I have taken to wearing a sword more often in class. It’s bound to become all the rage once people realise how exceedingly comfortable and useful they are.

That being the case, my utterly lovely, but scabbardless, Arms and Armor sharp rapier and dagger set got to feeling left out, and that I could not abide. So the first step was to build wooden scabbards for them, to be covered in leather and attached to a belt.

I chose ash as the best option; hard, springy, durable, and not too brutal to work. I’d be going down to some pretty fine tolerances, and the wood needed to be able to take the detail.

I started by planing the edge of an inch-thick board straight and flat, then laid the sword on it, and drew round it.

Then I routed out a groove, staying well within the lines. Then I got it to fit half the thickness of the blade quite precisely with chisels. This was quite tricky.

Then I cut off the grooved bit, leaving a generous allowance for cutting it down to shape, and repeated the process with the other side of the blade (which is of course not perfectly symmetrical).

After checking that it fit together with the sword inside, and had the right degree of grip,

 I cut off the second piece and glued them together with the sword inside. After a few moments, I withdrew the sword (the sword in the plank! stones are so passé), and cleaned the glue off the blade very carefully.

I repeated the process, working on the flat of a plank, not the edge, for the dagger, which was much, much easier!

Shaping the outsides was relatively easy; I like the idea of the scabbard faithfully copying the lines of the blade, so made these with a similar diamond profile.

While I was getting on all that, I also took a piece of half-tanned leather (which has been tanned on both sides but leaving a thin sliver of untanned rawhide in the middle, like a sandwich) home and made a sheath for my glorious rondel dagger (made by Lasse Mattila). I first cut the leather about to shape, and dropped it in a bowl of water.

I wrapped the blade in clingfilm, then clamped the wet leather around it.

Then I did a running backstitch using an awl and a single needle (two would have been quicker but I didn’t think of that until right now!),

then I cut the leather to size while still wet, and left the dagger in overnight while the leather dried and shrank onto the shape of the blade.

Leatherworking is not really my area, but this came out ok.
So, scabbards and sheaths, in ash and leather; another good excuse to get into the shed!