Mary Ostler

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OK… For every success we have, we have to experience disappointments to make our triumphs that much sweeter. The Ouled Nail tent is a disappointment for me. It was an interesting experiment, but in the end it didn’t work out as nice as I had hoped. I think the main problem I have is the size of the tent. [...]

I have the cartoon, I have a loom, I have the right amount of hedles (my order arrived a couple of days ago). Now I have to figure out how much material I will need to complete the rug, and how much of each color I will need to hand dye. Determining how much was [...]

I  had wanted to finish this tent in time for Tir Righ Investiture at the end of August. I am now confident that I will be able to do a test run at SYGC this weekend. This works out better, as I will have a chance to work out some bugs before investiture. I will [...]

I finished the 18ft of  unravelling canvas. What a pain. My Fingers are numb. It will look awesome, but I highly encourage everyone to skip this step and just sew the canvas directly to the wooden hangers.

I need a new tent. I have postponed my building of the Timurid Disked Bell for the time being, and moved on to making a new Bedouin tent. This time I am building one based on the style of tent found in the Northern Algerian regions. In “Tents: Architecture of the Nomads” by Torvald Feagre there is a [...]

I have an idea…. Its a backpack sized period encampment. Something small enough I could in theory lug onto the BC ferries as a walk on passenger thus saving me stupid amounts of money. so… In my seemingly never ending need to build different kinds of tents, I bring you the 15th century Timur Disked [...]

The project has been at a bit of a stand still as off late. The main hold up was the loom. I have been pulling out my hair trying to find either an image or a decent description of a near eastern rug loom in period. The closest I could find were a few images [...]

Lions Gate Archery & Heavy Defenders happened this weekend despite the horrific weather. Only a few die hards managed to brave the weather enough to camp. I was among those glorious few, as I wanted to test out my new tent at an event that was near-ish to my house if it turned disastrous.   Friday [...]

May Gamers (also known by some as May Bardic) took place yesterday. It was a smallish affair, but also kind of awesome. It was one of those events where just about everyone ended up doing all sort of stuff. I ran my first games tourney as Lions Gate games marshal. I decided on making a [...]

I have an evil plan to run a siege engine boules/ golf tourneys at up coming events. Since I have only so many weekends off before camping season starts, I needed to get on with it.