For a while now I’ve been oogling the tinwhistle “belt holsters” I occasionally see on Etsy, marketed toward the Ren faire and SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) crowd of which I am a part. The Irish whistle is one of the most portable period instruments around, and as a bard, I love to walk from campfire to campfire sharing music with the masses. It’s frustrating to do if you have a large instrument that gets hung up in your cloak, or if someone asks you for a hand with something (where do you set your instrument down at?? Where it won’t get broken??), and while whistles are some of the most easily stowed music machines, cramming them in your bra or waistband can get rather old because they’re kind of, well, pokey.
Enter the “belt holster” idea. 🙂
My wonderful husband is very adept at leather working, and I pitched the idea to him. He didn’t think it would be too hard after looking at the pics I’d scavenged off the Internet, and lo! We had some lightweight, supple suede buckskin hanging around from his Mary Rose leather doublet reproduction project last year.
All in all, it was a 20 minute project, and the longest part of it was deciding how to cut out the leather to best utilize the size of the scraps we had leftover. Initially, I thought of an upside-down T shape: the stem of the T would loop around the belt and be stitched, and the arms of the T would wrap around the body of the tinwhistle, but with the odd shape of the scrap leather, we ended up doing a shortened L shape instead, where the base of the L folded over to the side and was stitched to hold the whistle.
Marking and punching holes was a quick job. The hardest part of sewing was keeping the synthetic sinew from tangling and tearing (he used a double-needle stitch).
I am very excited about it. We won’t have another historical gathering for about another month, but I am looking forward to slapping it on my belt and using it. 🙂
(Mirrored on Weku)
