Behold, the humble leather flacket.
I've made about a dozen of these things now, of various shapes and colours, and I thought it was time I made a post about my process.
But first, a brief note on terminology! YAY!
Depending on who you ask, this kind of bottle can be called: a bottle, a bottell, a costrel, or a flacket. All these terms, except the flacket, I have heard applied to vessels that look more like a keg with a flattish bottom - like
this vessel in the Museum of London. I've also heard costrel used as a general term for a drinking vessel of any sort.
In
Black Jacks and Leather Bottels, Oliver Baker describes a leather flacket like this:
It is of an elongated pear shape,and there is a fairly. thick projecting seam right round it. In this seam are rounded projections, two on each side, which form loops by means of which it was carried. The seam is not thickened but simply consists of the edges of the two sides brought together...
That seems like a good description of what I'm making, although the shape varies from pear or pumpkinseed shaped to round.
So, how does one make a flacket?
There are two schools of thought: one favours casing and molding the leather over a wooden form, trimming the excess, and sewing it together. The other favours stitching the two pieces of leather together first, soaking (casing) the leather, and then packing it full of something, like sand or barley.
Honestly, the first method is probably the most historically accurate, and achieves a consistent shape as well as providing a base for tooling the leather. Most preserved examples of flackets are assymetrical, being flat on the back and rounded on the front - that's almost impossible to achieve with the sand-pounding method. Medieval leather workers were certainly used to using wooden forms in other disciplines, such as shoemaking.
However, my skill with woodworking is lacking (though I hope to improve) and I use the stuffing method. If you want to see an example of the wooden form method, the Leather Working Reverend has an excellent post
here.
The process starts with the pattern. I don't use a historical pattern
per se, I just drew a few shapes that I liked and thought would work. The best part about this pattern is that you only need one piece. When scribing the pattern on to the leather, I flip the pattern horizontally to account for any minor errors in symmetry. Once cut out, you end up with two (hopefully) identical pieces of flask shaped leather.
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| The two pieces of the flacket, along with the bristol board pattern piece on the right |
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After that's done, I gouge my stitching lines and mark the spacing for the sewing. Note that this wouldn't have been done in Medieval times. The earliest use of a pricking wheel for leather working is the 19th century, I think.
I use two rows of stitches along the outside of the bottle. This way, if one row of stitches fails, the other will hold it together. It also makes for a slightly better seal.
Now we get to the most time consuming part of the whole process - the stitching. I'm lucky with these bottles that I can use a stitching clamp to hold them in place while I sew - otherwise I would need to glue the edges and hold it between my knees, which is more difficult with thick leather like this.
As usual, this is the "saddle stitch", where a hole is made with an awl and two needles are passed through it. The needles are each at one end of the thread, so it amounts to kind of a double running stitch that is very strong. I use linen thread waxed with coad, a mixture of beeswax and pine rosin that keeps the thread from rotting and helps lock the stitches inside the leather.
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| Stitching part way done |
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| Stitching completed! |
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After this is done, I burnish the edges using a horn or bone folder. I used to use a horn one that I bought, but I discovered that a bone folder I had made at an SCA event worked far better and quicker. Perhaps the commercially-made folder is too finely polished to provide enough friction?
Now we get to the forming. I soak the bottle for about an hour to make sure the leather is really pliable. Then I do some initial opening up by blowing some air into the bottle. This basically gets it open enough that I can fit a funnel in the mouth and start pouring in barley. I use barley because that was what was used in the original how-to I followed - most people apparently use sand.
When the bottle is full of barley, I pack it down with a wooden dowel, then pour more barley. I keep doing this until the leather is stretched as tight as possible, and packing no longer stretches the leather. Not only does this give the bottle the most volume, I've found that fully stretched leather holds its form better than leather with more stretch in it.
Now we have to let it dry. This is important! If you put even slightly damp leather into hot wax, the leather will crumple or burst, wasting all the work you've done (and on a side note, possibly spraying hot wax everywhere. It takes awhile to dry, sometimes as much as two days, because of all the barley inside. This is where the wooden form method is nicer too - it would dry in much less time.
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| The stretched and packed bottle, drying. |
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While the bottle is drying, I usually get on with the woodworking side of things - namely, carving the stopper and cutting the toggle. Both of these I cut from oak branches. The toggle is pretty simple - I cut a button about 1/4 to 1/2 an inch thick off of the branch, then drill 4 holes in it. Then it's sanded and finished. Leather lace attaches the toggle to the finished bottle and forms a loop for the belt. The loop goes around the belt and hooks on the toggle. It's secure and quick to undo - my wife thought it up after looking at some Finnish belt-trappings and seeing something similar.
The stopper I carve while still part of the branch. This is pretty simple too - 95% of the work is done with a sharp knife. The stopper is a little crude - nothing at all like the turned stuff you see woodworkers produce - but they work, are a hard-wearing wood, and give the whole thing a kind of rustic flavour.
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| The finished button and stopper. Note the shoulder on the stopper, tricky to do on oak with just a knife! |
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Now we're getting to the final steps - waxing and lining the flacket. First the flacket is immersed in beeswax that's been melted in a double boiler. The double boiler part is key! If the wax gets too hot, it will boil the leather and it will crumple. The double boiler prevents the wax from getting above 100 degrees celsius. I'm always careful around melted wax and pitch - remember to wear long gloves and long sleeves.
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| Immersing the flacket in hot wax |
I immerse the flacket in the wax until I stop seeing bubbles rising to the surface of the wax, indicating the leather is fully saturated. This can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes, I think, though I've never timed it.
Once removed from the wax, I wipe off the excess wax from the outside with a wad of paper towels. you have to do this while it is still hot or the wax will solidify and you'll have to immerse it again to melt the wax. Then I let it cool. The leather slowly darkens from a light to a dark brown as it cools, resulting in a dark chocolate brown. The colour is the result of the dark beeswax I use, I think.
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| The waxed flacket |
The final step is to line the bottle with a pitch and beeswax mixture - this is similar to the coad mixture I use to wax my threads, and the same as the lining for the leather mugs I make. I melt the pitch and beeswax together (a 1:1 ratio), then pour it carefully into the bottle and roll it around, making sure the pitch gets into the seams where a leak is most likely. The pitch and wax lining is food safe and more resistant to impact, heat, acidity and alcohol content than just beeswax alone, though hot drinks, pop and orange juice are still no-nos!
Then, once it has cooled and set, I test the bottle for leaks. I fill it full of water and leave it on the counter for an hour or two, standing up between a couple of mason jars. If there's no leaks, it's good to go! The toggle and stopper are added and the flacket is complete.
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| "Ve meet again, Herr Flacket." |
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So, the inevitable question is, how historically accurate is this thing?
Well, there's documentary evidence of leather bottles and flasks as far back as the 10th century, though I don't believe there are extant examples from before the 15th century. Those bottles show some signs of being made on wooden forms, given their consistent shape and asymmetry. So the barley-stuffing method is iffy, but plausible. The leather is vegetable tanned, and while modern veg-tan leather is very different from historical stuff, it's used in the same way and achieves the same result. Unless I was pit-tanning the stuff myself, I'm unlikely to find better.
The thread and stitching are pretty period accurate - linen thread was used commonly on everything from shoes to bottles. The wax on the thread is similar, but not exactly the same (medieval recipes use black pitch instead of clear yellow rosin, apparently), but once again it serves the same function.
Bottles and flackets in period probably weren't hardened at all, as they show signs of patching and repair, and many were cut up to be used as patches for shoes when their life ended. My hardened bottles can't be patched or sewn - nothing short of a heavy blade wielded with considerable force is going to pierce them. I wax them to give them extra durability and water resistance, and I think the trade off is worth it.
The lining is pitch and beeswax. There's no evidence of beeswax being used in period for lining vessels, but the modern pitch (the rosin) is too brittle at room temperature for my liking. Period pitches were apparently a little more flexible. Once again, a good compromise.
The shape isn't perfect but it resembles several flackets that existed in period, including some from the Mary Rose, so I'll chalk it up to artistic license.
So it won't pass a close inspection by a Laurel or a history professor, but it mostly looks the part and has a lot of elements that
are accurate. It's perfect for SCA or Ren-faire type events, or just as a unique water carrier for a long hike.
If you're interested in purchasing one of these, I have several shapes and sizes available in my
Etsy Shop.
Thanks for reading!
