One of the other activities I do in the SCA is archery. I'm ok at it. I don't have any awards or anything in it, and I really enjoy doing the Unranked Archer shoot at Lilies War. I've been complaining about how we need to do more of these so, I guess I'll do it. My barony has an event every year around the Fourth of July called Simple Day, so I am sponsoring an Unranked Archery shoot at it.
I'm providing the prizes for it and am making archery bags. These will be bags for stashing all the stuff we carry around, strings, wax, extra parts, whatever, and I am using the intarsia applique technique for them. They will be about 10" by 13", the outside will be wool, lined with linen or a linen-cotton blend I have in my stash, and have a long strap for slinging over one's shoulders. I also want to use this as a possible learning and practice opportunity for our Tuesday night socials if people want to try their hand at it and help put them together. There will be three: one for handbow, one for crossbow, and one for period bow.
I am making one for myself to test this all out and have already run into some lessons for when we do this for real.
I printed out the pattern and started cutting. I used tape instead of pins to minimize the rippling in the fabric since you want each piece to match up as well as possible with the opposite hole. That worked great. What didn't work great was that I cut out both layers of fabric at the same time. Don't do this. You think it's going to work fine. You've got sharp, pointy scissors. Nope. Don't do it. They just didn't match up well when I switched them at all.
I went on and based each one into the other fabric. I could tell that there were going to be gaps in some places and overlap. With this technique, you can even some of that out as you sew and squish and stretch the fabric about, but the more you have, the more it just doesn't look great.
Here are the pieces with the arrows basted in with plain old poly sewing thread.
And here I have started the actual whip stitching, using linen thread.
And here this arrow is done. It isn't horrible, but I wasn't happy with it.
So... I'm going to start over. More to come!