My big project for last year’s season was to begin to put together a better encampment kitchen setup. I made some good progress and expect to continue to work on it this year. Here is a gallery of photos showing what we were up to. I hope you enjoy these pictures.
This week, we started making wooden trenchers based on ones in the Oseberg grave finds. I don’t have a lot of information on the extant trenches like size and the type of wood from which they are made. We are just going off this one picture I was able to find. In the wood shop, we had some nice 5/4 X 9 inch fir boards that were bought for a different project and never used.…
Last winter, my husband built a new door and frame for the jurta. The primary requirement was that it would easily break down for transport, unlike the red and black doors,which were transported in one piece. The construction was inspired by a yurt door design in “Yurta: a Central Asian Nomad’s Hearth and Home”, a video produced as part of a kirghiz yurt exhibit at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego in 1997. In…
For years, I’ve been puzzling over a picture in the book, “Ancient Hungarians” as it is literally the only picture in the entire book that shows textile fragments. In the picture, there is a strange metal object; a tube. It looks unlike any textile tool I’ve ever seen. Clearly, the authors were as stumped as I for the description of the object is as follows: “Bronze tube bent of sheet metal. One end tapers slightly,…
I’m at an SCA event this week where the weather is sunny and gorgeous, something that is somewhat rare where I live. It’s a perfect time to take pictures of my camp. I hope you enjoy this new gallery.
We haven’t had to do a lot of repairs to the jurta since my husband and I build it in 2000 despite a near catastrophic accident several years ago when the tension band gave out after the yurt was fully set up. That resulted in a roof ring splitting out and a few broken ties on the jurta walls. We repaired the roof ring with strapping tape. Believe it or not, that repair held, ugly…
Edited to add: The door described in this post is now mounted on the wall of my sewing room. After eight years, we built a new, new door in 2012. Tourney season is coming up and I really need to stop procrastinating. You see, in September of 2001, as we were coming back from a crown event, my jurta door, which was bungied to the roof rack of my SUV, came loose and went flying.…
This article was written around 2003. I’ve had my jurta for 13 years now. I’ve replaced the door a couple of times, the roof ring once and last year we redid the leather ties that bind the wall together for the first time. For a look at how my jurta looks now, go here. Being inside a yurt for the first time was a life altering experience for me. Previously, my husband and I had…
