of wood, (more on that in the next post I promise!), and these bits were left over.
Say, that's a nice shape. What if we drilled a hole in and put some text on it?
The text is (my own translation) in Sindarin. It reads "adab hûd" -- House of Assembly. It will be on our livingroom tent so everyone (who can read elvish) knows where we have our dinners.
The tree is a freehand interpretation of our logo.
Because Drachenfest is in July and in Germany, we expect high temperatures. To make sure everyone drinks enough, I should probably be, as their captain, leading by example and drinking enough. But water bottles are a pain because the standard bag we buy in larp stores is known to start leaking really soon, and anything else is just ugly. So I covered up a water bottle in leather myself. Mostly handsewn with thick leather-sewing thread.
The top of the leather folds down to give access to the cap. This leather will cover a 750ml Vitel bottle, but I've also seen Spa bottles in that same size and shape. And this leather stretches a bit, so I can easily replace the bottle should this one break. (I've fallen on top of a small drinking pouch of fruit yoghurt once while dramatically dying. It wasn't pretty.)
Meanwhile, I also bought a piece of dark green "crocodile" printed leather. Thick stuff. Perfect for scabbards. I have a long elven sword that is perfect for my character, but it needed a new scabbard to match the rest of the outfit.
The sword needs to be cushioned a bit, so after making a test pattern in printer paper and cutting out the leather pieces, I glued fake fur to the inside of the leather pieces using good old Bison Tix. The fur makes for excellent headaches, because with every pass of the needle you pull the fur outside the scabbard along with the leather cord I use to sew everything together...
The green leather with the gold-toned leather straps is beautiful but a bit boring. I make a copy of my captain's insignia in paper and go for it. The leather version is added to the tip of the scabbard and is held down by gold-coloured rivets. The insignia are in the small ziploc bag next to the scabbard.
Sewing everything together is messy, very messy. This is how my pants look after a while. Bits of fake fur that are pulled loose from the inside and bits of leather from the straps I use to sew everything together with.
Please excuse horrible fit of pants since I lost quite some weight recently...
And you can see Jan-Jaap in the background, sewing on his own project. If you think my pants look messed up, just be glad the floor is REALLY badly out of focus...
Here's the two finished projects. Jan-Jaap donated the rest of the gold-coloured leather to me, so I can continue with some more projects if I want to...
Scabbard details. The leather "fingers" on the scabbard are in one piece with the piece where it hangs from the belt. Because of the weird shape of the sword (and thus, scabbard) they fan out on the sides of the scabbard. This caused a lot of trouble...
An extra bit of fur is added around the opening to protect the sword and cover up the knots in the straps.
But we're not there yet!
We already have a working quiver pattern that is quite economical. It uses just little enough leather that I can make myself a quiver from the remains of the green leather!
I use the left thingy ("passer" in Dutch) to mark my holes with quite precisely. Then, I use the right sharp awl ("els" in Dutch, it's an awl with cutting sides) to puncture tiny slices in the leather.
Using two needles and special leather-sewing waxed thread, I sew in the bottom using a cross-stitch pattern. The threads pass eachother in each hole. Because the holes are punctured and tiny, it takes quite a bit of effort to pass the needle through.
Don't forget to attach all straps and belts before sewing the quiver itself!
I pull so hard on the needles at times, that the needle's eyes break under the strain. NoKey says I wiggle them about too much. I try to do better, because I can't find these size 18 needles in large enough (packets of 6) quantities anymore...
Sewing isn't the only craft where you break a needle every now and then!
Perseverance pays off! After finishing the sewing, I add a bit of bunny fur to the top of the quiver.
The fur is extremely soft and fuzzy. I use rivets again to attach it, but you can't even see them.
Don't worry, these bunnies had a great life in France and were a bit of a plague where they lived, so they're humanely killed for population control.
Rabbit fur is the only fur I'll use in costumes. Anything else I just can't justify, and I once saw a man wearing what looked like a wolf's pelt who was instantly on my "die, now, horribly" list.
This quiver holds 7 arrows in the bottom tier and an additional 5 in the top tier (stacking the arrows, foam head up)
And that concludes our dressdiary entry for today! I've been extremely busy this last week, but don't worry... I promise there is more. See you next time!
-----
Crossposted to
dressdiaries
