One cannot be on almost thrilling adventures all of the time.
Trust me, it’s exhausting to explain to your cats why their dinner is late…yet again. They have no tolerance for such things and are not subtle in their complaints. Therefore, we are in between exploits at the moment.
The respite is good for us though. It gives us a chance to work on projects we tend to ignore when we’re out and about. Such as the steampunk explorers / geocaching bracer I started last month with the best of intentions to finish quickly. Quickly didn’t happen.
Upon returning from Texas, we have continued our geocaching excursions with enthusiasm. We soon discovered a couple of things.
I continually forget to grab the pen to write on the cache lists. I made it my responsibility to be the pen bearer but keep leaving it in the vehicle until we open the cache at which point I remember.
Some caches are very small and hard to retrieve.
There are mystery caches (My favorite type) which require a person to keep track of information or solve riddles.
After a rather difficult find, Dave jokingly said I should make something to keep the items we need for geocaching in. Challenge accepted! I briefly considered a utility belt but decided that was overdoing it just a bit. Instead, I chose to create a bracer.
Brilliant!
Except for one insignificant detail. I’m a seamstress, an embroiderer, a painter. The bracer I envisioned making required minimal required sewing skills, the rest was entirely new skills and materials to me.
Sigh…
Not deterred, I bought some inexpensive items to put on the bracer from Amazon…
…and some leather, suede and miscellaneous necessities from our local leather dealer.
As I planned on this initial piece being a mockup (there was no chance of me creating a masterpiece on my first undertaking), I attempted to keep the cost low. It was a good try. The cost wasn’t terrible, just more than I was hoping to spend. I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was starting from scratch and that’s always more expensive.
Bracers are not large objects so I kept my list of accouterments to a minimum.
A pen
A small notebook (3” x 5”)
Tweezers
A small mirror on an extendable handle
A compass (this one is rather useless as geocaching requires detailed coordinates but it looks cool).
All I had to do was put it all together in an awesome looking way…with unfamiliar materials…and methods.
Piece of cake!
This part was pretty easy. However, I only bought one size of rivets and they are not going to hold those straps. Superglue (’cause it bonds leather) is being used at the moment.
The beginnings of a bracer
Superglue is messy. Aside from sticking to me, it also got all over the bracer. Goof off worked great to remove the mess and everything else it touched…
I made a bit of a mess with the compass when I used goof off to remove some super glue from the top of it
When I bent the bracer to go around my arm, the compass only touched in the center of the pretty medallion I found at Michael’s. General purpose Bondo was my solution to create stability.
I swear (like a sailor some days but that’s not important right now) when I marked off where the snaps should be sewn onto the suede they were evenly spaced and in a straight line. You wouldn’t know it looking at the metal diamonds covering them.
Fully loaded. I created a pocket to store the notebook in.
Still, for my first experiment with this type of thing, I’m quite pleased with the results. The finished product has turned out messier than I was hoping it would but that’s to be expected. I plan on wearing this when going on future hikes and geocaching expeditions to see if I like how it was put together and how well it holds up. I am definitely buying larger rivets for the straps, I can already tell they are needed.
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