While I would certainly take a damage cantrip if I were a spell caster, I would take Prestidigitation and Mending as the other two cantrips, one initially and the other one at level 5 if I really were living as an adventurer.
I am an amature leatherworker. When I heard that comment in the other video I immediately thought, "Well maybe not as easy as you think." I make pouches, cups, and other items from leather. I have even made a wash basin out of leather. I did not seal it with anything. It leaks very slowly. There is a secret to how you make the seams to reduce leakage. Your approach using bees wax is pretty good if you have the stuff.
I think easiest for an adventurer is a wooden cup. You can carve one out of a piece of wood yourself during downtime. I'm Finnish and we have these birch wood kuksa-cups which I think a traveler could make around a campfire if one breaks, with a pocket knife and piece of hard wood.
Any oil or fat can be used to seal it, or you could just use it for coffee and the beverage will seal the inside. As far as I can tell @@marvalice3455 it is leather that is much harder to seal in the field than wood
Geometry reminder : any cone-base shape doesn't start with a trapezoid (taped to itself), but with a circle, of which you take off a sector. The wider the central angle of the circle sector you use, the wider the cone. If you want a weakly tapering frustum, you have to start with a really wide circle and use a really thin slice of it. Maybe 15°, probably even less. In the end, given the weak tapering, you can get close enough with using your method, but any wider cone would have been horrible
Easiest way to get that circle? Tie a string to a fixed point several feet away and use it as a compass at two lengths (top and bottom of the cup). The further away, the less pronounced the flaring out at the top.
Attempting to do something yourself through trial and error is a great way to learn. Watching someone else go through all that stress is far better though :p
Making a wooden cup or bowl is very easy, in the wild. Just cut it rough and use a coal to burn in the resevoir/basin. I usually make one every time I go camping, just to have something to do, sitting around the fire.
After wood I would say clay. The difficulty is only in locating clay. After you find some it's easy to heat-treat. So Clay might be easier in places like a savanna.
Even if carving using a scorp knife and a hatchet or camp axe if likely less than 20 hours and can be done on the trail. I agree than next can be ceramic IFF you have good clay (40+ hours) and a kiln (40+ hours) those numbers being estimates of the to of my head. After you have the material and tools it is maybe less than an hour work per cup and only a few weeks to dry before firing. Not so simple on the trail though. Easiest and fastest is using a large leaf or so
@@mansfieldtime The difficulty is only in locating clay? Really? Locating clay is the easiest part, the damn thing is everywhere, and you can purify it from literal dirt. The difficult part is everything else. From working with it and shaping it uniformly, a very delicate and finicky job, to making it as smooth and nice as possible, to preventing it cracking as it dries... Yeah, doing it is easy enough, but doing it well and making the result look good, not so much, I'm afraid.
@@steelwasp9375I didn't know it was abundant. But I've made some bowls and that's where I got my knowledge from. I honestly don't know if there are different types of clay but the stuff I worked with we let dry for an hour or two, then we placed it on grill over a fire hole. it worked well enough for a bowl of soup at the end of the day but I don't think it lasted long. Definitely not something I would sell. If I'm camping, and I'm not worried about how it looks. Can you point me in the direction of purifying it from dirt. I had no idea. Sound like a fun experiment.
I think bringing a cup has more advantage if you are drinking something from a community source (like wine from a barrel) or if you are drinking hot liquid from a pot you can’t safely drink from. Otherwise, drinking directly from your canteen or costrel is much more convenient.
and ladles also work instead of a traditional cup. Bowls can have more utility than cups. Wood more utility than leather. Ceramic & metal more utility (but usually heavier) than any of the others. Wood & leaf easiest to make in the field
Great video! I would’ve either taken a beer glass and covered it in paper, seran wrap or foil to get a pattern, or just accepted that the reference was originally a cylinder and it gained its taper over time through use 😂😂😂
Easy/lazy way to make a template for similar projects - just roll a pre-existing cup/tumbler across a piece of paper and trace the line the top and bottom follow with a pencil. You can use the string and pencil method but it takes up more room. For a 'good' tumbler, you should use a 'tunnel' stitch: you make a shallow, acutely angled cut in the position you would put the stitch groove, then use an awl to make the stitch holes from the bottom of the cut to come out about half way up the cut side of the piece. You then put the stitches in, tighten everything up then wet & soften the leather and slick it down inside and out so the stitches don't show, just a bare suggestion of the cut line (you may need to get some glue into the cut too). The bottom can be done the same way if you are really really good, but it is easier to just make the bottom disk somewhat larger than the opening, soak it over night then force the edge up into shape to fit into the opening. Then use an awl to punch the holes through both the sides and the base in one operation, putting in the stitches as you go. Once the base is stitched into place you can go back and trim the excess material from the bottom disk, slick the edges smooth and you can make the base flare out a bit for more stability or try to force the base into something more like a cylinder. Just avoid stitching your fingers to the job while working with wet leather - it is embarrassing to have to cut your fingers loose and any blood stains will show DAMHIK.
Love this video, I design all my own clothing patterns and you are right, designing simple patterns can often become a mathematics nightmare, 2:58 yes, work out your relative circumferences and draw the trapezium as you did (2:31) but don't cut it out, tape it to a hard floor (a workshop floor you don't mind drawing on or a big piece of paper) then use a long straight edge to continue the two sides of your trapezium downwards until they meet, mark that point, don't move anything, use a piece of string non stretching string with a loop for the pen as a giant compass and create the radius of the two sectors for the top and bottom of your cup from that point, should turn out perfect! (alternative method: just make your cup and when you've hardened the leather flatten the top and bottom on a belt sander)
Would you consider a cup a luxury item while on an adventure? While camping I have found that a much wider cup can also be used as a bowl, but then there is also WW2 American mess kit. And looking at that, I want to say beautifully thought out design I would think, in a world with magic they may come up with some cool things like that as well.
Revelatory! Actually, the fast emergency cup to make if you have to scoop some water is a birch bark cup. You can even heat water in it, which you can't do with jack.
Just before the 4 minute mark, you mention something about trying to turn a one dimension object into a three dimension object. I think you meant to say turning a two dimension object into a three dimension object. A one dimension object is just a straight line.
I just discovered your channel, quite by accident. I have no idea how I got here, but I like it here and have subscribed. I'm 78 years old and what I know about LARP could be carved on the head of a pin. But I'm enjoying watching you make things that I could probably make and watching you figure things out! Your channel piques my curiosity, and if you're not curious, you're probably dead. I'm a harpist, a bookbinder and now fan of yours!
Can't even express how much I love people who will openly and clearly convey errors. Found you from Shad's videos, subscribing now because you demonstrate honor and dedication to accuracy. Looking forward to future videos!
I could see the setup for this being something that you might have at the equivalent to a longhunter base camp, although not on your person out in the field.
I don't think you have to clean pots and things from beeswax if you are in a bind. It's inert so it's fine if you will just eat some beeswax with the next few meals
Using a tent peg, Peg down one end of a string to the ground. About a 3 foot string, experiment to find the right size for the cup size you want. Take the other end and make a hoop, put that hoop around a knife, a nail, or needle. Take the piece of leather you have, make an arc by moving the knife or needle while keeping the line taut. Start in the middle of the top of the rectangle where the top of the cup is going to be and make an arc to the left and right, scraping the leather. Then without moving the leather, shorten the string just enough so you just barely reach one of the bottom corners, then make an arc to the other bottom corner, don't scratch it yet, adjust it until it is perfect, then make the scratch only when you think you have it perfect. Cut on the lines. Now make the string as long as it was for the top arc and orient the rectangle so that the string will now sweep an arc along the top like you had before, and without moving the rectangle, put the scraping tool in a top corner, then without moving the string, scrape along the string from the top corner to the bottom corner. Do this again for the other top corner, then cut it out. Congratulations, you have just made a perfect Conical Frustum.
i might be wrong but i do recall seeing a video some time ago that you can make any shape/size cone out of a circle, the most basic one: draw a circle on the outer edge of the circle measure the total circumference you want your cone to have mark both ends of that measurement from those marks take a ruler and make lines from the mark to the center of the circle and theres your cone template, now if you want a cone for a cup etc without the "tip"/"end" etc do the above and then do the following ontop of that: after youve drawn the lines from the marks to the center measure along those lines (from the outside inwards) from the outside circle to the point that marks the total height you want your cup/ bottomless cone to have do that on both lines take the tool you used to draw the circle and draw another circle (or rather the part of it that connects the two new marks) and theres your bottomless cone template in regards to the final angle your cone will have, thats the part im not sure of anymore, i think the smaller the circle the steeper the angle and the larger the circle the shallower the angle
Really interesting, I only recently watched your other video too so it was perfectly timed from my perspective. Thanks for going into such detal. You make me want to get into leather working.
I made a cup like this today in conditions like in the field. I eyballed the pieces and made the cylinder overlap itself. I used a softer leather that didn't even hold shape til i applied the beeswax. All wax i had was a small cube of beeswax and my best idea was to put a bit of string on it and light the thing like a candle to melt the wax. I did slide the burning waxcube over the outer surface to coat it and then turned the cup inside out(thats how much thinner and softer my leather was). At the moment i have two leaks at two of the holes but the overlap doesn't seem to be an issue. It doesn't look pretty but its still softer than most leathercups and this way pretty much indestructible by force
Thank you for the follow up, Kramer! It's great to see the practical results of our suppositions, whether they bear out or not. I appreciate your honesty when things don't work as expected. Keep up the great work!
I've just come across this video- Really nice cup, and thanks for the shout out! As you discovered, this style of construction is a surprisingly tricksy thing to do successfully, even with lots of practice. That said, if you are making these in any quantity, then there are various simple jigs you can make to hold everything together for stitching which do help a lot. I would say though that through-stitching the leather is not ideal, as it increases the risk of liquid sweating out. Butt stitching is definitely preferable. Keep Adventuring!
Nice cup! If you did make a cork for it, it would be a very handy container for carrying small things around when not drinking from it. Or for foraging berries or herbs while walking for a later meal. It would make it temporarily useless for drinking out of, of course.
I saw some 1700's reenactors just putting beeswax beads in the wooden or keather container and shaking it about for a long time. They said it works, but I haven't tried it yet.
should work fine. Shake the wax around, then let the cup warm up near the fire and finally hold it over the fire just long enough for the wax to melt. (Warming it up just makes it easier for the wax to penetrate).
Great video! For leather cups I wrap a piece of paper around a cup of the size I want and tape it. Then you can trim around the top and bottom to get an exact match. Not sure if that would help at all
Stone and wood cups would be more common. Back during the bronze age, the Israelites knew how to make stone cups in mass. Many other bronze age peoples knew how to do the same with wood and stone. I can see an adventurer with a good sharp knife, sitting down with a piece of soft wood and carving out a bowl or cup without much problem. I can even see them carrying a pouch of bladed instruments that they can multi purpose into doing a bunch of different things. Everything from cleaning monsters to preparing herbs, even carving out that bowl or cup.
I use 10-12oz vegetable tanned leather and I use a square butt stitch so there is no thread inside, I add pine pitch to my bees wax so when the cup develops a leek you just warm it up and it reseals
I believe I know several easier cups than a leather one to make on the trail. The split branch cup, or a kuksa(sp) are 2. I've made birch bark 'pots', finicky to use on a fire but definitely doable. I also carry some beeswax most of the time. Good for treating your tools and waterproofing your boots, gaiters, tinpants, haversacks, etc. A coffee cup is a good way to carry it or a jar is good too: works as part of the double boiler. You could just warm the wax and rub it in then warm it over the fire to get it to flow into the seams. Treating the seams before you stitch it together is also a good idea that I've used for a split branch cup. Then when you pour your coffee into it it flows and seals. You might want to skim the top before you drink it tho. Hadn't considered a leather cup before the last vid but don't currently have any appropriate leather to try it so I am glad you put out this one before I got some! Happy Adventuring!
I have a buddy who's a leatherworker and he has a lovely leather mug with a handle and an attached lid. I don't know how he made it, and I'm rather in awe of it. He used a modern sealant, though, so it can be used for hot as well as cold drinks.
I am glad you are talking about this ! Really back in the very old days people always carried eating and drinking implements on their person !! In fact t you might have been out of luck if you didnot 😂
Something along the lines of a wooden bowl would most likely be the easiest thing to make ‘in the field’, or maybe a gourd or some kind of ox/cow horn depending on location/material availability.
How do they hold up to wines? Because the acidity can mess with natural porpous vessels like horn cups. They're fine for beers, meads and such but acidic drinks like wine or ciders seem to damage them and spoil the drink.
I came across your channel recently and all the outfit videos made me so inspired to work on my own! One thing I'm wondering is: What about hats? I've looked around but there is a surprising lack of diy/larp/medieval headwear on the internet.
I’d say everyone travelling with leather, wood, and metal tools in a pre-modern technological environment should be carrying a quantity of beeswax as well as a quantity of tallow or lard or even (possibly olive, otherwise vegetable) oil for routine maintenance, emergency repair, and general utility on the trail. It’s like keeping a ball of string, some spare fabric (beyond a kerchief, pudding cloth, and “table” cloth) suitable for bandages or wicks, and a spare knife in the bottom of your pack: you do it just so you have it on hand if you need it, because if you need it then you might really need it, and that pays for the slight extra weight. With that and the ability to just make a simple cylinder cup borne in mind, this seems like a very simple trail project if out and about for a few days. Side not on beeswax in cooking vessels: boil water with a few handfuls of white ash in the pot and then scrub with a handful of grey ash before a final boil and it gets the wax right out of the pot in the time it takes to break camp, especially if you put in the ash and water the night before and left it in the warm coals to facilitate the alkaline reaction stripping the molten wax from the pot.
I wonder if you could make them flat packed, pre-punched, pre-waxed, just get the parts out, warm them over a fire to make it pliable, sew them together, and then warm the finished cup up enough that the wax melts into the holes to seal it all up.
@@DMZwerg Considering the facts that 1) a leaf would be less effective than using a hand or drinking straight from the source, 2) you would be hard-pressed to find one large enough, rigid enough, and well-shaped enough for to hold a serving size, and 3) you don't make leaves, you grow them... intentionally growing a plant that would produce the necessary leaf would undoubtedly take longer than carving wood or baking a gourd.
my gosh are you off base@@GameSage12_. First off I stated a leaf is the fastest and easiest to make. You tried to move the goalpost by claiming I meant "growing a leaf" rather than finding one, but as I am growing wood to carve into cups I laugh at your attempt as I have a very good idea how many YEARS it takes to grow silver maple trees to sufficient thickness to carve into cups, how many years you need to season it if you don't want leaks, and so forth. As for gourds, you have to season then (dry them) at least 1 season and then wax them to use them for more than a day or so. But yeah, IF you find them at the end of harvest season a gourd is faster and easier than carving wood. But leaves have a longer season and are faster & easier to find than even a gourd and large leaves are fairly easy to find in most temperate areas and all tropical area. In my back yard I have rhubarb and burdock, both of which typically have very large leaves. So, you attempt to move the goalposts and put words into my mouth that I didn't save failed miserably. A leaf is the fastest & easiest cup to form and many are large enough to carry over a cup of water some distance. Faster & easier to make than gourds (as fast as cutting a raw gourd in half, let along scooping out the guts, and way faster than carving or burning wood to make a cup
@@DMZwerg I don't care what you meant, and I made no claims regarding such. You literally cannot *make* a leaf. That is what I said. And most leaves you will find would be ill suited to use as a cup, unless you *happen* to be where usable ones are (or wait long enough to grow them). Also, what is the point of using something as a cup if you can't set it down without losing its contents?
Really @GameSage12_ ? I double-dog dare you to "make" a gourd. I triple-dog dare you to "make" a tree. Your argument is both illiterate and asinine. Leaves can be formed into a useful cup shape faster and easier than you can find, harvest, and scoop out a gourd. Gourds only grow certain months out of the year. An appropriate leaf can often be located, harvested, and fashioned into a cup shape faster than a limb can be sawn or chopped off a tree, with the exception of during winter. Do you not comprehend what a leaf is and that plants other than trees make leaves and that many leaves are as big as if not larger than one's hand?
Just stumbled over your channel and already love it. About the cup i just had an idea: How about have them taper a bit more and have stackable leather cups, like you would stack paper cups. Maybe with some kind of matching canteen they would fit onto to save space. Would it be possible to use linseed oil instead of beeswax, or is that too toxic for this application? Maybe birchglue? Hideglue? Looking forward to your content.
I suspect in a pinch if you had some leather you could just cut a slice out of a circle and stitch the cut sides together. It wouldn't have a flat side to rest on but you could drink out of it. Maybe seal it with tallow or something.
Could you perhaps add a carved wooden handle, connected with maybe a pressed tin band and a belt loop (hang upside-down to drip dry)? I would be afraid of microbial growth if I left any open top drinking cup in my pack
Honestly, if an adventurer carried a leather cup, it would have been a mug with a handle and hung on a belt or bedroll with a strap of some kind. Your cup is great for a first attempt! I’d drink from one like it. A little piece of advice: I would have skived the edges of the vertical seam so it would easily overlap and then use the cross stitch. It would allow for better sealing with the beeswax. Keep up the great work Kramer!
I would have thought they’d use pitch to seal these. It’s the traditional waterproofing material and beeswax would be more valuable in a candle wouldn’t it?
Both the top and bottom should be curves. I'm not sure how practical this would be, but if you mark the length of the top, and the length of the bottom, and then extend that angle on the bench below the cup, you should be able to use a string or ruler anchored where the lines cross and draw the top and bottom curves from that pivot point. As mentioned in some other comments, rolling a cup of the size you want and tracing it as you roll should give you the correct curves.
So, anyways, this video was unusual in that I was forced to learn four new words to understand it and the comments: frustum cone, cantrip, kuksa, costrell.
Pine pitch my guy! Melt that in a pot instead of beeswax. You only need it on the inside and burn the rest away when you are done. Almost any oil can seal the outside. I am someone who brings scrap leather with me everywhere tho. I could see it taking me about the same amount of time as someone carving a kusca.
This might sound incredibly dumb, but would it not be possible to just cut apart your damaged leather cup and use it as the pattern for your new one? You mentioned repair specifically, which is why this jumped out to me. You could even use the stitch holes to punch your needle through into the new cup, if they're not too damaged
Makes me want to do leather working. It looks interesting. Right now, though, my time is spent writing amateur fiction in screenplay format, illustrating it in Blender, narrating, recording it and uploading it to RU-vid. My first effort is called Bronze Age caveman: Wrath of Inanna. It offers a fictitious explanation for and narrative of the late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean collapse.
the heat will melt the wax, you can't hold an hot beverage. But my own made cup have been boiled, not just soaked, and can -litterally- stand a machete strike.
Leatherworking is never easy. I've done some work at church, but probably had people wondering why I had multiple awls, scissors, needles, rubber punch pad, and thread. And that's without me having to waterproof it. In my opinion, metal cups are better because they are more multi functional and easier to keep clean. They less likely to get eaten by animals or carry mold, and are similar in weight. I have made full length circle skirts out of scrap leather, so I'm not against leather. I can grab 4 different color scraps without moving more than my arm (I've been doing leather hardening with my iron because my family doesn't want me using the kitchen). Still, leather is just not best option for an adventurer when a metal mug will do the trick and also make it possible to heat the contents of the cup. Now to watch the other video. I only recently saw your channel come up under my recommendations after binge watching what i can best describe as Lord of the Rings lectures.
Yeah, I was raising my eyebrow when you said that. A wooden cup would have been the easiest to make if you were out in the wild and on the go. If you were in a fantasy land where the animals you killed just auto turned into leather, than that would be different because magic. Even still a wooden cup would be the easiest. You prob should have went with the basic cylinder for your first attempt. But you got a good-looking leather cup. I think you would prob be using tallow or lard instead of bee's wax as an adventurer. You would have that on your person anyways. I would still go with wooden implements except for the knife and pots/pans.
love your videos. You are attempting to recreate a non existent Character. The "adventurer". There was no place for this character in real life. However. I do love the "Aragorn" character. I went for a yeoman forest warden. REAL JOB. Drinking vessels have been one of my "thorn in the side" topics. Watching with interest
Thank you. The youtuber Colin Furze recently put out a video of 15 workshop tips. One is how to mark out a template of any conical shape. It is possibly exactly what you want.
As an adventurer, if we're spending time to create leather goods in the wilderness, I would hope some of those would be more complex, and professionally done, preferably inside a log cabin, hastily built to house the professional leatherworker and his tools. I don't want Billy the Barbarian to be wasting our time because his mother's leather milkcup got busted. "WE WILL FIX IT IN TOWN. There are goblins and undead you moron! Carry another bag of gold!" Now, it's not a null possibility, but there has to be something valuable enough out there we'd want to occupy it, long term, which will generally convey the downtime necessary to get it right, with Steve Guardsman's limited training before being drafted.
I find this very backwards. If you're doing something during an adventure, then you orient yourself after bushcraft. I could whittle out a drinking cup in less than half an hour out of green wood. Could fashion fashion something out of bark, too. This is otherwise like the Baggins approach rather than Strider's
so not possible in the field becuse you think they would let wax burn ?? i'm confused , the reason you gave for being hard to make on the field is kind of a non deal !
