Monday 23 February 2015

Italian Quiver

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. 

Sunday 15 February 2015

And I'm back!

The start of this year saw a suspected power issue with the old laptop turn into a complete motherboard failure, so I've been without my files and pictures for almost six weeks now. Far too long *shudder*

But I have a shiny new piece of tech now, and a whole lot of updates from last year to catch up on! So I'm just going to get things in order again (and learn how to use this thing), and I'll have something to share with ye all again.