Scale Smithing End of Week 1

So our first week of scaling has come to a close. Sue finished enough to throw her armor on the dress form, mainly so she could agonize over how to do the contractions so that it'll fit right. Contractions still escape my logic, but after some forum post questions, I think Sue knows what she needs to do. My armor is now almost perfectly sized for Jack's chest. We ran out of cleaned scales on Tuesday, so we spent Wednesday night cleaning scales and watching the new Sherlock on Netflix. Not bad. Here are some pics:

Sue Day 6

Drew Day 6

Sue Day 7

Drew Day 7

Scale smithing Week 1 Days 4 and 5

Aah the weekend. Now that we finally hit our first weekend of scaling, we were excited. Except of course we have kids, so our time scaling was pretty much the exact same 9ish to midnightish it was during the week. Oh well. At least we're both becoming a little more proficient at weaving things together.

By the end of Day 4, I had a nice big happy 'Y.' I also, sadly, learned that my 5x5 diamonds were a crap idea because they make for cock-eyed assembly. Sue had explored the minor hells of weaving the bottom half of a diamond--hell because it doesn't really hold a good shape while you're trying to weave things that way. And minor for two reasons 1) Once she figured it out it wasn't hard to do 2) part of figuring out was that she grabbed a chopstick and used it to enforce shape while weaving. Brilliant.

Day 4 Drew

Day 4 Sue

I was real excited for Saturday night because Sunday is the only day of the week that we don't have alarms (aside from the Maaamy alarm). I started out by fixing the cock-eyed ness of the 5x5 diamonds. Then I tried making a 6x6 diamond and realized that it was a bit too large and cumbersome to really build all that well. I've decided to go down to the 4x4s that Sue's been using all along. What's that saying, "If at first you don't succeed, do it the way your wife told you in the first time." After the 6x6, I went about filling in the gap between the amended 5x5 and the new 6x6.

Sue finished wiring up the other shoulder and started adding down over her breast.

Drew Day 5

Sue Day 5

We're still really digging the process, and I'm real sad thinking that all next week I'll be away on business and not able to scale (If I didn't already decide that I need to write like a banshee while away, I'd totally smuggle some scales along with me.)

Armor Smithing Week 1, Days 2 and 3

As we continue on our way making our scale armor, things are getting easier. By the end of day 2, I'd finished two 5 across diamonds, and Sue had started knitting together her 4 across diamonds into the neckline for her armor.

Day 2 Status Drew

Day 2 Status Sue

Day 3 went even better. I finished four 5-across diamonds and knitted three of them together--I would have gotten the fourth knitted as well but I knitted it backwards and had to take it out. Sue completed knitting together nine 4-across diamonds and is now beginning to worry where/when she's going to have to do contractions to handle the boob issues.

Day 3 Status Sue

Day 3 Status Drew

We're both really enjoying this project, and spent a little time talking about how exciting it will be when the kids demand some armor of their own. I've already been told that if Molly wants purple, that I'll be weaving that lest Sue get the purple poisoning.

More soon.

Armor Smith, The Blog

Week 1, Day 1

Recently, Sue and I were talking, and considering how much we both enjoy the medieval faire (Went twice this year already and planning a third trip to the Pittsburgh faire in September), she suggested that as a winter project, we make Scale armor. I immediately said that I was too inept at doing things with my hands to be able to pull something like this off, but after a couple of days of encouragement, we went out to TheRingLord.com and ordered 5,000 stainless steel scales as our mutual Christmas present/winter project. The scales came yesterday, and we could hardly wait to start.

Weaving scale armor is a lot like making chainmail--in fact, the standard scale weave is very close to the standard chainmail 4-in-1 weave. The only major difference being that there's a scale in there too. Instead of standard chainmail kinds of rings where the ring is split needing a rivet or weld closure, we got splitrings--much like keyrings. They're more durable in the longrun, because you won't have to worry about scales popping off as easy, but there's a considerable learning curve attached to getting the rings to work, as we found out last night. Below are the results of our first night as armorsmiths.

(my scales are on the left and Sue's are on the right). As you can see, I'm a bit more retarded about scaling than my wife--she ended up spending a good half hour trying to help me fix the mess I made of my first pass. I got a little ring happy and started adding and tying scales to too many other scales, making my pattern go all wonky off center. Towards the end of the night though I was starting to understand it better, so hopefully tonight I'll be able to catch up to Sue's progress while she's at class. Overall, we worked for about 2.5 hours last night; and I managed to link 19 scales correctly. I think sue is somewhere around 24 or 32, I can't remember which. TheRingLord.com's scale calculator estimated I'd need something in the neighborhood of 3,260 some odd scales to finish my armor--for Sue, she'll need about half that because she's planning on making hers backless and connected with leather straps instead.

All that being said, the first night went well and I'm looking forward to day two. I'll try to keep regular updates on our progress here.

Ontologica 3.1 Now Available!

I'm happy to announce that Ontologica 3.1 Summer 2011 is now live!  The issue contains works from these fine authors:

• Non-Fiction
• Jessica Erica Hahn
• Maureen Foley
• William Pomeroy
• Kilean Kennedy (Book Review)
• Fiction
• A. Lucia Cravens
• S.V. Meyers
• Poetry
• Carolyn Moore
• Karen L. George
• Tasha Cotter
• Ruth Foley
• Gary Lehmann
• Chris Compson
• Bruce Majors
• Art
• Eleanor Bennett
• Fabio Sassi

Please take a moment and check out the new issue: Ontologica Issue 3.1

The next Issue will come out some time in the Winter.  We will announce the open reading period for the Winter issue probably some time early in the fall.