I’m also a mediocre fletcher…

I do a lot of archery in the SCA, with varying degrees of skill. A lot of archery, for me, depends on the weather, my fragile emotional state, the day of the week, the alignment of Venus and Mars, and sunspots. Disirregardlessly, I persevere. Honestly, it’s amazing how lucky I get when I practice a lot. Anyway…

When you shoot a lot, you lose or break a lot of arrows. Wooden arrows with feather fletchings can get spendy – they start around $70 a dozen and only go up. After spending $100 a dozen three times in two months, I figured I’d better get on this fletching bandwagon.

It saves you a little money (shafts, nocks, tips, fletchings, and needed glues and chemicals still run you about $65 per dozen) but you can do better if you buy in bulk, and occasionally people will give you money to make them arrows, which helps. The best part about fletching is that all you need to do is be able to do neat work, then spend $300 on tools, and you’ll be making professional-quality flying pointy sticks of your own in no time!

Here’s a few pictures of arrows I’ve made. This first one is my current batch of personal projectiles:

And some others I’ve done:

These were a personal favorite project, USMC Dress Blues themed arrows. Sadly, right after I finished them I upgraded to a stronger bow, and these aren’t spined correctly for the new bow, so they’re mostly loaners now.