Hunting Garb

An early layout of the doublet front panel, at this point I'm pretty much just draping stuff in place to get a feel for what sort of spacing is going to look good.

The tracing paper pattern that I ended out making to show there I wanted all of the slashes to go.

I use a chalk wheel for marking out, this leaves very small perforations in the paper and allows me to use it through the tracing paper directly onto the leather. This is extremely handy since I was easily able to use the same paper on both sides of the costume.

Chalked up and ready to be slashed.

A close up of the slashes in the leather. Note that the slashes aren't just a single cut, but are two slightly curves cuts, meeting at each end but about 1 or 2mm apart in the center.

The other thing that isn't at all visible in this picture (but can be seen in one or two of the others) is that when this leather is cut, it exposed the yellow color of the un dyed leather. This really looked ugly, so I spent quite a while searching through local art stores to find a permanent marker of the right color so that I could go over every exposed cut and dye the leather back to the finish color.

Many of the edges are glued down, I found that binder clips worked really nicely to hold the leather in place so that it adhered thoroughly. Note the beginnings of the curved color here. This was particularly fiddly to get looking good. In fact the neck line of this jacket is probably the part that I am most proud of, there are some better close ups later on.

This shows an early stage of the bottom loops. This is basically a rolled leather thong laced around another thong through small holed in the leather.

This is another view of the same loops, showing how the thong is anchored in place against another piece of thong. This hold it in place very securely, then the line is glued and then folded over to make the center front.

This is the equivalent shot of the button side. Again, a single lace holds all of the buttons in place.

Sans shoulders and lining.

Note that the golden trim is continuous over the shoulders, each piece runs from the waist at the front to the waist at the back, and each is nicely centered between the slashes. Hence all of the painstaking mucking about with tracing paper for the slashing earlier on.

Another pre-lining shot, showing the back of the button loops and the waist tabs.

Sewing the final stages of the shoulder tabs together.

As you can see, the shoulders end out with rather a lot of layers of leather. What I needed was a skife (or skiving knife) but I didn't know that at the time. Anyway, the support with the grommets on gets sewn on last and then the whole ridge gets folded over onto the inside of the shoulder.

The seemingly enormous sleeve (the left one), already slashed and cut for the buttons.

A closer view of the same sleeve

The black lining in this case is simply here to show through the slashes and hide the batting that's going to go in the upper sleeves.

The buttons lace through carefully lined up holds in the sleeve

and are then laced through the black backing so that the lacing itself can hold the backing in place. I don't want to sew it in place since the stitching would be visible, and I don't want to rely on gluing it in place since frankly the glue just doesn't bond fabric to leather that well.

Now this is the inner surface of the sleeve Note the gathered crinoline at the top of the shoulder, this helps to give the shoulder its distinctive padded shape. Later the batting is sewn to this layer so that it doesn't slide down the arm.

Unfortunately I don't have any further pictures of the sleeve construction, but if you look at Margo's patterns the rest is actually pretty straight forward. Honest. :)

Sewing the waistband onto the pants. Yes, that is a sewing awl in the picture, and yes, I did have to use that far more often than I'd hoped. There's certainly a knack to it and the results are very good, but I've never needed to sew with a box of band-aids beside me before. I stabbed myself with that dratted awl so very many times :(

Here we are, the finished garment.

And the back. Note that most of the back is one piece of leather, including the back of the neck.

Finally a nice close up of the front and shoulder.

The sleeves. are laced in place and can be removed, you can clearly see the padded shoulder and upper arm, as well as that nice neck line I was referring to earlier.