Some more arrow making

The knock and one fletching are completely gone,
and most of the second fletching is as well

After arriving home form work yesterday, I received a message of Derega, our archery marshal, inviting me over to come and help paint some more arrows.

The truth of the matter is that I had had a horrid day at work and needed to do something constructive before I said something highly "unproductive". The invitation was well timed, and headed that way after having dinner with my family. 

When I got there, the first thing she showed me was the rests of the first test firing Several shafts had had their heads knocked off, but one in particular has suffered a catastrophic failure. The knock, most of the wood attached to it, and one of the three fletching were ripped clean off the shaft. Derega said that the funniest thing about the destruction was that the wood around the fletchings exploded  on impact, not on the rack itself.

So, the first order of business that night was to recreate an arrow with that pattern so we could replace what we had. I used the painting jig like before, and even found my old pattern guide on the table to help me space the paint properly.

The white bands on each end of the color more or less vanish in this photo. 

After that, I set to work on the next dozen. I decided to keep them cleaner and simpler than the first set I painted, so I stuck with my heraldic colors (nothing wrong with signing my work, right?) and slowly worked my way through the set. It took about an hour to do all twelve, but I wasn't in a hear hurry. A good portion of the time was spent talking, it seems that our good archery marshal had not exactly had the best of days herself.

In the end, I had a dozen freshly painted shafts that looked sharp, and were easily identifiable.


The night was as much about conversation as it was about archery, and all of this was while we were listening to/watching "Into the woods", on her Netflicks account.

I seem to recall there only being one dozen shafts left to paint out of the 200 shafts we purchased for the group. Wonder who will paint the last dozen?

Lord Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"God save the King!"