Other type of crafting - and an update about the blog silence

Wow, it's already been over a month since my last post ... I must admit it's been kind of hectic the past months - workwise, that is. The plan is that I wrap up my PhD, and it hasn't been a fun ride lately. My funding finished December 31st, and it was something I struggled a lot with. I always had the luxury of finding a job before the previous one was over, so I had never been unemployed in my life. This time it's different, and I found it very difficult to just let it be like that. I was very emotional about it, and the festive atmosphere around the end of the year just made the contrast just that much bigger. I didn't sew, I didn't enjoy the christmassy atmosphere, I was just stressed and sad. Now that the deadline has passed, I am more calm about it and I just keep doing what I'm doing: writing up results and conclusions every day, reading and integrating articles and studies, more or less at my own pace. I do apply for jobs, but I'm just working on the PhD until I have a new job. I just have to finish it, and it's going okay, or at least that's how I feel about it today :-).

This leads me to this post. I have given up a lot the past few months, just to write against a deadline I couldn't make anyway. So last week I decided it would be good for me to take back some activities I hadn't done for a whole while. And I'm not only a seamstress (there's a new skirt in the making, woohoow), but also an archer! I had bought my own arrows a few months ago, but I stopped going to practice to work some more in the evenings. Last Friday, I went back to the club, and asked a good friend how to assemble my arrows. Because I can't shoot without arrows. And this is the work in progress :-).

The arrow comes in different pieces: the shaft (mine are aluminum, not carbon ones, because of my (old) bow), the nock (the blue endings on the picture), the metal point and, the trickiest part, the vanes (3 per arrow). There are great explanations about this on the net, so I won't talk about it here. Just know that assembling arrows involves some potentially dangerous equipment ;-): the shaft has to be cut with a special electric saw, the points and the glue to hold them in the shaft have to be heated with a burner, etc.
What I'm doing now is glueing the vanes on the shafts, and it's a time-consuming thing: the glue has to set for 20 minutes per vane, plus a little dot of glue at the ends after all the vanes have been glued that has to set for 30 minutes. Luckily, I'm writing, so I'm just glueing new vanes when I'm thinking about it. No real hurry :-). 8 arrows to do, 3 almost done. Looking forward to use them!

Thanks for stopping by!