hey, it's been a long time i know, but thanks for the continued warm comments and guess what?!
we finally got around to making an arrow from scratch. here's some pics:
these were the ingredients all gathered from nearby woodlands (ahem, except for olive oil required for making vegetable glycerin)
that's rabbit poo
charcoal and cordage made from carded nettle fibres
canada goose feathers and dried yucca leaves -yea, ok, the yucca came from the garden but we could have used anything,, ie: water-iris
pine resin
then we made a little fire to straighten the hazel shafts over
and to prepare the pine-pitch. we also made some other (vegetable) glue using cornstarch, vinegar, and glycerol made from olive oil and lye from oak ashes. but mostly we used the pine-pitch resin which works really well but goes hard very quickly so is sometimes fiddly to apply.
i knapped the arrow-head from the bottom of a glass ale-bottle. decent flint nodules are hard to come by in my neck of the woods and i didn't want to smash so many up with my lack of stone-working skills haha,
here's some pics of the arrow-head loosly mounted in the hazel shaft:
and here it is once we mounted it
and here's the fletching which we really struggled with tbh lol. imp-child demanded that we only uses plant-based materials throughout this entire build,, so we tried to stick the fletching using some glue made from corn-flour but in contrast to the pine-pitch, that stuff took waaaaay long to set. lol. sigh. so it ended up being a bit messy by the time we'd got everything properly stuck together. and bound with yucca fibres for good measure.
..and a final pic of our first home-made arrow! woot!
Thanks again for all the kindly comments! i really cannot wait to have a go at making another bow for myself one of these fine days!
all pics can be found here on flickr
