Drafting patterns for leatherworking

Note: This post isn't really about 16th century methodologies.

I've shared a few of my favorite "hacks" (as the kids say) for making leather items with a bit of improvisation in the tools department. We've used flower pots to build mugs, we've used butter knives for skiving, and my favorite cheap woodworking chisels for cutting.

So let's talk about pattern making.

If you've ever followed my maskmaking tutorial or done any other leatherworking without a pre-printed pattern, you've noticed that there's often a size discrepancy between any paper pattern you've created by wrapping the item in paper and marking seams (as we did with this shoemaking post) and the leather you're going to use.

This can cause some real fit issues.

The problem stems from the difference in thickness between paper and leather, combined with the fact that paper doesn't stretch around a form and leather does. You could use some math to account for the thickness, but the stretch is a bit more difficult to guess at, which can result in some wasted materials.

Here's my Not Even Remotely Period (NERP) approach to leather patterning that saves me a lot of time and leather when I'm winging it with a pattern: craft foam.

In the image below, I am preparing a knife sheath for one of my carving knives. I've wrapped the knife in paper and marked the seam, but to get a better handle on the actual shape of the final piece of leather, I made the pattern in the back on thin white foam which I purchased from a local Michael's craft store.

It's not quite as thick as the final leather, but it's close. More importantly, it stretches a bit in a manner that is very reminiscent of damp leather. And since this is a pattern where the fit is precise and the seams have to just meet with no seam allowance, fit is so very crucial.

It's NERPy, sure, but it works a treat.

- Scott

What I did on my summer vacation, or "How this project got stepped on by a giant robot"

For the past little while, I've been distracted from this project by an overwhelming surge of The Other Things that make up my life. For this I apologize because I've been less than communicative. Sometimes I get so far into my own head that I'm out of cell range. My wife and I went on our first vacation in years and I saw parts of my own state that I've never had the privilege of exploring before.

Sometimes you just have to get in the car and go for a three-day drive.

No leather was worked, no wood was carved, no sheep were sheared. I did clean out my shop before it started raining and we built another oven and baked some bread, but that was revisiting a guild that already had its checkmark.

For all intents and purposes, the Renaissance Artisan was 'out' for most of the summer.

Which isn't the same as saying that I've been idle...

As you probably know that before anything else that I do, I am a writer. I make sense of the world by telling stories about it. Whether it's history or fantasy, it's all words to me. When I'm lucky, I get to share those stories with others. Writing is my vocation and my first love. This means that at any given moment, I have more than one project on the docket and often when a deal is being considered, it is confidential until all the papers are signed.

Which is a long way to go toward saying that this week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring my humorous science fiction novel Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made by my publisher yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

Howard Carter is a novel that I just sat down and told the first story that occurred to me, taking it wherever my fancy led, no matter how bizarre. Aliens who learned about earth by watching Sesame Street? Done. Secretive government agencies? Mysterious universities? Mad scientists? Got it all. Giant robots? Oh, the giant robots...  I wrote it all in public (rather like I've been doing here) posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter on a blog, writing live and in front of a studio audience. No laugh tracks allowed!

If you want to read a bit of it, here's a free short story that gives you a general sense of the storytelling and characters from the novel. 

Which is a long way of going about telling you that I'm sorry I dropped this to run off and do that, but I will be back in the workshop in a week or so. I have a half-finished costrel and a shoemaking project in the wings. I've also been making connections to get a proper handle on the life of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen, plus the weavers, spinners, mercers, and tailors that lie at the end of that supply chain. 

In the meantime, I have some up-front work to do on getting Howard Carter ready for print and I'll be ducking in and out as my editor and publisher need me. If you would like to join me on that part of the journey as well as this one, I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

Side note: Would it be cheating to use this as part of a study of the Worshipful Companies of Stationers and Clerks?  Just a thought...

However it goes, my goal in that project and this one is to put out a story that is good enough for you to read and enjoy, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

There will be much, much more later.

- Scott

Occupational Hazards: My mother the shoemaker...

My mother was a nurse for most of my life, until she retired. Except at one point when I was a kid, out of frustration with some aspect of the nursing trade, she went to work in a local shoe factory. More than anything, I remember the smell of the glue on her clothing when she came home.

And you thought my grandfathers were my only link to the trades...

It's probably just as well that I did not know at the time about n-hexane polyneuropathy, an occupational disease endemic to these shoe factories brought on by exposure to the very glue that I remember so well. Thankfully, factory life didn't agree with her and she went back to nursing in pretty short order.

Nursing has its own hazards, just as sitting at a desk typing does, but occupational diseases are not a modern invention. Our repetitive strain disorders and bad backs and neuropathies born of the chemical age are nothing new. N-hexane polyneuropathy is just the modern equivalent of an 18th century disease known as 'shoemaker's colic'. Hatters were famously driven mad by the mercury they used, and so on and so forth...

Something we should probably talk about more often is the occupational hazards of the artisan life.

To get a bit nearer our period, let us wander off to Jamestown and take a gander at some scary-looking femurs that bear the marks of a lifetime of cobblers using their upper legs to pound on.  In the image at the right, you can get a glimpse inside a 16th century shoemaker's workshop from my old nemesis Jost Amman.

Note the way the two men in the foreground are working with the shoe on their thigh. The strap you can see holding the shoe in place, running under the heel of the bloke on the left is the shoemaker's stirrup I described last Sunday.

Image from the Jamestown.org

website's "Written in Bone: 

Forensic Files of the 17th 

Century Chesapeake" exhibit. 

Jost's guys are sewing, but hammers were also used to condense and work-harden leather, especially soles, and if you do that on your leg for a lifetime, your body is going to defend you from the damage. When you damage a bone, it repairs itself -- damage it enough repeatedly over a long enough period and your body will adapt, build up extra bone to protect itself from the next blow. Eventually, the layers of bone will build up and you end up with a sort of anvil attached to your femur.

Do me and yourself a favor: learn from their mistake.

It would make sense, in a way, for this to be more common for cobblers than cordwainers since sole repairs would've fallen to the cobbler. Though I should note that the Jamestown website doesn't draw a distinction between the two, and on the frontier there might not have been one.  On the muddy reaches of the Virginia coast, I would think that pounding hobnails into soles was a more common task than not.

A bone spur like that must've leant itself to one hell of a limp.

It's a cobbler's life, I guess.

Not all occupational markers are skeletal or so terribly painful. Bakers and blacksmiths have burns, which would theoretically heal and leave your skin all the more impervious to future burns. As I mentioned, the scars and bone spurs were the result of the body's attempts to protect itself.

On a side note, when I'm watching TV shows like NCIS or Bones, when they confidently describe the working lives of the men and women whose skeletons they're examining, I often wonder how hobbyists throw wrenches into the works on such occasions. I may be a writer, but I have several that might confuse a forensics team if I ever ended up on the table in an episode of Bones. My left incisor has been worn down years of cutting thread with it and I have a shoulder thing that's the result of a stint as a stockman at WalMart* in my youth preceded by a couple years in the pressroom of a local publisher. Compound that by all the adventures this project have led me on and I have to wonder what the CSI folks would make of my body.

That might seem a bit macabre, but ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Food for thought anyway.

~ Scott

------
* You know that thing you hear about where Wally World comes to town and before you know it they're the only game in town? Yeah.

Living Elizabethan: All Work and No Play...

The local news and gossip is awash with stories of our local team's quest to move a small leathern object of possession by hand or foot from one end to the other of a gridded field of dispute against the fervent wishes of their opposite numbers in counter-coloured uniforms who rise up to stop them. It is given me by local lore and custom that Our local sportsmen are better at achieving this endeavor successfully than any other group of combatants similarly accoutered.

Certainly this seems to be the current obsession of townsfolk in every restaurant, bar, party, and workplace that I enter.

(Go Seahawks.)

Of course I'm being a bit silly, but since I'm not a football fan it all seems a bit silly anyway. (Unless we're talking about the Stanley Cup, in which case an overwhelming obsession Makes Perfect Sense!) One of the things I feel like I did wrong in putting this project together was overlooking how the Life Elizabethan really worked.

And believe it or not, that includes football... well, sort of.

So today, let's talk about other things on an Elizabethan's mind. The things of passing import beyond the immediate pleasure of watching or participating... which is to say games.

Henry VIII was a huge football fan and enjoyed playing, though his game would be as unfamiliar to European football (soccer) fans as it would be to American fans of the gridiron. Though rugby fans would feel right at home.

We've talked about Archery, the practice of which was instituted as a matter of law in the centuries preceding Elizabeth's accession in order to train men for war rather than allow them to be distracted by games like football.

Not that Archery wasn't considered a sport or didn't lead to competitions. Around here somewhere, I have a partial court record of a man accused of witchcraft for being too greatly improved at archery, which to me just reeks of a competitor's jealousy. It led to many games meant to sharpen the instinct and aim of the archer from the benign (swinging targets) to the cruel (shooting at a cat in a bag**).

Thanks to Shakespeare*, we know more about what our Elizabethan townsfolk were up to on a day-to-day basis. Our Elizabethan forebears weren't necessarily so wrapped up in work they had no time to play. The rise of the artisan class meant upward mobility and with upward mobility came free time. Beyond archery and football, there were also card games and dice, tables (better known these days as backgammon), baseball-like games such as rounders and stool ball, hurling (for our Irish cousins), tennis (another of Henry VIII's favorites), bowls, badminton...  Also, anywhere there are competitive spirits and things that can be pushed, ridden, or rolled (horses, carts, wheelbarrows, rounds of cheddar...) there will be racing.

They didn't have a Superbowl or Lord Stanley's Cup to vie for, but our modern affection for sport is nothing new and it would not be all that surprising to our forebears.

~ Scott

Rounders: Your humble author at the bat...

---
* Let's face it, without The Bard drawing our attention to it, the Elizabethan period would be just another period dimly remembered from history class. Type "Life in Chaucer's England" into the Amazon search screen. 88 hits on that Amazon search and most of them different editions of the same book or irrelevant to the subject. There were 552 hits on a similar search for Shakespeare's England almost all of them actually about the life and times of the Glover of Avon.

**"If I do, hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot
at me; and he that hits me, let him be clapped on
the shoulder, and called Adam."
-Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing,

Now What? The evolution of the project...

Today is December 1st. The state of the project? It is to laugh...

I've been very sick since the end of September. I have this stupid... thing that happens to me periodically. Around here, we call it Sporadic Lego Head Holiday Syndrome. We call it that because it's apparently un-diagnosable by modern science. Perhaps the dumbest assumption I made at the beginning of this year was that I'd be able to stay healthy for the entire year so that I could complete the rather daunting task list I'd written for myself.

All that is somewhat beside the point.

The brief interstice moments the past couple of months, I've spent working on our kitchen. Because family comes first and I keep my promises to others before I keep the ones I made to myself. So I have a functioning kitchen and a non-functioning artisan project...

I'm proud of the work I've managed to finish on the kitchen, but the "One Year Mission..." part of this blog has not fared nearly as well.

Have I failed? 

It would be difficult to argue otherwise. I certainly can't knock out two dozen trades in the one month I have between now and January 1st. So it would be pretty stupid for me to say I haven't failed at my original mission.

If you feel the urge to say I told you so, please feel free to swallow that urge. Seriously. Don't be that person.

The truth is, this project was beginning to morph into something more long-term long before my head swelled to cartoonish proportions. If I'm honest with you and with myself I began to second-guess the format I chose for this back in August when I experienced the true difference between learning an aspect of a trade and truly practicing it.

Of course, it's impossible to practice 111 trades from 54 guilds at once.  There are valid reasons why tradesmen specialized and it wasn't only because the guilds required them to. The requirements for specialization forced them to focus on a single trade and operate at the top of their game.

So now what?

Yes, I am a craftsman, but I am first and foremost, a storyteller. So I will finish the story.

This story has grown in the telling, as stories are wont to do. With every blister, splinter, burnt loaf, and failed thimble, it has become about more than the making of the stuff and less about the making of the artisan. For the past year, I expended too much effort on the tasks and not enough on the tradesmen.

A story like this deserves all the space it needs to tell it properly. It deserves more than scene setting, it deserves character development. I don't rightly know how that will look, but that's what I plan to do. So my continuing mission is a purer, more thorough version of the original one, but without the artificial time constraint.

I said at the outset that I had a problem with how history is taught, with the People Magazine approach that is a pointless litany of glittering celebrities carrying on, mostly behaving badly. It's no wonder that students view history as a list of dates to be memorized and the names of kings and generals to regurgitate. I found myself doing the same thing on a different level, ticking off a list of items to make and move on to the next.

Material culture is only interesting in how those materials reflect the culture. The tools are only interesting in the way that they reflect their user and their maker. I lost sight of that as I focused on the sprint.

Spending three weeks in the smoke and flour dust of our ersatz renaissance bakery showed me how thin my understanding of these trades was. How superficial the project had become, mostly because I had set an artificial deadline that made it look more exciting from the outside and forced it to become less in-depth on the inside.

By failing, I've set myself free from my own constraints. There's probably a deeper metaphor there for those who have an urge to mine for such things.

In the meantime, I've a story to tell. I invite you to stick around and help me tell it. If you don't, I certainly understand.

~ Scott

Scenes from a Renaissance Bakery

The "Production Scale Renaissance Bakery" experiment continues...

There are certain fringe benefits of working an outdoor kitchen. The view, for instance, is quite often simply amazing.

This was the scene Friday evening on the edge of the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire that is dedicated to living history displays. A group of friends of ours who teach period games sits next to us and beyond that, the military encampment where Goode's Company of Foote and the Salle St George demonstrate the life and martial studies of a renaissance soldier.

By the way, I'm convinced that the whole "Red sky at night/sailor's delight" thing is a lie. I may not be a sailor, but even I know that a beautiful sky like that presages nothing but trouble.  Sure enough, six hours after this photo was taken, the temperature stopped falling and began to rise as a thunderstorm moved north out of the Mount Rainier National Park, split around the flanks of the mountain, and fell on us like the wrath of a vengeful god.

Now, contrary to what you might see on television shows like Grey's Anatomy, it hardly ever thunders or downpours in the Seattle area. We generally have too many mountains and too much water. Fronts that create thunderheads get snagged and chopped up on the peaks that surround our cities.

This storm front missed that memo.

Those of us who hail not from the placid weather patterns of the Pacific Northwest, but from the center portion of the United States where the weather frequently and actively tries to kill you, watched the clouds surround our campsite with some trepidation. While lightning danced across the surrounding hilltops, I sat with two friends (both also from the plains states) drinking beer and speculating about what it felt like to get hit by 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. As the rain started to fall, we began to retreat to our cars, urging our northwestern friends to do likewise. Better to weather the storm in a Faraday cage (which is what a car is, if you think about it) than in a canvas box suspended from lightning rods (which is what a tent is if you think about it, God help you).

I've known people who died sleeping in tents during a storm. I learned early in life the lesson "Thou shalt not mess with the storm".

So it was that the engineer and I spent half the night in sporadic catnaps amid the relative discomforts of a rain-drenched vehicle. So it was that once the storm passed and the day dawned (all assembled were thankfully unhurt no matter where they spent the night) it was a cranky and ill-tempered brood of bakers that greeted the morning's light.

Well... everyone except for that guy. I told him that naming his horse "DeLorean" wasn't going to be enough to get it up to 88 miles per hour...  

The things we'll do for the sake of a project, I swear.

A Day Weekend In the Life...

A baker's life is not one that allows for much in the way of sleeping in. We admittedly don't get up nearly as early as the bakers of yore since the festival does not open its gates until 10:00. But there's still precious little time for catching up on storm-addled dreams as the unrelenting mistresses of beer, bread, and hearth beckon.

I and my fellow bakers are up and tending our hearth by 7:00 in order to be ready to have bread coming out by the time the patrons begin filtering in.  In our first weekend at our new trade, we had nothing but trouble with an oven that hadn't yet dried to a point where it would give back the heat we put into it in an efficient manner.



Friday evening, I got to site early and rebuilt the oven's mouth, making it a bit deeper and doing what I could to increase the wall thickness (with mixed results). The reason I had a fire in the oven for that picture up top was to dry out the new cob I'd added. And that fire was the main reason I was still awake in the wee hours, sitting with soldiers and watching the approaching storm. A hot oven can't go under a tarp.

The oven was barely cool enough to get tarped when the storm rolled in and Saturday morning, condensation on the inside of the tarp had made a bit of a mess out of what was already a bit of a messy application of clay to the outside.

We over-compensated and fired it way too long, the result of which was burning the first batch of bread for the day because it must've been at least 700 degrees fahrenheit when we put the dough in.

Nevertheless, we got our feet under us and kept our hands in the dough all day, totally on Saturday alone more than our entire previous weekend's output.

For all the time I spend with tools, there are some simple things that I just didn't know how to do, skills that I might never have noticed my lack of were it not for this project. For instance, this year, I had to teach myself how to peel an apple or a potato with a knife instead of a peeler. (Turns out I needn't have bothered, when it came time to make the apple tart, The Engineer was already a dab hand with a knife... of course.)

At the end of the first day, we had totalled more loaves than we'd baked the entire first weekend. By the end of the day on Saturday, we'd more than doubled it.

I've been going to renaissance faires in one capacity or another for quite some time. They crack me up for both what they are and what the most assuredly are not. What they aren't is Living History in any sense. Faire is essentially a theatrical enterprise. Participants are either cast in specific roles or create their own and are expected to act the part. Historical fact plays second or third fiddle to entertainment and that's just how it goes. Welcome to ye olde theme parke.

People who cannot handle that don't last long.

This was my first real experiment in something that I think we can (I think) genuinely describe as living history. My crew spent the entire day either baking or explaining what we were doing to the onlookers. And boy did we draw a crowd. I explained the principles of oven construction hundreds of times. People are/were fascinated by what we were about, challenged me on what ingredients I'd have had and where I got them in a 16th century context.

As a card-carrying nerd, I'm not ashamed to admit it was some of the most fun I think I've ever had in public. We educated a lot of people, we made over 100 loaves of bread, and -- if comments are to be believed -- might have even inspired a minor oven-building boom in the Pacific Northwest.

Now that's what I call a job well done.

The Engineer channels a character from a Breugel painting as she measures out the flour for a new batch. She's even wearing wooden shoes though you can't see them here....

Kill It with Fire Part Three: Fifty faire loaves and counting...

It may not always come across when I'm writing, but I'm acutely aware that it's one thing to play at a profession from days of yore, and it is another thing entirely to actually attempt to perform a trade at a professional level of production, not to mention quality. 

The baker's got big ol' pants, oh yeah...

It seems unavoidable that to do a single project or even a series of projects that touch on the tools and skills of a profession and then move on to something else imparts only a surface understanding of the real daily existence of the craftsman working night and day just to keep food on the table. I'm just one guy with one life to live. How different is it to brew five gallons of weak ale compared to brewing thousands of gallons of strong ale to meet demand and fill orders outstanding? Thimbles, pins, barrels, furniture, bread, tools, hats… all of these trade goods take on a different dimension when viewed from the perspective of mass production instead of one-off projects.

This past weekend, I found myself trying to really do this thing and it just might be my favorite thing I’ve done so far.

Awhile back I mentioned that a group I founded had been hired to create renaissance cooking and baking demonstrations at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire. Originally we wanted to do a full-on historical cooking show, but it quickly became clear that was putting the cart before the horse. So it is that over the course of the last three weeks, I’ve been laboring to build another oven on the WMRF site and then this past weekend we used it to produce a lot of bread.

Eventually, I would still like this to grow into a full-on live cooking show. Sort of an Elizabethan version of Good Eats that delves into the what, why, and how of renaissance fare. At the moment, though, we have enough to do just coming to grips with the logistics and obstacles of cooking in a period manner in a period setting.

No lights no phones, no motor cars, not a single luxury…

It is pretty rustic, though. This is a picture of me
warming a cup of beer to a temperature that I
hope won't kill the yeast... with a hot tent stake. 

Okay, that’s a lie; it’s a renaissance faire, not a desert island. This is Seattle -- there’s a parking lot full of cars and you can’t throw a bun without hitting an iPhone. But we’re still baking bread with the heat from a fire while wearing silly clothes in the middle of a hay field.

This past weekend (after a slow start owing to an oven that hadn’t sufficiently dried out yet to really go into production) the Engineer and I produced fifty loaves of bread. The Engineer made eight loaves of the loveliest rosemary herbed bread and  and our compatriot Becky made a lovely apple tart. 

By the end of the weekend, we had furnished the tables of almost every other group at faire (apologies if we missed you) with delicious loaves of bread. And we've been taking orders for this weekend and accepting bribes to get higher on the delivery list. (I'm an artisan, not a saint.)

I don’t know how that stacks up to the output of a professional bakery. Small beer, I'd wager, but nevertheless I don’t personally know anyone outside of the baking profession that walks out into the middle of a field one day and decides to build an oven and bake fifty-odd loaves of bread all in one go...

Mine really is a very special and specific kind of insanity.

I have to admit that it hurt a little bit. Monday morning, my hands and forearms ached like nobody's business. A friend of mine who used to be a baker before giving it all up for the exciting world of certified accountancy laughed and said “Where do you think I got my Popeyes?” (I always wondered why his forearms were so big… I didn't ask about the anchor tattoos.) The skin on my hands is raw and feels callused from the heat and abrasion of the whole wheat and barley flour we were using. I have tiny blisters from burns I didn’t even notice until I got home and my head is still full of the smell of woodsmoke.

And I loved every minute of it.  I can't wait to go out there this weekend and do it all over again. Awhile back I said that coopering was the only job so far that I could picture myself doing as a vocation. Baking now officially tops that list.

I may have an addiction forming. Ah well, at least flour is cheaper when you buy it fifty pounds at a time...

Learning Curves and the State of the Project: I know now why apprentices are a Thing...

Part One: History and Hubris 

“History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.” – Henri Fabre

That sounds familiar.

That quote, attributed to Henri Fabre[1], sits at the top of page one, chapter one in the book Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History by H.E. Jacob. The book is a vast and noble attempt to fix Mssr Fabre’s problem, and it goes a long way toward doing so. It is the latest of many books I’ve found and wished I had and/or read before we embarked on this journey. At risk of stacking quotes, an old adage that’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln says that the purpose of reading is to remind us that our original ideas aren’t all that original.

Touché, Mssrs. Lincoln, Fabre, & co. A hit, a palpable hit...

What 6,000 Years of Bread really does well, though, is map out a very reasonable twenty-years spent by the author trying to understand the origins of bread. And it reminds me that what I’m doing here has become less and less about the world, trade, and tools of the renaissance craftsmen and more and more about their tools.

In other words, I’ve gone about this entire thing in entirely the wrong way. 

For instance, when I ventured into the world of the Worshipful Company of Turners, I spent quite a while trying to figure out what kind of lathe to build, how it operates, and how to build one. Then I built one. From scratch.

Now, while I knew this would be part of the process, I wildly under-estimated how long it would take to build all of these tools. (Or perhaps underestimated the size of my own creative ego, you be the judge.)

The next project includes baking and cooking.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my house didn’t come equipped with an Elizabethan spec kitchen any more than it came with a wood shop, which means there’s a cob oven and hob rising from nothing in my back yard. And I’m doing everything myself except baking the bricks.

And I really ought to be baking the bricks except that I haven’t found someone with a large enough kiln yet who will let me near it. 

Which all sort of argues that my project has veered more toward a re-imagining of the renaissance as something that was invented from nothing. Or perhaps springing from some post-apocalyptic hellscape where each piece of technology has to be re-created from stuff I find lying around. 

 Mad Max, circa 1560.

Part Two: Tools and Their Users

Sometimes I feel like I’m not so much learning how an Elizabethan artisan lived his life as reenacting the 1600 odd years that preceded his life as we moved from whittling to bow lathes to springpoles and treadles and onward. Sometimes it’s a bit like studying the lives of Indy drivers and starting by learning how to make tires from scratch...

Because I’m almost literally reinventing the wheel with every one of these projects, it eats into the time I can spend actually learning about the craftsmen and the things they made. Which is fine, studying the tools is a fine thing and I’m learning a mind-blowing amount of information about fabricating my own tools. But I think that the key thing I’m learning is that this should have been two projects: a yearlong preparation stage where I build the tools and then a second year when I learn to use them to create standard period artifacts and study the people who used them.

Which isn't the worst idea I've ever had, actually.

There's an inherent drawback to inheriting your tools. You were either not alive or too young to care when they were purchased. (Actually, in my case, my grandpa was either not alive or too young to care when some of them were purchased.) So you don't have a really close relationship with that punch to the wallet that accompanies some tool purchases.

Seriously, I bought my first new hammer ever just this year.

When I first embarked on this project, I thought that with easy access to the internet, I could get my hands on anything I really needed to get a project done. Going out into the community to see if I could source things locally was a bit of a lark because I could always just order it online. And that's certainly true, as it turns out... but there's a hitch.

Take this adze for instance.

If you've never seen one of those before, that's okay; it's not exactly a common tool in modern America. An ancient tool, the adze is sort of a sideways axe, used to dig out hollows (as with a dugout canoe) or smooth a surface (as shown above).

The adze in the image above was an adze-shaped ball of rust when I found it in the bottom of a bin at a flea market. The seller thought it was a gardening tool, and priced it at the princely sum of $5.99. In the past couple of months, I've procured three adzes in precisely the same manner, and in the same state of disrepair. As followers of the Facebook feed know, I recently spent the weekend bringing them back to life.

That one tool took six hours to bring back to life. I worked the sun into and out of the sky and still wasn't finished with the smaller of the three, a cooper's adze.

It was time well spent and it makes my heart glad. This tool is truly a joy to use, as are the other two.

My forbears left me a big box of serious tools because they took their tools seriously. And even if that wasn't true, standing opposed to the disposable aesthetic is part of maker culture.

Part of what makes me... me.

I also refuse to spend the money on anything that won't survive regular use. (Except computer equipment, which is a rant for a different time.) There's no economic sense in spending a $100 for a tool that will last five years (maybe) when you can buy a thirty or hundred-year tool for $200.

This is complicated by the fact that at the outset of this endeavor, I had to agree not to bankrupt us in my quest. The Engineer is smarter than I am and always has been. She's followed me into many a woodworking store and while I was oohing and ahhhing over the figured cherry, she was flipping price tags. She knew this would not be cheap and extracted a promise from me before I caught on.

See? Smarter.

Everything I could ever possibly need is indeed available to me via the internet, but there's a catch. Real tools cost real money.

Three: The Internet & the Deep Blue Sea

As we've discussed before, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose went down on July 19, 1545, she sealed for the ages a time capsule of life in Henrician England. The artifacts preserved included the tools of the ship's carpenters. Eight chests of period tools, preserved by the waters of the Solent and a strange quirk of unkind fate.

Despite there being eight chests of tools, this is not by any stretch an elaborate or even complete example of a wood worker's trade. The tools aboard Mary Rose were specific to the task of keeping her upright and fighting. Nevertheless this gives us that rarest of gifts for a project like this one: an intact example of a 16th century tradesman's tools.

Which made me wonder what it would cost if I just went out and bought the modern interpretations of those classic hand tools. Hewing as closely as possible to their historical counterparts, of course, and bearing in mind the quality standards already outlines, I pretended I had a Hollywood budget under my belt, composed a selected list of key tools from Mary Rose, and went window shopping.

Broad Axe (Woodcraft).... $300.00

Broad Hatchet (Amazon).... $125.00

Carpenter's Adze (Lee Valley).... $250.00

Hand Adze (Lee Valley)... $50.00

Wimble (A wooden brace or hand drill)... Metal varieties are a dime a dozen. No one seems to sell wooden ones anymore and anyone that wants one, makes one. Antiques are priced from $50 up.

Spoon bits (no spiral bits in the 16th Century - Lee Valley).... $80.00 for a set of five

Bow Saw (Gramercy Tools).... $150.00

Wooden Smoothing Plane (Closest I could find to the Mary Rose example - Lee Valley).... $239

Wooden Rabbet Plane (Or what looks like one in the few pics I can find online - Lee Valley).... $39.50

Marking/Mortise Gauge (Rockler)..... $49.50

Dividers (Lee Valley).... $23.00

Ruler (Primitive).... It's a stick with marks burnt into it. Can't imagine buying one from someone.

Draw Knife (Daegrad).... £ 27.99 (Call it $43.00 at today's exchange rate)

Handsaw (Northwind Toolworks).... $275.00

I stopped when the total hit $1600.00 and remember that he would also have had various nippers, pliers, clamps, and miscellaneous whatnot which were made primarily of ferrous metals and therefore lost to time and tides.

I'm not saying that my tool chest is worth anywhere near that much (because it isn't), or that these are worth that much (though they are) you can see why I rely heavily on the antique stores and flea markets. And why I jumped at a carpenter's adze for under $6.00, even if it was a lump of ferrous oxide.

Also, bear in mind that this list would just cover tools for the carpenter's portion of the project. Leaving aside the overlap with the coopers, joiners, and turners which would still add to the total. There's also cooks and bakers and embroiderers and knitters and spinners and weavers and woolmen...

Thankfully, I am only metaphorically doing this on a stage, so there's no reason for me to go out and buy the perfectly period versions of these tools unless it genuinely affects the outcome in some way. Even Peter Follansbee, the joiner at Plimoth Plantation advises aspiring joiners to get close and get on with it.



So that's what I'm doing, but it's still slow-going.

Which is why a large and growing portion of this project has been about tools. Hunting, creating, rehabilitating, tools. And if at the end of the year all I've learned or earned is about the tools and toolmaking, I suppose I'll just have to spend another year learning about their users.And I'm going to call that a win.

With that settled, rest assured I will be posting more often in the coming weeks.

See you soon!

- Scott

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[1] Though the quote is attributed to Henri Fabre (inventor of the sea plane) in the book where I found it, I suspect that it’s actually attributable to Jen-Henri Fabre, entomologist and social commentator who also said “The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.” Which I find similarly germane to my mission.

And then my brain tried to kill me... The state of the project.

The other day on Facebook, I promised to update soon. I promised that I wasn't dead. And because fate has a warped sense of humor, then my brain tried to kill me.

Like it often does.

So... lots to catch up on. Coffee, for instance. Haven't had any coffee since Wednesday and I have a lot of catching up to do. Also there's a kitchen sitting around in pieces that needs to be reassembled so we can, you know, cook food and stuff. Tiling and cabinets and countertops and miscellaneous whatnot await me, but coffee first. 

Because priorities, I have them.

Which brings us back to this project, and most especially this blog, which I have been neglecting, I fear.

I seriously underestimated the toll that accepting a full-time job would have on this project. Especially with all the home renovations that have to be done. The level of organization necessary exceeded my ready supply of tools.  I'm not really good at organization on this scale at home. I do fine at work, juggling huge projects that span entire years, but when I get home... something clicks off in my brain.

Just one of the many ways my brain periodically demonstrates how it hates me.

There's a horn out in the shop that's halfway to becoming a beaker, a half-made bow-lathe that needs some attention, and all the makings of a woodfired oven stacked under a tarp waiting for a dry spell so I can call out the troops to come help build it.

Anyway, I talked to the engineer, and we're trying something new.

Because real, bought and paid for, life trumps blogging projects, the bulk of my time is spoken for. There's just no way around that. Some of what I have to do for the kitchen (tile for instance) will align with parts of this project, but most of it is too modern to fit neatly into Renaissance Artisan business.

One or two days a week, however, will be devoted entirely to this project. Building, experimenting, photographing, and documenting (cough-blogging-cough) will take precedence on those days. We're still working out which days and how, but that's the plan or this is never going to work out.

Like the Facebook thingy said: "one man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks." And we're at the end of week 18. At this rate, it's never going to work and before you propose it, I am not yet willing to entertain the idea of cutting projects. Part of the "fun" of doing this is figuring out how to do it without neglecting the day-to-day of modern life.

Anyway, that's the state of the project.

More later. I have coffee to drink and all the aforementioned projects aren't going to get closer to done by typing.

~Scott