NSTIW

 

I hadn’t planned to join the Sable Hawks when I first got invited to camp with them at Great Western War. I just asked who I could borrow a tent from, and they were the ones who answered. But they were a very hospitable group of people, so I decided to undergo the initiation. This involves a) chugging a fluid of choice from a deceptively capacitous skull mug and b) telling a story to all assembled. This is an easy thing if you’re a fighter and/or a party animal, but I’m an artisan and a professional shy person. I was worried I’d have to reach back to Boy Scouts for something, but I had a fortuitous adventure at war. And it mostly involves crafting, so it goes on the blog. Thus, in the grand tradition, more or less how I told it that night…

NO SHIT

THERE I WAS

NAKED

...in the shower five months or so before GWW, where all the bestworst ideas happen. I’ve been in the SCA since 2015 or so, but I’ve been in isolated areas with not much budget, so I’ve been largely unknown. Since having a decent job in a populous city, I’ve been working to expand my wordfame. But even then, I’m up in Oertha, and the only time I can prove that people in mainland West hear about me, is when someone moves away. So I want to go big, and business card the King and/or Queen of the West, whichever I can get an audience with. As an artisan, the way I do that is with largesse.

For those uninitiated, largesse is the stuff that the nobility hands out to people for whatever reasons they choose - awards for service, prizes, payment, or what have you. It’s usually small items that can be packed for travel easily and made in some kind of bulk. And that all comes from donations from the populace - whoever is inclined to make something sends it into the system, and where it goes after that, nobody knows until it happens.

Now, I haven’t quite got a handle on what I can mass produce, because my specialty is tedious things few other people are bothered to do. Ulfhildr, I’ve watched churn out multiple nalbound hats in one sitting. She’s an absolute largesse machine. Me, not so much. But I’ve experimented with Hedeby frame bags before, they involve a bunch of different things I know how to do, and they’re easy to transport. Pretty good for largesse. And for a good number… 12 should be impressive.

So I get to work. I buy a scroll saw and cut some 30 oaken handles. I give myself an RSI hand sanding those handles. I card weave a band for loops to connect the frames to the bags. It goes a third as far as I want it to and takes too long, so I try rigid heddle for the first time. I’m unhappy with the thread density on my heddle, so I squeeze it down and make inkle. That’s still not enough loops, so I print two tighter heddles and weave twill. For months, my spare time at work is spent weaving or hand-assembling bags, and my evenings and weekends are spent sanding, machine sewing components, or fingerloop braiding the bag straps. 

 

The bags in question. I could have sworn I got a photo of them with the straps on, but I guess I didn't.

And while I’m doing this, I’m planning well in advance how I’m going to introduce myself, because dangit I need a script if I’m going into a social interaction cold. While doing this, I independently arrive at what’s probably one of the society’s oldest and corniest jokes, and I decide I’m going to commit to the bit.

Fast forward to Thursday night. There’s a party at West camp, and I bring along my royal purple bag with a gold hippogriff stamped on it, full of a dozen Hedeby bags, the product of months of work, and a secret other thing. I don’t see either royalty that night, but that’s just as well. It was dark and loud, nobody would have seen anything.

The next day, a new friend (names redacted to protect the innocent) goes over to West camp from the Sables, so I grab my purple bag with a gold hippogriff stamped on it and tag along. Today, success. The queen is out under an awning, and she has a friend/retinue with her. So I start my spiel, stumbling a little bit on the transition.

“Hello, I’m Arnthor Hestofthi, you don’t know me yet, but I come from the far off lands of Oertha. I’ve been told it’s custom to gift the royalty with a Large S…”

And I reach into my large bag of other, smaller bags, and I pull out a sheet of cardstock, on which I have printed the largest calligraphic letter S I could fit on the page.

And all three people present *lose their freaking minds* laughing. 

 

Artist's recreation of the Large S

Nothing else I said matters for this story. I also handed over a scratch-made frame bag and its eleven brothers, but the star of the show was the windows default font single letter I had printed off in under five minutes.

I departed camp on foot after that, and as I rounded the last corner to turn off to the Sable Hawks camp, an SUV passes me. It’s occupant gets out at the neighboring camp, and a familiar voice yells out, “He brought largesse!” I look up; it’s the Queen's retinue, holding up the S, for which she had gone to find a matte.

So let that be a lesson: if you’re going to put your heart and soul into something, save your best material for another time, lest you accidentally upstage yourself with your throwaway gag.

New Frame Loom

I've been tinkering with card loom designs basically since I started weaving. I've been through a few iterations, and now I think I've got The One, at least for how I normally work. 

Since all of the actual work in card weaving is being done by the cards themselves, the loom itself can be simple, or even not exist at all. This could be a pair of posts stuck into the ground, as was Roman practice, or a freestanding structure like the Oseberg loom - which is just the two posts method, but combined into one piece of furniture. Card lends itself well to backstrap, where you've got one end tied to some furniture and the other to your belt, but my back isn't a fan. So a loom really only needs to do a few things: hold the work stable, be easy to advance the warp through, let you manage your tension and twist, and give you ergonomic access to the project. Easy enough, but how exactly you go about that can make as much difference in your experience as your cards do.

When Ulfhildr helped me get started on card weaving, she loaned me an inkle loom, and she showed me her personal board loom with a vertical peg on one end and a simple board clamp on the other. Tie the far end to the peg, manage your tension with the clamp. I never tried the latter; the former was handy in that it has an adjustable tension bar, but it has a major downside when circularly warped as intended: the upper length is hard capped by your pegs, and twist can only be undone by weaving backwards. There are creative ways around these problems, if you individually knot your threads, or you tie off your warp at either end, but at that point, you can build something with fewer parts and more workspace - hence the board loom. Your workspace is the entire board, and everything past the ends isn't important.

Shortly after, I saw a pair of different friends had put together a different style of board loom, with risers on both sides, and horizontal handles built into the board at each end for tying off. The first loom I made myself was a hybrid of the two; a riser on the back to keep my warp horizontal, with a clamp on the near end to simplify securing the completed warp. That worked rather well, so I went back and made a longer loom, this time with some improvements. The longer one has the carry handle on the side, making transport far easier (the original loom got this as a retrofit), and the hole in the riser that was originally for threading finished product through got moved up near the top. This makes an extra handle the warp can be tied off to without wasting the space between the riser and handle. For border cards, which are twisted the same direction through the entire band, I installed fishing swivels that I could tie off to, which let me simply push twist out of the relevant threads. 

This still left some points where I had to actively manage the threads. The non-swiveled threads all got tied to the handle as one large bundle, combed out when relevant, and then all had to be tied back on as a group, hoping that one of them wasn't a little bit more slack than the others. And, as twist built up and increased the tension, that required releasing the clamp incrementally. Not the end of the world, but advancing the warp is a chore.

I don’t use the longer loom much; it has extra space for twist buildup, but it’s big, heavy, and fatiguing to weave so far away from yourself. Hard to pack out to other places, but usable at home given the right table.

This design worked well before I discovered the joy of warp weights. With warp weights, which need to dangle through the back handle, this means the loom must be set on the corner of the table, or I have to use a TV tray that has a short enough surface that the loom can sit straight. With that setup done, though, everything else becomes easier. Each tablet has its own individual 3oz weight free-hanging, so the tension is always perfect after setup. Twist can get pushed out through the spinning weights, so I never have to weave in reverse unless I want to. And when I need to advance the warp, I can just unreel a couple wraps of thread from each weight, reclamp, and move on. 

Most of my weights are lead wire from the fishing aisle, encased in 3d printed cases. While in most cases, I like my gear pretty, the printed case was chosen for practicality of shape. I have twine leaders on them, so I can work closer to the end of my warp. To get more weights later, I coated some bank sinkers in enamel paint. These are smaller, but the paint chips.

Last year, I saw a friend up in Winter’s Gate (who later became my Laurel) carrying around a super simple frame loom, which worked when simply propped up on the edge of a table. The weaving is thus done in your lap, which makes everything easy to reach, and the weights can hang down between your knees.

 

My first frame loom is currently in someone else’s hands to pass on the art of weaving, so in lieu of dedicated blog post pictures, here are a couple from when it was new. I made it 11” by 20” or thereabouts, with a two-stage brake pointing to the inside of the frame. The only complex workmanship was cutting out some relief in the top of the beams to give myself some workspace, and an angled joint at the base board to keep everything square. I like the 90 degree rotation of the clamp, because threading the work around the center piece provides a lot of braking force without going too hard on the screws. 

I had some unused boards from the shield project, so after some experience, I made myself the second loom. It turned out with a bit less precise workmanship than the first, owing to less premeditation, but I’ve incorporated a couple of design tweaks. The first design secured the bolts with toothed T-nuts on the near face of the loom. This threatened to split the wood and showed more hardware on the outside of the piece, while also not securing the bolts square. Realistically, with the clamp assembled, the bolts will never come out, but the new solution is better anyway. A pair of tacked T-nuts, sans tacks, is now recessed into the opposite side of the board, providing a more conventional hold that isn’t structurally dependent on the clamp in any way and generally looks neater.

The crosspiece is now shaped instead of being straight across. The cutout on the near side is just to reclaim a 1/4” of workspace from slightly different board placement, and the curved front edge ideally encourages the warp threads to cluster together. On the original, they would try to spread out to match the warp weights, which makes the cards separate and stop holding each other upright. The curved bar works to some extent; the threads still walk outwards gently, but not quite as much as they used to.

Lastly, the curved cutouts at the end of the boards hopefully will encourage the loom itself to center on the table. The straight boards on the original could sometimes slide off the table edge sideways, which results in a very awkward drop as the whole thing tries to fall into my lap and tip sideways. With the cutouts, the weight encourages it to self-center. I've been using it for a few months now, and I've only dropped it twice, so I'd call that a success.

I've now got my setup refined to the point that I can kill downtime at work by weaving, which has helped me waste a lot less time playing solitaire.

Wooden Viking Shield

It all started with the 2023 Rondy parade when one of my fellow SCAdians surprised everyone by showing up to our float staging area with a spear. She looked awesome, so naturally I thought, “I want a spear!” 

And then, following naturally, I thought, “Just also having a spear would be copying. I want a shield. I’ll make it from actual planks so it won’t just be plywood. It’ll be a cool prop to get people’s attention (though I'm no longer a fighter), and it’ll be easy.” 

 You will notice a theme on this page as I go along: I plan projects like a starving man walking into an all you can eat buffet. 

My primary source for this reconstruction is this excellent breakdown of a whole lot of shields and their surviving components. 

Actual goals (as conceived on a hardware store trip later that day) 

My general goal for a historical project isn’t to replicate the thing exactly, and this is the case here. I will be limited by my facilities, modest budget, and parts availability, but within those constraints, I want to stay as true as I can to the concept in general. 

Ornately shaped iron handles with copper trefoil terminals and the like were beyond my capabilities, but I could use a reasonably accurately-shaped wooden handle and emulate the important hardware. I wasn’t going to try to make an exact depiction of one shield (fragmentary finds being what they are), but I could amalgamate them into something that fit me physically and aesthetically while looking plausible. This would not be a combat shield, but it would be dimensionally accurate and assembled more or less properly. 

My handle would be wood, my front face would be canvas (which was mentioned in a later document regarding kite shields as an inferior facing material, but by its mention, that meant at least someone did it), and the edging would be rawhide. I could hide a front facing being canvas by using my previously-acquired house paint, which I had used on heavy combat shields. This would save weight and cost, and I could make the unpainted back from leather. 

The sources online commonly referred to “rivets” fastening everything into the wood, but I didn’t find any great ways of acquiring solid rivets in the proper material and length, or a good way of using them without splitting the wood. Ultimately, I settled on clinch nailing. I was familiar enough with it for government work, and it appeared to be what was meant by "riveting" in some cases for at least one article. 

After getting some rawhide strip, I could glue and tack that down with carpet tacks. Nice thing about those, they have irregularly shaped heads and square profiles, so they look more like hand-forged nails than regular nails do. 

 The handle would be carved from a 1” square dowel; a reconstruction of the Trelleborg shield I hurriedly googled showed a simple round handle with a faceted grip, which sat in a small indentation in the shield blank. This I could do. 

Materials, round 1 

Canvas - 1 yd, natural color 

1/2x6x4 poplar planks - 6 ea. With some careful cutting, I could skimp on the two outer boards to save a couple bucks, and still get a 32” shield. Poplar was available at a good price, which was mentioned in the sources as being a used wood, amongst oak and linden. 

1” poplar square dowel - 1 ea. Good size, fits pleasingly in hand.

Assorted nails 

Wood glue

1/4” doweling pegs - left over from chests earlier

2-3 oz economy leather veg-tan shoulder

1" square dowel

Planks, round 1

 

A Norse craftsman could have hewn down whatever tree he wanted and split it into perfectly sized boards, planed to the desired thickness. A city-bound reenactor in an apartment might have some difficulties doing the same, so one makes do with Lowe's as necessary. I made a pattern in poster board, then laid out my wood, marked it for doweling, and started by cutting out my center hole. I have no jigsaw, so the easiest thing was to cut each half of the hole from its respective board, assemble the shield, then clean up later. 

By all indications, my original counterpart would not have doweled the boards, but I had less faith in my Lowe’s boards' ability to produce a solid butt joint. With my clamp lengths being what they were, I assembled the first four boards in the center, then put the outer boards on last, clamping from the inside of the hole. 

With that done, I took the scroll saw off its table and cut out the perimeter. The hard part was getting the correct thickness. My boards were 1/2” thick (12mm), but the originals were 8-9mm (3/8, more or less), working down to 4mm at the edges. I got the edge taper done while cleaning up the perimeter - the shield tapers most dramatically near the edge - but cleaning up the center area was the hard part. I eventually located some 36 grit sanding belts and finished the job in an hour. Because most of my tapering was on the front face, I had a couple of dowels poking through the surface by the time I was done. 

 

The core weighed 5 lb, 3 oz by the final taper, down from around 6 at initial assembly.

The handle

 

The handle ended up as a hybrid of Birka graves 736 and 886. The shape derived from 736, with its long, tapered and flared profile, while I took the rope work ornamentation from 886. Without the metal to emboss into, keeping the detailing simple would be the most reliable route. The original plan was to emulate the Trelleborg handle, but with that handle being ostensibly short, and my boards looking like they would want a bit more support to prevent taco-ing, I used a longer handle.

Shaping on the the scroll saw was simple, and was followed up with sanding and hand carving. For strap retention, my original plan was to make what my source described as a “staple” by bending wire into a key shape to then pass the strap through, as in the Torshov find. Upon further realization, the Torshov staple appeared to have been constructed a different way, with a single spike of metal, in which a hole was drifted open and the base flattened. When the tip was folded over to hold it in the wood, the end result would have been excellent at opening paint cans.

Instead, I looked to Birka 644, the survivors of which are a shield boss… and two actual staples with rings in them. I was going to use a pair of fence staples, but I was unimpressed with the length of those I could get in reasonable quantity. Instead, I got some rings and a pair of steel cotter pins, which I backed with washers hidden inside the handle. This gave me ample security, though the cotter pins were too stiff to bend over completely, and I had to trim them.

I wanted to put them near the ends of the handle, but I was concerned about removing that much wood, so I went nearer in.

Oops

And then, high on my own progress one weekend, I got the handle finished and hardware mounted, and I debated whether I needed to face the shield on both sides, or only the face and not the back. Based on the impression in the back of the Trelleborg shield, which had a faint divot where the handle had been, my guess was no; a depression that shallow would seem to be obscured by the leather.
So I attached the handle, clinched the nails, hid them in the shield, and glued up my facing leather with liquid hide glue.

And then I went to start my write up, and staring me in the face was Birka 850: both sides were faced. And I had just used my good leather on the paint side.

Time to spend $50 again.

 

Materials, round 2

2 stainless steel cotter pins

2 steel washers

Liquid hide glue (the last three bottles in the city)

2-3 veg-tan side *again*

270x7cm rawhide shield edging, because the local Tandy had no rawhide at all

Replica Telemark shield boss, 200mm

Yellow house paint

2 bulk bags cheap spring clamps 

Danish oil

Mink oil

Sno-coat

Sheet of 20ga steel unused

Planks, round 2

In a world where I hadn't screwed up, it seemed the correct way to assemble the shield would have been to face both sides, thus securing the boards together, before attaching the handle. Since I didn't live in that world, and I had an unfaced shield with the handle on it and two pieces of leather, I would have to cut the handle out of the leather and drop it over very carefully.

Facing the front was simple. Coat both the wood and the leather with liquid hide, lay it down, smooth it out, and put something heavy on top overnight. The back was less so; I measured where the handle sat on the shield in relation to the center hole, traced out my cutting pattern onto the leather, cut that out, and then same gluing process as before. Would have been perfect if I hadn't put the leather on backwards, leaving a gap on one end and a bit of trimming on the other. Oh well, not too noticeable. A coat of mink oil followed by some sno-coat would keep the unpainted leather safe, and a hit of danish oil would protect the wooden handle.

Having used an entire bottle of glue, I had enough structural parts on that my shield looked sort of like a shield. After some waiting, it was time for...

Edging

Once my rawhide strip showed up from Germany, I could get down to business. Having found little definitive information on stitching down the rawhide, I opted to glue it. Time to don gloves and break out the liquid hide. Once the rawhide had soaked overnight, I could begin clamping. Tapering the shield extensively towards the edges bit me hard here, because this made the clamps want to slide off and take the rawhide with them, rather than hold. After getting the first eight inches or so in place, it started holding on better, and I could make real progress. What worked best for me was giving it a little bit of stretch, then holding it in place every three or four inches with a large clamp. Then I could fill in space with smaller clamps and crush down any folds. Once I had used up all my clamps, the glue had generally set enough on the early sections that I could start pulling clamps away from there and reusing them, leaving a few behind to tack down.

I had calculated a bit of spare length for my rawhide, but it seemed I had compacted it a little in the early stages of installation, so I ended up with very precisely the amount I needed to cover my shield, with little to no overlap.  

My ultimate goal was to make some metal edge clamps, as had been found on many extant shields. Given the inconsistency in the number of clamps per shield and their location, these may have just been repairs, but I figured adding a few would look good and help hold the rawhide in place. However, after rigging up a dummy section of shield and cutting out a test clamp, I lost the test clamp immediately. At that point, some parts of my plan were coming into doubt, like whether I could peen over the nails I wanted to use as rivets, and whether I even needed clamps at all. At this point, months had gone by, and project fatigue was setting in, so I abandoned the idea entirely.

Interlude: What if I did everything again

As I was shopping at Walmart one night, I spied a cat bowl that had a nice flanged edge and a mostly round bottom, and I realized that it would make a convincing shield boss for someone with tiny hands. I have a sister, who at the time of writing is three years old. I've garbed her for the renfaire, and since her garb still fits... what if I made her a shield too...

Materials, round 3:

1 cat bowl

1/4x6x24 poplar boards, 4 ea

1/2" square dowel

Two colors green craft paint

Pull rivets

Blind rivet puller

XL rawhide dog bone

Assembly

After taking the drill press at work to the cat bowl, the process for this shield largely mirrors mine. In this case, I only butted the planks since I got to gluing them as soon as I got home, and they wouldn't have a chance to warp. Her shield is faced on the front only, and with the canvas I had meant to use for myself. Her shield is notably a bit flimsier than mine owing to the relative lack of support, but as a photo prop, it'll be fine. 

The interesting part was the rawhide. First, it took three different pet stores to find a rawhide bone big enough, quite a lot of soaking to get it unknotted, and about three seconds to realize it was too distorted to get good strips out of. However, there was a smaller, thinner piece on the inside that was a nice rectangle, and if I cut it out slightly thinner than I had initially wanted, it was enough for the whole shield. This was an even less cooperative gluing experience than my shield, partly because of the narrow strips, and partly because pet rawhide has been processed so hard that it's not a very good crafting material anymore. But, after using twice as many clamps at once as I had before, I got a good enough clamp job, and with a quick hit of 400-grit sandpaper, it looked and felt pretty good too. I chose pull rivets for attaching the boss so they would be relatively unobtrusive, both physically and aesthetically. Best to avoid rough edges with small children involved.

Painting

For a pattern, I opted not to go entirely with my heraldry, but instead do something similar to it. Since my heraldry has a centered charge that would be obscured by the boss anyway, I could be evocative, but do whatever I wanted anyway. So, I went with a gyronny arrondi of four for the background, with the gold orle from my heraldry rendered as a pattern from the reverse of the Heggen weathervane, which I've pulled from before.

Boss fight

At this point, it had progressed from early February to early May, and having taken about a month to produce, my shield boss finally arrived from overseas. This meant I could have my shield finished in time for faire, which was also a factor in not making edge clamps. It came with some very nice, heavy-duty rivets, and I quickly realized that given the size of the boss relative to the hand hole, they would blow the wood out if I tried to buck them. So, I compromised with Chicago screws, which fortunately the holes in the boss were already perfect for. While this leaves some obvious slot-head screws visible on the back, the front has nothing of the sort. Should be good enough for anyone taking pictures.

Materials, round 4

Chicago screws, 5/8", 6ea

1" Economy veg-tan belt blank, 2ea

Brass rivets, 2ea

Waxed cotton thread

1" belt buckle

1" belt retainer loop

Strap

Nothing I had found on extant shield bits included anything regarding hardware for the carry strap. We know there were straps, because we have a couple different styles of mounting point, and they were written about, but I haven't seen a buckle or anything else. In an ideal world, I would go to Raymond's Quiet Press or Armor and Castings and get a period buckle, but the former's shop was closed to new orders, and the latter has a bit of a war going on, so that ruled them out from timely delivery. So, the snake buckle from Tandy at least doesn't look like shiny polished modern hardware. Good enough. I bought a retainer loop because I couldn't be bothered to make my own at this point. That still left the elephant in the room: how to attach the strap to the shield itself. I would like to be able to replace the strap with something else eventually, and getting the shield up to an anvil to set rivets would be hard at home (or I could bring it to work and invoke the rivet gun, but that's its own minor headache. I settled for making a tab and slot loop, in lieu of a rolled toggle like found on the Jorvik shoe - the belt blanks I bought were far too thick to roll anything. To make it look a little less clunky and also ensure security, I bound the base of it with thread. Sturdy, removable, and wouldn't leave a remnant.

 

Conclusion

The final shield weighed 9 lb 13 oz with the strap included. The Project Forlog reproduction shield (from the beginning of the article I've been sourcing pictures of individual shields from), by comparison, weighed 9 lb 14 oz for a diameter of 35 inches as opposed to my 32. So theirs was definitely lighter; I probably could have tapered mine a little differently, or more than likely, used different wood and leather. Their lamb leather was probably thinner and added significantly less weight. However, my version being limited by the time, budget, and effort of a single poorly-focused individual, I'm satisfied to have gotten as close as I did.