About a year and a half ago I posted pictures and a description of a dagger I had made here:
https://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=50651.msg503212#msg503212I made a sheath for it shortly thereafter but never finished it, and it sat on a shelf for the next year-plus until a couple weeks ago, when I finally made of my mind of certain matters of decoration and color.
As you can see, it is made from wood, not leather. I made the decision to use wood instead of leather in part because I really liked the wooden sheath Todd Bitler made for a similar dagger (
http://nativeworkshop.com/portfolio/octagonal-wood-handled-dagger-wooden-sheath/) and partly because between making the dagger and making the sheath I discovered that I had a massive mold problem in my leather that forced me to throw away almost everything made from leather I owned, including all the leather suitable for making dagger sheaths, and I really did not want to spend good money for more leather that would be destroyed very quickly as long as I was living in that damp little basement apartment.
So. from a practical standpoint, wood made a lot of sense. However, as far as Historical Correctness, goes, it is kind of a fantasy item, I think - there is one or two original wooden sheaths for trade knives extant, which are pictured or mentioned in Hamilton Grant's knife good and Carl Russell's
Firearms, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Men (I'm not sure if they are describing the same sheath or two separate ones, and both books are in storage right now so I can't check), plus, wooden-cored sheaths lined with fur or felt and covered in leather/parchment were standard in the Middle Ages, so the idea isn't novel, but it is definitely an outlier and there is no exact model for this one. I plead necessity and the cool factor.
This is actually the second attempt at a sheath (which fits with the rest of the dagger, as every piece on it is a second or third attempt!). The first was made of poplar and had a little round button on it to keep it from sliding out of the belt, but I sanded it just a hair short trying to true up the end of the sheath to the crossguard and the tip of the blade pushed into the end of the sheath when inserted, which in turn made it impossible to draw one-handed - the sheath would just slide out of the belt when I pulled on the handle.
It turns out that making a wooden sheath is a lot of work, rather more than a basic leather one, I think, because it is really difficult to cut the cavity so it is snug enough that the blade doesn't rattle around yet can be withdrawn easily. One also has to consider the possibility of changing humidity, which makes things more difficult. The second time around I made a couple of design changes. In addition to using maple instead of poplar and the obvious move of leaving a bit more room in the tip, I made the button a bit larger and drilled a hole in it so I can tie the sheath onto the belt if the blade starts sticking in the sheath. I also lined the inside of the inside of the sheath with some linen cloth, which gave just enough compressability to make a good fit. Something thicker and softer, like wood felt, would have worked even better, but all I had was some linen and it seems to have worked out ok.
Originally, I intended to carve animals on it in a similar fashion to Bitler's work, which is one reason why I chose maple instead of walnut for the material. I also expected to stain it a bit. However, I didn't like either the commercial stain I had available and the vinagaroon I had mixed up gave a grey-green instead of brown, and I didn't really like the look of my "folk art" bear when I carved it on a test piece. After a year or more of going back and forth on what to do with it, I finally was able to mixed up a much better batch of vinegaroon (1084 steel filings instead of steel wool), test it, and decide that it still wasn't what I wanted. I also, and some back and forth decided not to try my hand at a carved bear after I noticed that incised carving on
wood really isn't common on White-made backwwods objects (Amerindian, yes; White, no, despite a lot of scrimshaw on horn) and I was already pushing things with a wooden sheath. So I carved some simple lines, to mimic the metal fittings of a leather sheath, and finished it up with four coats of Jim Chamber's Oil Finish. I did try rubbing some soot into the lines to make them pop better and age it just a bit, but it turns out that soot 1) doesn't go into and stay in cut lines, yet 2) tend to get into the pores of even finished wood where the lines aren't...
I'm not sure how much I like this sheath. In and of itself I like it, but doesn't seem to match the dagger quite right.
