So, here's the story. I'm out with a friend of mine spending the afternoon hunting for deer. It's archery season and I love spending the time out doors. Between my job, my beautiful wife's job and the half dozen or so kids we have I haven't had the time to spend hunting that I would've like this year. Oh well, I try to be thankful for the time that I do get and try to remember to be grateful that I even have a job in this economy. I have a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to spend hunting and decide to go a couple miles up the road to a friends house where he assures me he's been passing up shots at Doe almost every evening. I hunt for the food and not for the trophy so this will work wonderfully for me.
The weather is nice and sunny but cool enough for me to wear my jacket. The wind is brisk enough that I actually flip my hood up to keep my ears warm while I'm sitting. Most of the afternoon has passed uneventfully with nothing but a few squirrels, a couple dozen blue jays and half a million chick-a-dees being the only critters we see. We did see two deer in the distance but they were too far away for a safe shot so we watched them go on about their business and off into the wild blue yonder.
Spent the evening watching the pond that is the local deer herds' watering hole until about 15 minutes before sundown. At this point my buddy is pretty upset that we haven't seen the deer that he claims to have been passing up on and we decide that we will walk over to another location where the deer often come out and graze around sunset.
We quietly stalk up to the edge of the field where we hope the deer will be while keeping the vegetation between us and where they hopefully will be grazing. Quietly and carefully we round the edge of some bushes looking out over the field and .....
20 yards away there are two does grazing on the far side of a large clump of bushes. Arrows knocked, bows drawn.... Quietly creeping to the side until.... there she is, head down, broadside to me, grazing contentedly on some clover. Wind is blowing slightly towards me, she has no idea that I am there, I aim, take a breath, half let out..... THWACK!!!!! The string slaps against the bunched up side of my new jacket that I have foolishly never worn while practicing with my bow, the arrow goes wide and a little high, the noise startles the doe causing her to drop (jumping the string) and the arrow flies harmlessly over her into an oblivion of high grass and weeds never to be seen again. The doe I just missed runs off about 20 more yards, stops turns and looks straight at me. Her friend blows an alarm and they both bound off into the woods.
Long story even longer, I decide I need to make an arm guard to wear so that my bow string never hits my jacket sleeve again.
Two days later, my beautiful wife is unwell and I stay home from work to get the kids fed, dressed and carted of to school. Beautiful wife is sleeping, youngest child is happily preoccupied, now is a great time to make a leather arm guard from a scrap of leather that I have.
I am still fairly new to leather working. I am still experimenting a lot with some of my techniques and with some of the tools I use but I had the foresight to take pictures while I was working on this project and thought I would share it with the rest of the group and maybe someone would learn something useful. Or, maybe, if I'm really lucky; someone will see something I did and will give me some instruction on a better way to do it.
I will be adding my steps and some pictures I took as separate posts.
