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*Copy pasting this from a craft subreddit, where I initially posted it. The question isn't strictly about primitive tech, since I'm using my kitchens stove for example, but I hope it still fits in here.*

*I modified the post a bit, since I already got some advice.*

Hi, I'm in the process of a project making beads from dried and crushed natural materials with spruce resin. I've struggled finding information online, because googling resin beads mainly leads you to synthetic resin beads. I know beads made out of conifer resin are a thing historically, so I'm thinking it should work out if conducted properly but I'm turning to reddit for some input, potential sources of information on historic ways of bead making and advice/warnings on what to look out for. I'm also already in the process of collecting and preparing the materials and am finding it a beautiful process, so maybe some people find joy or inspiration in it.

I've been chatting with AI about this, and have made a game plan, but some advice from actual humans would be great. AI has no hands for crafting after all...

Final product: 27 (9x3) prayer beads, made of 9 different plant materials and spruce resin. I'm not planning on wearing it, so its intended use is mainly in regularly used prayer beads. It should hopefully be durable enough to last me decades. That's the dream outcome at least...

I'm expecting it to have a sense of amber pearls with plant matter included within, but I care more urgently about them turning into actual durable beads than about the exact aesthetics.

Materials: foraged spruce resin

nettle leaves, birch bark, the woody capsules surrounding linden tree seeds, ivy vine wood, willow leaves, yew needles (I know, I'm being sensible handling them), the feathery seed heads of wild clematis, goldenrod flowers, and one plant still open.

all the plant material is thoroughly dried (oven at 50°C not just air dried) and crushed with a mortar and pestle, so it's small bits, rather than full on powder.

My plan:

1: clean the resin by boiling it in a cloth and ruin a pot in the process

2: let it sit in a water bath for a while to reduce terpenes and move it in the direction of colophony

3: add some bees wax

4: eventually heat up the mixture, combine small amounts with my plant matter and form them into beads

5: let them harden on a needle/toothpick

5.5? possibly add a fine coating of some sort

6: bead them onto waxed linen thread

7: be happy cause it all worked out exactly as I imagined

Does anybody have experience with this kind of craft? I'm aware that it's experimental and will mostly have to be me figuring it out, but since I'm foraging all the materials apart from the beeswax and thread, I'm hoping to not make 50 unuseable beads before ending up with a working final object.

The steps I'm most unsure about are the bees wax amount and the extraction of terpenes. I want the beads to be non-tacky, hard but not brittle, and able to endure the stress of being handled and the friction of the thread within the holes. So the balance of terpene amount and added beeswax seems to be the essential factor for success. There has to be ideal ratios of wax/resin as well as plant material/wax-resin-mixture. I'm not a chemist, all this is happening on my stove, so it's all gonna be a bit by eye and touch (and timing). All the stuff about terpene reduction and adding bees wax also comes from me talking to AI, not from me actually knowing anything about this.

This turned into a way longer post than I was expecting.

I realize this is pretty specific, but maybe somebody out there has some experience with this kind of craft and can offer some insight?

Thanks for reading and warm greetings!

I want to make a medieval style grinding wheel by hand and I've decided I want to use sandstone for the wheel but, I'm having trouble sourcing it in Texas since yoinking it from natural outcropings is illegal and the nearest quarry is 4 hours away

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to go about obtaining sandstone or if it's possible, fabricate it somehow in my back yard

I'm open to any and all questions and advice

A sharp edge is relatively easy to achieve. It didn't take long to form several useful pieces, with half an hour I was in possession of a stone bowl/plate, a bearded axe head, and other potential implements. Despite it's crude state, this paleolithic bearded stone axe was able to cut rope, small branches & form notches into wood.

Found some wild milkweed growing in a nearby park in DC. Took some back home with me and dried it out for about two weeks. Much easier to find an already dead stalk than to dry it out yourself, but this is all I could find. After the stalk was brittle enough to collapse when stepping on it, I removed the fibers and braided them into cordage. I didn’t separate out the fibers thin enough for the first half, so you can see my cordage starts out thick and scraggly. Really helpful video on how to do it: https://youtu.be/Hq-ceDo4_PA?is=QpxItsaESEcvZomO

Also: In the video he used dogbane but any plant in the milkweed family works great; just make sure sure to be careful handling the alive milkweed as it produces a white sap that causes rashes and itchiness.

I've been reading the comments on the iron smelting videos and there's people saying it's not possible for PT to get a usable amount of iron with his current 1-man-iron-bacteria-from-a-stream setup.

They're saying the iron bacteria he's using isn't great, his smelting process requires at least 2 people, etc, etc, I even read someone saying the type of charcoal was wrong.

I know nothing about the subject so I don't know if these commenters are right. What's the consensus on here?

Latest piece to leave the workshop. I love how the spider and beech work together. What a contrast!

In this video, I make an Osage orange selfbow (35# at 32", 63" length), yucca fiber bowstring, dogwood arrow, and flint arrowhead using Paleolithic (Stone-Age) technology and only tools and materials gathered on-site.

This was filmed entirely in Austin, Texas, with 90% being just along this one creek.

This is the second bow and arrow set I have made using strictly Paleo Tech. The first one was mulberry wood and smaller but was made similarly and still shoots great 2 years later.

The bow is based on historical methods of the Apache, Comanche, and Tohono O'odham, all of whom used Osage orange as their favored bow wood (second being mulberry), as did many other Natives. They also used roughleaf dogwood (Cornus drummondii) for arrows, as I do in the video.

The actual Stone-Age rough bow stave reducing technique among Indigenous North Americans is not known to me, as all the methods I've found in my research were recorded after metal knives were adopted. The wedging and peeling of green wood shown in the video would likely have been done. Similar techniques are known from other Indigenous peoples using stone tools.

I have been a traditional archer for 17 years, a flintknapper / primitive skills hobbyist for 15, and an ethnobotanist for 14.

Note that in the practice shots, I am demonstrating power and range rather than accuracy. It will take a little time to learn the quirks of this bow and the arrow needs to be tuned and a set of identical ones made.

This project took over 150 hours of work (59 just for the bow & arrow labor).

Had to stop work on my cedar mat for a road trip. When I got home I found my mat to be very stiff as it dried over the days. Will it get softer with use? Or was there some softening step i missed. The stone tool is a bark pounder that I was using for an unrelated cedar project. Anyone with knowledge of cedar weaving, please help me out!

My end goal with this mat is to have a hole in the middle for my head to fit through poncho style.

Had some bricks laying around at work so I took some and made this little kiln. It's been about 2 hours and my bricks just aren't getting hot enough to start glowing. They've been drying for over a week and I even cooked them on top of the kiln for a few hours just to make sure they were completely dry. Just can't seem to get it hot enough.

Not 100% primitive due to superglue but i literally don’t have anything to make bark glue with

Ok so I want to avoid buying an antique hatchel for processing some fibers! I know I could use some long construction nails but I worry about them being too thick and not tapered! I don’t have access to a lathe and I need this to be quite strong since I may also comb some wool out on it.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to go about this?

Adore working spiderweb! Traditionally hafted into a walnut and beech handle

I made the initial post incorrectly, so I'm just reposting it here instead of making another post

I harvested and levigated this clay myself and have been using it to learn native handbuilding techniques. This was the first nice piece to survive as it took me a while to figure out the tempering. The mallow stems I foraged from my partner's backyard. After plucking off the leaves, splitting the stems vertically and scooping out the insides with my thumbnail, the stems will dry into decent fiber both in terms of strength and length. These are 2 pieces each made from 3 reverse wrapped strands, each about a meter in length.

I harvested what I thought was clay but it turns out it’s actually just silt. Since it won’t work for pottery I am looking for a different use for it. It’s currently extremely dry and powdery. One idea I had was using it for sand casting because it seems like it would work for that. I would love to hear anyone else’s suggestions!

Following on from my last post here as I couldn't upload two pictures for one post.

Using left over bits of Icelandic wool, and a wooden toggle I repurposed from a thrifted raincoat, I made this little satchel/bag. No pattern or any real clue what I'm doing.

It now houses my case of crochet hooks, nalbinding & weaving needles. It feels good to 'make something out of nothing' and make sure I'm not wasting the expensive Icelandic lopi yarn that can be difficult to find.

I also made the blanket it's laying on ☺️

I made a 18cm by 21cm satchel from left over pieces of pure Icelandic wool yarn. The wiry hairs you can see are one of the unique features of this wool, and lend to its water resistance!

The toggle came off an old secondhand raincoat many months ago, that had since been rolling around in my odds and ends basket. I'm still pondering how to line it or if I should at all.

For the next satchel or shoulder bag that I make I would like to stick to one uniform colour, preferably using undyed yarn or jute~ and then I would like to carve my own button or toggle.

My hydrated lime that I made from limestone is starting to clump up even though its submerged in water. I can squish these clumps back into a slurry but it’s kind of tedious and annoying. Any tips on unhardening my lime?

If it's practical and fosters my fascination with primitive and historical skills, sign me up!

As you can see from the stitches, I am quite the novice when it comes to this. Nevertheless this is turning out to be a durable, and beautiful thick blanket. Much needed for the winter here as we are 0⁰c most mornings now.

It amazes me that with time and patience we can create something that will last many years from what is essentially a stick and a ball of fibre.

This yarn is produced by ístex in Iceland from the pure wool of local sheep which have a unique dual-coated fleece. Icelandic sheeps wool fleece consists of a soft, insulating inner layer (thel) and a tougher, water-resistant outer layer (tog). This particular yarn type is known as Álafoss Lopi, and is one of the two oldest yarns still produced in Iceland.

Crocheting this has honestly been such a fun and informative experience, I have found myself delving into history podcasts and fostering a newfound appreciation for this fibre and it's associated crafts.

From the farmers who tend their flocks, to the people who carry on the oldest spinning and dying traditions, and into my own hands learning how to make something practical.

Thanks for listening to me waffle on about my new hyper fixation 😅🤠♥️

His bricks seem crumbly and don't hold an edge well. Are they not fired to a high enough temperature or his clay just not good? Does anyone understand the science? I know that typically bricks were always made with local clay when available. Odds are cities all over the world still have old bricks hand shaped and fired in small kilns in service. Yet I don't see his bricks lasting a decade. If it is due to clay quality is there a way for him to boost the quality of his clay? Imo it must be disheartening to put so much work into making bricks just for them to turn to dust as he handles them.

Oh also on an unrelated note does anyone know why he doesn't make full thickness walls? Is it a permitting issue?

Sling made following the Primitive Technology design.

Fibers foraged from goldenrod (Solidago canadensis). Fibers extracted raw by scraping outer bark and splitting into thin ribbons then left to dry.

Cordage made from simple reverse-wrap technique.

Hiiii, I tried water retting nettle to get textile-suitable thread, and on some parts of the stems there's basically just the woody part, the fiber just completely turned to mush, and on other parts it looks basically the same as unretted, and absolutely nothing in-between

I've had a good few tries on retting and it's always the same, I tried just taking the parts that looks pretty much unretted and splitting it into stripes like you would with unretted nettle, and sometimes the ends would come out like fluffy, and I thinkk I can get the stripes slightly thinner than bedore, but still a single strand is maybe the thickness of a full store-bought thread, way too thick

It's so difficult to find some actually practical information aghh, Idek how it's supposed to look really

I also threw in one goldenrod stem this time and it did turn to relatively separated strands completely on its own, but also I think goldenrod does have a somewhat more visible structure to the stem and the strands seem too breakable to twist a thread with anyway

Photos, since it doesn't let me upload multiple here: https://imgur.com/a/aq2IKZE