Mary Ostler

Baroness’ Birthday tourney took place yesterday. It was a smallish event, but still covered all the basics. Rapier, and Heavy fighting, A&S contests, dancing, feasting, drinking, court, and merchant row. I ran a small merchanting booth selling wooden goodes (turned stuff and furniture). Since I spent most of my time merchanting, and hanging out with [...]

Goofing around in the work shop the other day.  I have been thinking about trying to turn a Japanese oval turned Inro. This turned out to be one of the more difficult things I have made. Trying to juggle drill bits of different sizes for different cuts just got confusing after a while. An Inro [...]

I hate turning plywood bowls. They are horrible to hog out material, and they never finish very well. The plus side is they are very pretty. I have had my arm twisted behind my back to make a bowl for my aunt. 14 images of tedious details on how I make plywood bowls

A friend of mine recently came across a great website, that has some amazing clock plans. In amongst those plans there was a package of plans specifically aimed at yarn lovers. EB ordered those plans, and then passed them on to me. She wanted the yarn spooler made up. I was more than happy to [...]

Having acquired Buffalo fleece at AT war, and previously turned a drop spindle to spin the wool. I went ahead an made a set of wool combs. I have had a chunk of scrap walnut kicking around the shop for years now, so I decided to use it. Its just big enough to make two [...]

Today was a play day out in the shop. I have no projects that are needed done ASAP, and I spent last weekend cleaning the shop. Just plain old ME time. I decided to do some turning. Mistress Agnes had asked about making some thread spools out of a couple chunks of mahogany. I was [...]

In 2005 I taught a Pole Lathe class up at Cinton war. It was only possible to teach this class up at Clinton due to the multi-day event left enough time to set it up, and the property owners permission to cut down multiple poplar trees for the spring poles. I never took images of [...]

I feel so happy watching this video, I could just cry. My new Happy thought for the day. It also doesn’t hurt that the music for the video rocks.

Nothing really medievaloid today, just making tools handles for a set of rasps. These rasps have been kicking around in my tool box for sometime. I seldom used them as the end your not using always ended up grating away flesh from my palm. I decided to use up a bunch of beautiful spalted red [...]

  So the long and trying road has finally winded to the end. The bed is done. This project was a fairly ambitious project for myself.  The whole thing needed only a fairly simple skill set, but its a marathon of time and patience.  I have a severe backlog of projects I need to do [...]