Archery set

For Mom's birthday this year I'd long planned to make a belt and quiver to go with the bow I bought her two years ago.  The Seven Meadows child bow is a scaled-down version of their Scythian style, with no siyahs, but Mom asked for the equipment to be something she could wear to Renaissance fairs.  Because she's half-Bohemian, I decided to try to model it after that which was used by Bohemian archers.

Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, information on something as specific as Renaissance-era Bohemian archery equipment is very difficult to come by.  What little I was able to find seemed to indicate that their stuff resembled Eastern European and Turkic gear, so in the end I modeled it after Ottoman Turkish examples, with the modification of using Western European belt parts (a D-shaped buckle attached by a plate and a chape).

This was the first time I'd stitched fabric over leather.  I cut the fabric slightly larger than the bowcase and quiver, cut the edges of the fabric into tabs, folded the tabs under, glued them with Fabri-Tac and then stitched them with linen cord.  The result is very rough-looking.  I will have to put further study into how this should have been done historically.  One thing I've already noticed is that the originals appear to have had fabric with designs woven or embroidered for the case and quiver instead of taking fabric that was woven by the yard with designs already added and cutting it to shape, as I did here.

This was also the first time I beveled and burnished the belt edges and pasted the back.  Burnishing tutorials often recommend using a combination of gum tragacanth, glycerin and/or saddle soap, beeswax, etc.  To keep things simple, I used TandyPro Burnishing Solution, which is intended to be all-in-one, but I unfortunately found that it dries very stiff.

The chape is by Lord of Battles, but since we settled on a wider belt than a matching buckle is available for, I used a 1-1/2" heel bar buckle from Buckleguy and made a matching plate from a wide brass strip, etched with ferric chloride.  In order to allow the belt to be worn with the case or quiver, they have attached buckles and straps which go through slots cut in the belt.  The buckles are the same type as the belt buckle, in a smaller size.  The two knotted leather bands used to stabilize the quiver will eventually be trimmed down; they can even be removed entirely.

The conchos are also by Lord of Battles.  They're very thin and have to be attached with 1/8-inch rivets.  To try to keep them from collapsing, I put several brass washers under each one.  I then trimmed the rivets to the most exact length I could, and peened them over washers, hammering the peen from all angles to give it a smooth dome and minimize chafing on clothing.  To keep the domed rivet heads from being flattened, I set them in a small round pit drilled into a 1/4-inch steel bar.  This unfortunately meant that in the process of rounding the peens, the conchos came into contact with the bar, and some of them are a bit flattened in places as a result.  The final step will be to make some field arrows (she has declined any offer of blunt SCA-style combat arrows).