janewilliams20

And a few other bits. Spent Saturday in a yurt near WGC, learning how to make a drum. We'd done a walk to meet the deer the hide would be coming from earlier in the year, then my actual workshop had been delayed due to the leg.

I'd chosen a 13" cedar frame (my main drum is 16", the big one 30", I wanted something a bit smaller). It's called a "Messenger" size, and that fitted in rather well with one of my reasons for wanting to make it. You may remember that a few years back, I set myself a story challenge - a story of each of the days of Xmas. The final one "Twelve drummers drumming" was about a storyteller making the drum he would use when he became a journeyman rather than an apprentice.
This drum frame was cedar, not ash, and pre-made, I didn't kill my own deer, and I used rawhide thong, not rope, but otherwise, the process was pretty much as he describes it.

So we started off with discussing how we wanted to decorate our drums. Not on the skin - that's the bit you hit, so decoration wears off. Not on the outside of the frame, that gets covered in skin. So it's the inside of the frame. First we sand it, how much depending on what sort of decoration we want to use. Painting the entire inside a different colour was an option, but we all liked the look of the wood too much to do that. There were pens, there were paints, but I wanted to try pyrography. A craft which I had never tried before, nr had anyone else present,, and for which we had no tools. Naturally we gave up on that idea, as risking setting fire to an expensive and irreplaceable drum frame, or even just messing up the decoration, would be stupid - no, this is me. We had a fire pit. One of the bits and pieces I'd picked up on the deer walk was an iron nail. I needed to improvise a wooden handle - take two bits of kindling, clamp them round the head of the nail hard enough to make indentations in the wood, then tie them round it. Holding the nail in the hot part of the fire without the wood bursting into flame proved to be a problem, though so we thought again. Janet poked up the fire in an attempt to make it more intense, and that gave me an Idea. Pyrography was originally known as "poker work". Maybe if we heated up the poker...? So we did that, then tried out the result on a bit of kindling. Wow, that was easy! Jumping ahead in the story a little here, later on I whittled and sanding that bit of kindling, and it's now a rather nice ultra-light-weight beater - I also worked out how to heat up my nail (use a candle), and used that to add one more mark (it only just got hot enough to have any effect). Here's the result, with the nail line on the left:

So, onward to setting fire to the drum frame. Actually, no - I sketched what I wanted to do in pencil on the frame, then applied the poker, and discovered that cedar doesn't burn anything like as fast as pine. Much reheating was required, but I got there in the end. Here's a view of the inside, taken after the drum was completed:

Issaries runes, as I wanted, and nice and simple to do. Then I got all ambitious. How about the stylised six-line Osprey I'd used as a signature in my Far Isles days? I'd leave off the fish in its claws I'd done then, just have the talons reaching out, like the fish eagle I'd had "snatching" me at the Birds of Prey centre. Yes. A bit more complex, but that worked. Coffee arrived, in rather nice mugs, with blue fish on them. Maybe.... there were pens over there. Pass me a blue one...?

That fish is quite similar to the graphic sig I used as a child, only lacking the "J"-shaped hook and the open mouth.

So, onward to making the proper beater. I'd chosen a birch handle, and sawn it to length - others were using a saw-bench at floor level, I preferred something a little higher, so used the edge of the fire pit. I had to be a bit careful of where my knuckles went, but not a problem. No, I'm not afraid of fire, why do you ask? We could strip the bark and sand if we wanted to, but I preferred the look with the bark still in place and only rough twigs sanded down. There were a choice of leathers, and a green one seemed to go best - probably chrome tanned, but I can live with that for this purpose. Cut out the pattern, and sewed it up with artificial sinew - very nice stuff to work with, I'll have to get some of that. The hole punch supplied was also a very nice tool, and a joint order is going t go in, as quite a lot of us want our own. Beater head turned, then stuffed with sheeps' wool from a bag of random bits of fleece, and including some deer hair I'd picked up on the walk. Tied on with more sinew, then bound over the join with yarn - I'd liked the look of some green yarn another lady had used, but when she tried to pass me some, it decided to mate with the cream next to it. So I decided against parting them.

That's 11" long and weighs 60g - the plain wood was 8 1/2 and weighed 19g

The smaller drums two of us were making were going to have iron tension rings in the centre, and these got bound with felt strips at this point for decorative purposes.

Time to attach the skin, for which we will need raw-hide thong. Lots of it. What we were given was a lot of wet raw-hide strip, to be trimmed at any "elbows" so as to make to bend more easily, then twisted and left stretched between a hook and a solid support (chair, fence, cooking tripod...) to "set". This took a while, and for the people with very long strips, help from friends, because as you S-twist the working part, the tail is Z-twisting itself and tying itself in knots.

Indoors, and to a table, where we met our hides. Wet, circular, and needing holes punched before they could be attached, 12 holes, for us. Then we attach the tension ring to the frame with temporary bits of string, and start applying thong - a button-hole slit and back through itself to attach to the ring, then over and under each hole and the ring.. Once you're back at the beginning, get rid of the string, and start tightening up. Keep going round, and round, and round, until a gentle tap on the skin shows that it's starting to sound like a drum. Fasten off.

Finally, we put a handle in the middle - thong in an X across the tension ring, then a Bridget's Cross bound around the centre.

Here's the end result: