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 sold the cone of shame. That leaves me two days to make another tent…. so….. I built a new tent today. Took me an hour. 45 minutes of that was ripping a 2×4 into 2 beveled  tent poles. I like it a 1000 times more than the cone of shame…. and it doesn’t even [...]

I am done… as done as I will ever be. From the second I realized my mistake in building this temporary tent, I have grown to hate it. It is a fairly nice looking tent, and it is pretty damn dry in this glorified painter tarp. It is however nothing like I was attempting to build in the first [...]

So I have a conical tube of canvas. I now need to make a pole to support the whole shebang. Since my truck will only accommodate poles 6’4″ in length. I am going to have to make a two part sleeve/pole set up.

At this point I had not realized I had screwed up the template. I marked out all the sections on the painters tarp with wax tailor markers. The template was longer than the tarp, so I ended up using the wasted space at the corners to make up for the short lengths of canvas. Hard [...]

The Norse Tent is done. Leland got to play in it briefly with his friend Nathan before the traditional onslaught destruction of 8 trees worth of gift wrap began. He seemed to like it. Happy Dance.

Since I found little to no usable information on Bedouin tents, I have decided to make a post on how I set up my tent.

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 [...]

OK, I have had numerous people in the last month or so express a lot of interest in my mini yurt. I have promised I would make a post on just how I managed to build the cute little thing for so little (inflation may have inflated the cost a bit).  So Here it is. [...]

Well, We survived. Mistress Agnes, and myself braved a 12.5 hour trip into Avacal. An Avacal populated by gigantic windmills. If they had been any closer to were we camped, I may have had to go Don Quiote on their butts.               I found my old banner in the [...]