ludicrously excited about the fact that i can now title this project i made armor in a cave
from a box of scraps i'm going to be here forever although i guess we would have to rename the shed
the cave in order to make that strictly accurate maybe i should explain about the whole shed
thing currently there are two very nice fellas in my kitchen wreaking absolute destruction and
then hopefully putting back some nicer things i'm very excited about this but also we need to
get some work done so here we are given that trifling non-essentials like electricity and
water were intermittently going to be turned off i decided to relegate myself to the garden shed
for the duration and actually work on a costume project that i had conceived of in the summer
making leather scale armor for a d&d cosplay the concept was pretty simple i think scale armor is
pretty i don't really have the tools or skills or space to work with metal at the moment let's make
a sort of all-purpose leather adventuring vest for my dnd character amelia hi i'm Jill Bearup
i'm an actor combatant and also kind of a nerd welcome so to that end i ordered a large box of
leather offcuts from ebay for cheap because it seemed a more environmentally friendly option
to reuse what was essentially scrap material rather than buying some new fancy vegetable
tanned leather and then probably making a hames of it did i mention i've never actually worked with
leather before it arrived on a day in which we got more packages than i was expecting what's inside
we're going to find out it's not what i want it's not what i wanted it's cat food the second large
parcel of the day did make me more joyful live and learn i guess previous visitors to
the channel may recognize mannequin skywalker who still has the stab wounds and now i've got
four kilograms of leather offcuts scale armor is generally defined as armor made from small
individual scales which are attached to each other and to a cloth or leather backing in overlapping
rows you can make scale armor of varying degrees of effectiveness from just about anything
leather metal pangolin scales crocodile i went for leather the first challenge was the cloth
backing because i figured if that fits properly then everything else can't help but fit properly
right? hello and welcome to the floor where i have suddenly had an epiphany this is my fabric bag and
in my fabric bag were the pieces of curtain fabric (look i really hated those curtains and they kept
getting in my face at night and they came with the house and they probably weren't that clean)
that i had previously intended to make into a bodice style top for cosplay
because i saw Salinda Nichols wearing one in her d&d lookbook video and i thought i want
one of those isn't it great when like you've done some of your work already big fan of that
where's the back in here somewhere i think this is the back it's two pieces which i apparently sewed
to each other i mean i'm sure that seemed like a good idea at the time but i'm probably gonna
have to undo that so i detached the pieces from each other ironed down some seams hemmed them
on the sewing machine while the kitchen guys were off getting plumbing supplies allowing me to sing
disney songs with impunity [cause I'll breathe, when they try to suffocate me...] measured me
and then the mannequin to figure out how closely we resembled each other that's actually not bad
that's actually not bad okay and then altered the armholes to try and make it fit a bit
better so the plan is i'm going to take these two pieces i'm going to pin them on her i'm going to
kind of leave them at the shoulders and the sides and at the end we'll come up with two
kind of straps at the shoulders to join them up and then lace them down the sides because
technically they should close they should close but if they don't that's okay we'll work
something out now ordinarily under scale armor obviously you would have some kind of padded layer
but frankly i'm lazy and so i might put at most a thick jumper under there but probably it's going
to be quite warm because it's going to be quite a lot of leather there and i don't know what these
curtains were made of but um i don't think it was any natural material so probably gonna skip the
historically and indeed practically accurate uh under layer and just try and make it fit.
this is what we're doing this is what we're doing okay then we had a brief interlude in
which i tried to figure out which bit was the front because i had not previously labeled them
50 50 chance it's on the right way around i think it might be on the right way around let's
just turn it around and see if that's actually better no that's worse okay, let's write inside f
b there we go i mean is it perfect no but will it work hopefully now it's time to figure out
how we're going to add the scales the first thing i'm going to do is consult a tutorial that i found
on the internet on how to make larp leather scale armor so having a look at the tutorial
it suggests that the easiest way to do things is to cut out strips of scales and then attach
the strip to your base tab art the real question is what sort of stuff have i got in this box of
leather i'm gonna have to remove you from the tripod for this i am dividing my leather
into piles uh this is the brine pile and on my knee here is the black pile black
a lot of black shiny black a little bit sketch um let's make a pile for shiny black black black
oh brown! having determined that i had much more black leather than brown leather i went for black
which also kind of fits in with amelia's character who is basically what if evie circa the mummy
returns had magic powers. but could i actually cut the leather actually let's find out i find
this board in my loft we're definitely continuing the theme of scraps here having traced a scale in
purple glitter pen not the best idea you still can see the marks on the finished armor but never mind
i then discovered it could be cut with scissors but also much more efficiently with a rotary
cutter yes we can i cut a row of scales as a test and then i had to go do the school run well it's
been the weekend and we are now back in the shed so if you hear birds singing or indeed people
hammering things uh kitchen renovation is ongoing i used my test scales to make a cardboard template
and then enough stalling had occurred and since my house was full of dust and often not full of
electricity there was really nothing to do but get on with cutting out rows and rows of scales and
then punching holes in them got my leather punch recall which is the smallest one i think it's
this one so we're just going to punch the smallest hole possible and see what happens and then having
punched two holes at the top of each scale one on each side i then stitch them onto the base fabric
with string look don't judge me i was trying to continue my theme of only using stuff that was
hanging around my house obviously excluding the actual box of leather scraps because who has four
kilos of leather scraps hanging around their house maybe you do i don't know. for the sake
of everyone's sanity we will skate lightly over how long this took i'm going to be here forever
forever which was as you can see a couple of days but i did a lot and i mean a lot of cutting
rows of scales until i got bored and then punching holes until i got bored and then repeating because
i think if i had to cut out the 300 or so scales before i started i might have gone mad you know
this isn't looking bad when i got up to the waist i had to cut the rows of scales up into
smaller sections so they overlapped properly more like actual scale armor i suppose and that seemed
to work pretty well it took two days to finish the bulk of it but i did put the same t-shirt on
because first of all the washing machine was not working at the time and second of all the t-shirt
was covered in lots of little pieces of leather so i thought if i have to go out i'll just change
we're doing pretty well we've got almost all of this done i need a couple of extra ones for there
and then i need to figure out what i do at the top probably going to make a bunch of individual
scales and i cut them out until i lose the will to live again but i mean it's looking great i just
hope it fits it'll be fine totally fine and that's pretty much what i did when it came to the top i
kind of folded the scales over and then sewed them onto the back and the front of the fabric base and
that seemed to work okay having got basically all the scales on i decided to tidy up a bit
and to try and hide all of the string which mostly worked sometimes it's easier to sew
things on when they're inside out by the way and the nice thing about the white string
gray fabric and black scales is that it's easier for you to see what's going on which is totally
why i did it and not because i'm cheap or environmentally conscious depending on how
charitable you're feeling to attach the shoulders together i sewed the fabric together at the top
and then having checked it fit all right basically decided to wrap the existing scales in a tube of
leather and then punch holes through everything and tie it with a strip of leather that i cut from
the offcuts again it worked remarkably well and it even looks quite nice i think and then it was
school pick-up time so we resumed the next day you may have many questions at this point
jill why are you dressed like a hobbit bartender? jill why do you look so tired?
jill what even is the plan today? and those are all good questions and i will be answering
some of them this is the plan for today this is my thickest piece of leather i'm going to
turn it into four equally sized strips and i'm going to attach one piece to each side
of the front of the armor and one piece to each side of the back and punch holes in them so that
they can be laced together i had a really clever thought yesterday which i will explain because
hobbit bartender jill was extremely tired and so not terribly coherent sorry Ani... the thought
was if i attach the other side of the shoulders with the same method i used for the first side
then i can just put the thing over my head with minimal faffing and then the leather lacings on
one side are sort of semi-permanently done up but the leather lacings on the other side
are actually just hiding cunningly concealed command strips then i can take it on and off
really easily which is always helpful with cosplay it's like velcro but it's not velcro
poor hobbit bartender Jill but that's exactly what i did i took my extremely thick piece of leather
i punched big holes in the sides that would have the lacing i punched little holes in the side
that i wanted to sew to the fabric and i sewed them on the lacing i used to tie them together
incidentally was a leather lace that i had bought for a princess Leia hair tutorial i then cut
out a rectangle of leather to make my shoulder tube on the right hand side and close the right
shoulder in the same manner as the left though i'd advise not doing it while it's on the mannequin
i tried that being done i had to go and see a man about a bike repair and then i had to figure out
how the command strips were going to work question is how do we attach them so they won't fall off
the fabric the solution i came up with was get a long rectangle of thin leather and sew it to the
front piece for later sticking so the thick back strip on as usual lace the thick pieces together
so they look nice and then something like this and this can just stick together with those little
command strips have a go i had a go
oh no no these are not sticking at all are they? clearly the solution is stronger glue so
i went into my house and i thought i know there's super glue in here somewhere and then i thought
why don't i just ask these nice guys who are here renovating my kitchen if they
have any strong blue yeah they do as it turns out yes using extremely strong skin
bonding two-part glue did in fact mean that everything stayed where it needed to
argh, it's stuck with my glasses
all right it worked tidy up time tidy up time basically involved sewing or pva gluing individual
scales to places that looked like they could use it after which i had to actually tidy up all of
the mess that i'd made and then it was time to get my glad rags on but not before texting
all of my friends to show them what i had made because if it had taken you four days in a shed
to make something you'd probably send pictures to everyone you knew as well may i present Amelia:
rogue warlock variant human, Evy from the mummy but with magic powers kind of concept is why she
wears a lot of black why she has a lot of ranks in knowledge history and why she has a lot of points
in investigation as well the reason she has levels in rogue and in warlock is basically because
i had not played d d for so long i had no idea what was going on so i just
told my friend James the character concept and went what do you think? as it turns out she is
a lot of fun to play and as it turns out she's really fun to cosplay because she just wears a lot
of black and now of course her beautiful amazing wonderful black scale armor vest i am so pleased
with how it turned out honestly every time i do one of these making projects i'm like never again
never again why is this so hard but then i look at the end product and go well maybe next time i
could just try something slightly less ambitious honestly I wonder at the end of every project
should there be a next time but we'll see i mean according to her character sheet she has leather
armor so she could definitely use more leather armor i definitely think she could use a bracer
because she uses a short bow maybe a sort of fingerless glove type arrangement surely that
misty stepping away from trouble just isn't going to cut it and i'll see you next time