Well, I'll start out by saying that is one of my many fails. Normally I just delete the pics, or refrain from taking them. It was only after a few hours work that I determined this to be a fail. I started this piece a few months ago. Until today I debated even posting it, but for sake of education to others I'll put it here. We ALL fail sometimes. If you haven't failed, you haven't been trying hard enough.
The overall idea was to build a copper frame for a pouch to be worn with my Landsknecht outfit. Only later, after some research did I determine that most men didn't wear pouches. Oh well... The pouch frame didn't work anyway.
I didn't want to cast the frame as some of the period examples I've seen were done. I had some copper wire around and thought I would experiment with working a piece cold to see if it had the strength to hold up.
Basic shaping was all done cold, and from memory. I thought I saw a piece and would copy it, but unfortunately I recalled the basic shape incorrectly. I shaped this pieces over an anvil using only a couple medium sized ball peen hammers.
The frame was to have to loops which would both hang from a cross bar. Each would hold a pouch, the smaller loop framing up a smaller pouch which would actually sit in the mouth of the larger pouch.
All in all I'm really happy with the excercise. I like the way the pieces fit together and they looked about like what I thought they should look like. The next step was going to be to pierce the fish tailed ends and run a cross bar through it. It was at this point I went in the house to take a break and looked at my extant example only to find out that the shape was wrong. The actual pouch didn't have the fish tailed ends going straight up. Oh well. I was very upset for a while, but recently I recycled some of the copper for use in a period coin balance I'm making. No great loss. Good practice and proof of concept worked. I may make a framed pouch some day, but not soon I think.
