Upon returning home, terribly cranky after a night of lumps and pebbles under my rump, it occurred to me that I needed to do something to prevent such a fate in the future -- particularly if I wanted to survive my first Pennsic Experience (Pennsic XXXI) with all my joints basically in tact. (I figure I have more chance of that than most; I'm not a fighter!) So, I trundled myself off in my car and combed through all sorts of stores in search of a new air mattress and a suitable camp cot to place it on.

Camp cots, I discovered, are rather expensive. What's more, most of them come with only a thin foam pad, while I had decided I wanted a nice twin-sized Coleman air mattress -- you know, the 6" thick ones with reinforced valves that don't leak. (My tent isn't really big enough to accommodate anything bigger. Not with a cot or other such support added to it, at any rate.) The more I looked, the more I realized I had a choice: a really nice air mattress set upon the ground, or a thin little foam pad on a stretched canvas cot. Frankly, I liked the air mattress better... but I still didn't want to spend 10 days at War sleeping on the ground.

Enter the Age of the Internet. Bored at work sometime mid-week, I started searching through various Pennsic checklist sites (when one is a Pennsic virgin, one likes to know just what one might be in for, doncha know), which inevitably lead me to sites on period camping and camp furniture, and the like. Among these, perhaps not surprisingly, was the Miscellany site published and maintained by Duke Cariadoc of the Bow and his Lady wife, Elizabeth. There, on that site, was an article on building a rope bed based on an image found in "the Andrews diptych, a 13th c. Byzantine Ivory presently in the Victoria and Albert Museum" (A picture of the ivory can be found at: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Articles/rope_bed/period_bed.htm. The article itself can be found at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Articles/rope_bed/rope_bed.htm or in the downloadable Miscellany pdf found at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/miscellany_pdf/Miscellany.htm)

The bed depicted there is a little different from the "Transportable Rope Bed" commonly seen in most camps (cf. http://www.greydragon.org/furniture/beds/ropebed.html). But, it's amazingly inexpensive to build, and a wee bit more compact, I think, than what the Greydragon offering appears to be. (I admit that packing it up to transport it is a wee bit more of a challenge, since once you've laced it once you /really/ don't want to unlace it, but it's hardly insurmountable. And it actually does set up relatively easily if you don't have to unlace it. I moved it and tested it.) What's more, tightening the ropes, to keep them properly and comfortably taut (a challenge with the other bed), is easy due to the pulley bar.

So, I started to play with the instructions Duke Cariadoc outlined in his article. I drafted myself up some plans, based on his directions and what I could glean from the pictures I saw, (INSERT http://images.wolftree.net/ropebed1tb.gif AND http://images.wolftree.net/ropebed2tb.gif IMAGES HERE AS LINKS TO THE DRAFTED PLANS AT http://images.wolftree.net/ropebed1.gif and http://images.wolftree.net/ropebed2.gif), and then set off to get my supplies.

I bought myself an 8' long 4x4 that I had the lumberyard cut down into four 18" lengths, with a little bit of scrap left over. I also got five 8' long 2x2's, which I cut down at home to serve as the end rails, side rails, and pulley bar. (The measurements for them I gleaned from the mattress dimentions (72"x38") plus the width of the leg posts (4"x4"). At first I added a couple of extra inches to each end, but once I set the finished bed up in my tent, I determined that shaving off that excess was a better idea.) I drilled two holes into each leg post to accommodate the rails, and whittled down the square ends of the 2x2's so that they fit into the round openings. Then, all I needed was the rope. (I used 1/4" manila rope. It was cheap and has a decent workload limit.) I cut a sufficient length to work the pulley bar and then used the rest to lace the bed in a crosshatch pattern, rather than the usual grid layout. (Though Cariadoc's instructions didn't call for it, I also added a personal improvisation by adding rope cleats to the side of each leg post so that I could tie off the rope neatly when I was done tightening it.)

Frankly, to understand the lacing pattern, you really need to simply examine the pictures at Cariadoc's site. It's a true lesson in building a celtic knot, let me tell you! But, that makes it very difficult to explain in text. Basically, though, it's an over and under repeating square pattern that crisscrosses the 3 rails and pulley bar.

The bed I made finally turned out to look like this: (INSERT http://images.wolftree.net/ropebedthm.jpg IMAGE HERE AS A LINK TO THE LARGER IMAGE AT http://images.wolftree.net/ropebed.jpg.)

Packing up the bed for transport, actually, is realtively easy. First, you loosen the pulley bar rope so that you can pull the legs off the one end. Then, you loosen and pull out the various other rails from the legs, without removing them from the rope loops. Next, you bind the rope loops on the one end rail and pulley bar together so that they are in the center of the rails. The two side rails are rolled in together and the pulley bar and one end rail are twisted and laid in parallel to the side rails so that the mesh wraps in and around itself. Add the second endrail to the pile and bind the entire thing together with the pulley rope to keep everything in one piece. Setting it up in the tent, then, just becomes a reversal of this process. (The only thing you have to be sure to do is not let the rails slip out of the loops for fear the loops will untwist and you'll be forced to spend an hour and a half relacing the dang thing.)

All together, the whole thing cost me about $60CAN, which is about on par with the $40US His Grace wrote that it cost him. So, I have to say, I'm really quite pleased with it.

Not bad for a first attempt, anyway.