20120910-003938.jpgToday I take a short break from posts about knitting and ceramics (my usual crafty things) to talk about something entirely different: archery. When I was younger, I loved to shoot arrows, particularly at the many summer camps I attended, and had visions of being a super awesome archer. Then, after 6 years, I left camp and completely forgot about the existence of archery until a friend of mine mentioned getting bows and going shooting together.

Now, I am generally a very non-violent person. I would never own a gun, my only experience shooting a gun was while laying on a mattress aimed at a hill, and I was never interested in any of the martial arts. In fact, I’m pretty sure if faced with a dangerous situation, I would run in the total opposite direction. And I tend to avoid any situation with hinting or the possibility of large animals.

But archery is so much fun! There’s skill and power behind that arrow, like a game, but without the loud noises and possibility for disaster like a gun.

So anyway, I drove out to Maryland a few weeks ago to look at bows and such and, after finding only expensive arm guards, decided to try my hand at making my own. For those who haven’t done archery, an arm guard is something you wear on the inside of the arm that holds the front of the bow. If you didn’t wear one of these things (or anything on that area of your arm), your arm would sting and get super red pretty quickly. Plus it’s possible you could tear some skin off. So, they’re kind of necessary, and the ones I was finding were cheap and stupid looking, or unnecessarily expensive. So, I got to work. And this is what I came up with:


I used this site a little for the quick tutorial, then once I messed up a little, improvised on how exactly to plus this together (it was supposed to be holes on one side and divets on the other). But I kind of like how it came out. A little bit like how it’s supposed to be, but definitely an original. As for materials and methods, I got a big bag of leather odds and ends at Michaels, which are the main piece and the cord, and I made the holes with an xacto knife.

Enjoy!