Mary Ostler

Long, long ago… When I first joined the SCA, I had wanted to start fighting with all the heavys. I made armour, and went to fight practice…and eventually built my own helm. Its a nasty piece of work as I really had no idea what I was doing. The welding job was pretty bad (Having [...]

 Years ago at Clinton war (I forget which year) I entered the A&S war point challenge. That years challenge was to build period lighting. I decided to build a peirce work lantern using scrap duct work I had lying around my shop.     I can no longer find the original image of the period [...]

  This is one of my oldest SCA pieces of furniture I have made. It’s a very simple lap jointed stool. I have made close to a dozen of these over the years mainly do to an unlimited source of high quality scrap plywood from my company. I am including a link to a couple [...]

After I had built my original tudor house, I decided that assembling the house was just more effort than it was worth. I needed something that was much more ready to go. Hence the beginning of the Tudor House Trailer was born. Since I was going to tow this behind my truck I wanted it [...]

A Pillar Cube Dial made for the Shire of Eisenmarche A&S championship (a long time ago) Made out of red oak scrap, and wood burn details. It had dials set of Lionsdale, Lionsgate, Clinton, Estrella, and Eisenmarche. The Lions Gate, Lionsdale, and Eisenmarche dials all read the same time due to the close proximity to [...]

For a very brief time, long ago, I was fighting heavy in the SCA. It required me making a lot of my own Armour.  This is the first shield I built. It was a curved heavy made of three pieces of skinply laminated together with a slight curve along the length.  On top of the [...]

This is the first Tudor house I built. It had to be modular, and the pieces could not exceed 4′ x 6′ in size (the size of the bed of my truck). The walls are all held together by two sets of hinges. The hinge pins were removable, making the thing portable. The gables were supported [...]

I built this weird contraption as a complete lark.  water is placed in the upper reservoir, and flows out of the copper tubes in the bottom of the reservoir, and pours directly over the internal waterwheel. The shaft the water wheel wheel spins on is hooked up to a fan blade. The bottom reservoir just [...]

I made this cooler for my medieval society. I was getting tired of trying to hide my old plastic Colman cooler under blankets. Having to go into the red cooler of doom, always bugged me at events. I try hard to have nothing overwhelming modern in plain view. So one day I when to the [...]

Tribute window I built in honor of a local SCA group. Using Copper Foil construction methods I attempted to make a semi-replica of a 10th century window that hangs in the Augsburg Cathedral. As I do not have access to a glass kiln, I used a Dremel with a diamond bit to etch out the [...]