Guild and Fighting Update

Tonight was our second night working on boxes. We had a pretty good size crew this time 13 or 14 if I remember correctly. When I arrived, Terryl was covering the finer points of Boffer fighting and fitting armor on several interested kids. She has offered to have a youth practice every Tuesday from 6-7pm and also explained to several parents what was needed for weapons and armor. It sounds like this will kick off next Tuesday Feb 27th. I will have to take my son next week!! He is twelve and it’s high time he started hitting people with sticks (even if it’s the padded foamy kind).

Balian next gave a quick talk on Medieval table wear, complete with Power Point slides and examples from his own feast gear. I have a link to his blog where he discusses many topics related to food and feasting. Remember it only looks like a candy dish it’s really a covered cup.

Eron next talked about carving and wood burning techniques as Medieval decorations and also brought many beautiful examples from her own experimentation over time. She had several books with different styles and periods of carving and also some example of boxes and chests in period. I believe I will get her to help me put a large carving of the Marshals badge on the front of my box. I will then store all the Marshal items I need for an event in the box.

We then started working on the boxes themselves. Several people had worked on them at home since our last meeting (2 weeks ago). I forgot to take my camera but will try to get pictures to post as these boxes are completed.

Terryl’s has been assembled, stained and had a Celtic picture painted on the lid. It sounds like she may put hinges on the lid or leave it free floating.

Drogo and family have made and completed assembly on two of them. He spent some time last night sanding. I did not hear what he plans on doing as a finish (leave plain, paint, stain, carve etc. )

Torashi worked on squaring his joints so it could be glued together and so did his young friend(I need to learn his name). In fact I think his box was clamped together after being glued just before we broke up for the night.

Vicki had two to cut out the joints for and I am afraid I measured them one of them wrong. Instead of cutting out the smaller side for the joint I told her to cut out the larger. This resulted in a large gap (about 1 ½ inches). After apologizing to her about my screw up we had two choices. One would be to cut the box shorter than the rest to make it fit or put it together with the gap and then inlay some material to fill the hole and pretend that we meant to do this. I think she is going to do latter. I will have to see if I have any fancy wood grains around the house to give her to use for an inlay. After this the second one was cut out correctly. She is going to work on gluing them tonight if I understand correctly.

That’s what I remember about the meeting anyway!! Just before people went home the question of youth fighting came up again and what we needed to do for shields. I offered to press a bunch of shields and (with some prompting from Teryll) to bring a couple for next weeks practice. I will have several shield blanks at the next youth practice and we will have to assign them to fighters. Then size them and strap them for the kids. We should be able to complete a couple each week until everyone has a nice shield.