Dark Ages Re-Creation Company
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| The beater is maple as it is a proper wood and I had a nice length handy while I didn't seem to have much whalebone lying around. 73.5 cm long, 6 cm wide, and 1.75cm thick. The handle is 14cm long and has been reduced to 2.5cm wide. Given that it was adjusted four or five times so that it felt right for Karen I would suggest that you will need to customize this to suit your own weaver. The "blade" has a roughly oval cross section and I took special care to sand it very smooth along the edges. I used no finish on the wood figuring that it would wind up with a nice coat of lanolin. I was right. It gleams softly in the light now and the grain has a wonderful depth. The pick is also maple from another scrap I had lying around. 15 cm long, 4 cm wide, 3/4 cm thick and with 9 teeth. The important step here was getting the teeth right. These really need to be suited to the warp being used (I expect to have to make more of these). Again a lot of time to make them smooth. These were cut using a dremel tool with a cutoff disk, but I assume that a saw would do the job fine. Not sure how the norse would have sanded inside the teeth - perhaps just a bit of thin leather would do. Many artefacts of this sort of thing exist. Birka has a couple of pretty ones including a nice composite antler one with ring-dot decoration. I ran out of maple so the shuttle was pine. No artefacts to base this on so I did it from memory of modern shuttles. Not sure what the norse would have used (if anything). I'll leave that question to Karen. The shuttle is 32cm long, 6cm wide, and 1.5 cm thick. The notches at the ends are 2.5 cm wide and 5 cm deep. Report Next
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