Towards the end of last year, Dun in Mara hosted a leather working weekend, with Master Pol attending as the teacher. I attended with a specific
project in mind, and I was quite pleased that I actually got further along with it than I’d hoped.
I bought myself some leather earlier this year with the hope of turning it into an Italian style quiver. Thankfully, not only is there a perfect image where the painted archer is twisting himself into knots to make sure we get a full front image of his quiver (though granted, you do need to zoom in), wiser heads than mine have gone before me, so I even had a pattern to work with.
I started by sizing up the pattern, and made up a cardboard mock-up to check the size against my arrows and to make sure it wouldn't just plain too long or awkward for me to wear. With this confirmed, I transferred the pattern to the leather and cut it out.
Now, to be honest,
this was as far as I expected to get this weekend. I'd planned to draw my
heraldry on the quiver, but as I hadn't drawn it out before hand, and didn't
initially trust myself to free hand it, but as time marched on, I felt there
were worse things I could do than attempt to draw it out. Lo and behold, I
had a heraldry! Now I could move onto the problem of being stuck with what to
fill into the rest of the blank space. Several minutes browsing through
Pinterest later, I fell across this image of a red velvet hood
embroidered with gold thread (as per the description, I've never actually seen
the colour image), but I've always adored the scroll work of this
hood, so I decided to use it as inspiration for completing the design for the
quiver. That was actually
the easy part.
With the design completed, I had to transfer it to the leather. I taped the leather quiver cut out to a convenient flat surface, then taped the paper pattern over it, matching the outer lines. I used a leather stitch marker to transfer the shape through the hide, which took forever, or what very much felt like it, but I was afraid to stop halfway through in case the paper shifted, or I lost track of where I was. A brief chocolate break later, shapes all transferred, I went over the lines with a swivel knife to finish the transfer of the design.
I have plans to gilt parts of this design,
and Lady Órlaith is currently doing some research into period leather dyes for
me, but first, I wanted to do some stamping to bring out texture in the pattern.
Typically, the two stamps I decided on, a simple beveller and a drop shaped
texture stamp, were two of the smallest in my collection. But I really like the
effect they gave.
This is as far as I got before I had to call it for the weekend. I'd promised myself the quiver would be the Saturday job, and I'd work on something else on the Sunday of the workshop. *sigh* I shall be at this a while before it's done.
I bought myself some leather earlier this year with the hope of turning it into an Italian style quiver. Thankfully, not only is there a perfect image where the painted archer is twisting himself into knots to make sure we get a full front image of his quiver (though granted, you do need to zoom in), wiser heads than mine have gone before me, so I even had a pattern to work with.
I started by sizing up the pattern, and made up a cardboard mock-up to check the size against my arrows and to make sure it wouldn't just plain too long or awkward for me to wear. With this confirmed, I transferred the pattern to the leather and cut it out.
Now, to be honest,
this was as far as I expected to get this weekend. I'd planned to draw my
heraldry on the quiver, but as I hadn't drawn it out before hand, and didn't
initially trust myself to free hand it, but as time marched on, I felt there
were worse things I could do than attempt to draw it out. Lo and behold, I
had a heraldry! Now I could move onto the problem of being stuck with what to
fill into the rest of the blank space. Several minutes browsing through
Pinterest later, I fell across this image of a red velvet hood
embroidered with gold thread (as per the description, I've never actually seen
the colour image), but I've always adored the scroll work of this
hood, so I decided to use it as inspiration for completing the design for the
quiver. That was actually
the easy part. With the design completed, I had to transfer it to the leather. I taped the leather quiver cut out to a convenient flat surface, then taped the paper pattern over it, matching the outer lines. I used a leather stitch marker to transfer the shape through the hide, which took forever, or what very much felt like it, but I was afraid to stop halfway through in case the paper shifted, or I lost track of where I was. A brief chocolate break later, shapes all transferred, I went over the lines with a swivel knife to finish the transfer of the design.
I have plans to gilt parts of this design,
and Lady Órlaith is currently doing some research into period leather dyes for
me, but first, I wanted to do some stamping to bring out texture in the pattern.
Typically, the two stamps I decided on, a simple beveller and a drop shaped
texture stamp, were two of the smallest in my collection. But I really like the
effect they gave. This is as far as I got before I had to call it for the weekend. I'd promised myself the quiver would be the Saturday job, and I'd work on something else on the Sunday of the workshop. *sigh* I shall be at this a while before it's done.
