The Armour Archive

first home made gambeson! now i just have to add the ties to close it and i have to make some sleeves.
Enjoy:)





p.s. i didn't realize how stoic and creepy i looked in the first pic.

quite nice what are the materials you used ? canvas linen cotton?

It has a canvas outer shell and 100% cotton filler with a linen liner. 4 layers of cotton on the shoulders and across the kidneys, 2 layers everywhere else.

Envy.

I'm trying to make one right now and not having nearly as much luck. I am a rotten tailor.

Congrats on your efforts.

thanks!

Well, Louis, one thing you can do, and which Varukh did not, is use shoulder seams -- a seam going along the line of each shoulder from joint to collar. Cut these not perpendicular, but slanted -- so that the fabric now lies upon the slope of your shoulder, and not diverging from it and trying to make a pagoda roof. The bits of your front half and back half that extend up over your shoulders to join would look rather like / \ before you sew them. The angle is probably rather exaggerated, but both parts would have it. If you slapped either part up on you in its place, the / part would follow the slope of your shoulder, right about at the centerline (preferably 3/8" or so past it, for seam allowance).

Works whether there are extra layers of padding in there or not.

When one is struggling with tailoring, there are two things you can do to improve matters about a thousand percent. One, get somebody to help pin and mark stuff. You hold bits on you, and another pair of hands and eyes deals with extras or deficits with tape and scissors. Two, when you've gotten the patterns to fit best you know how, cut out the shapes on cheap cloth, baste-stitch these together, and try on the cheap cloth experiments. Again with the helper, go around on everything and see where there is too much or too little. Move around in your cheapie model and see if anything rips apart, or else if there's really more there than you want. Trim and add on as required, a little more experimental fitting, and then you have the true, proper patterns and can get going on the rest of the project. I used my experimental bits for the lining of my CdB.

How to get a seam for a quilted garment to lie flat: in a word, you interdigitate the layers, back and forth.

Start at the outer shell; sew together and press out flat, either open like a butterfly or pressed over to one side. All done with that layer. Now you have a layer of padding on both sides bumping together at the seam line, don't you? Well, leave one side of the padding layer alone, and cut a strip away from the other side to make room for the one side. Lay that flat into the room you cut away. Now the next layer of padding up from that: this time, trim away the other side, so that there's room for the opposite layer to lie flat. And so on, as much as necessary, until you arrive at the lining. Now you get a bit fancy. First, overcast-stitch the two edges together. Don't even try to run a stitchline right up against all those quilted layers you just went back and forth with, because all that stuff won't fit under your sewing foot. So instead get the edges stuck together, break out your iron again, and press the lining fabric down flat, folding this to one side. Now topstitch the lining layer's overcast edge all down, right through all the quilting and the outer shell fabric. The result is at least two stitch lines holding the seam together; very strong. Put in three, and it's very very strong -- the shell seam, the topstitch that holds down the lining to everything else, and a third stitch line right between the two, also through everything. Use thread the color of the outer shell, NOT the lining unless both are the same color -- you'd get unsightly dots of the wrong color showing in your outer layer when the stitches pull tight. You can cover all this business of the lining with bias tape to match if you like -- what they call a taped seam. Nice and smooth, and not tricky to do, you just pin it in place and stitch down about any way you like -- say, topstitch through everything again, or a whipstitch only to the lining fabric. Varukh's borders are bias tape of this kind, topstitched through. A topstitch is just a line of stitching you can see, on the top of everything in there. Contrary, you see, to that seam you did on the outer shell, where the line of stitches is actually a bit inside the garment and it's the fabric that's on top where you can see.

Always use a gazillion pins, about three or four times as many pins as you'd think are needed. Then they really hold the pieces together just the way you wanted. Stitch Witchery too, if you like -- like hot glue for seams or appliqués, sometimes called "fusible interfacing," pressed in with a medium-temp iron. And you can run a stitch right through there too, for a mechanical as well as an adhesive fastening. (Yes, that'd be topstitching.)

Konstantin the Red wrote:Well, Louis, one thing you can do, and which Varukh did not, is use shoulder seams -- a seam going along the line of each shoulder from joint to collar. Cut these not perpendicular, but slanted -- so that the fabric now lies upon the slope of your shoulder, and not diverging from it and trying to make a pagoda roof. The bits of your front half and back half that extend up over your shoulders to join would look rather like / \ before you sew them. The angle is probably rather exaggerated, but both parts would have it. If you slapped either part up on you in its place, the / part would follow the slope of your shoulder, right about at the centerline (preferably 3/8" or so past it, for seam allowance).

did that on the shoulders. just after i did that i sewed a flat piece over the top of the seams to add a little extra canvas over the shoulder line for that much more protection.

thanks for all the tips though.

p.s. i finished most of the sleeves today. hopefully i will have them all done tomorrow and i will be able to post pics of the entire piece. Yay!!!

I could see there was a lot of material up there -- though that was about all I could tell. It looked like it was only cooperating so far and no farther with you.

A lot of people dealing with thick or stiff stuff there will make a sort of vaguely conical cowl of several pieces all around, tapering from narrower at the neck to wide at the hem, then attaching the rest of the body of the garment to the hem of this cowl. The trick even works in mail; you can make the top of a shirt that way -- or in its circular-expansions equivalent -- and make a yoke- or mantle-top shirt. Mail shirts of this type work at their best with short sleeves to half or 5/8 sleeves, because the sleeves are naturally closed-hang mail instead of open-hang, which cooperates with elbows well. It's in how the shoulder section linkrows present themselves to the sleeves. Barrel & Strap/Euro Modified Square shoulder sections point the linkrows out and down the arms. Mantletops go the other way, across and around the arms.

Konstantin the Red wrote:I could see there was a lot of material up there -- though that was about all I could tell. It looked like it was only cooperating so far and no farther with you.

well part of the reason the shoulders stand up in the pic is that i hadn't added the ties for the front of the gambeson so when it gapes open at the bottom the shoulders rise a little bit. I added the ties today and once i attach the sleeves and my shoulder cops it should fit like a charm.

Outstanding! You're learning skills and stuff you never had before!

great gambeson, but PLEASE DEAR GOD TAKE THOSE WRECHED THINGS out OF YOUR EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!


Cheers
Bryan

bryanrobbins wrote:great gambeson, but PLEASE DEAR GOD TAKE THOSE WRECHED THINGS out OF YOUR EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!


Cheers
Bryan

unfortunately the ear gauges are here to stay. sory. lol cant see it in the pic but i have a ring in the lip as well. its not for everybody i guess.

You'll never want to keep a helmet in place using them -- but they might make a good Bluetooth mounting...

Dude your stuff is coming a long way.

You have, in fact, shamed me that I haven't done squat in a while...

Konstantin, wow. Thanks for all of that. It'll take me a while to digest it all though - I don't speak "tailor". I might PM you a few other questions along the way so as to not hijack someones thread if that's ok. Thanks again.

Cisco wrote:Dude your stuff is coming a long way.

You have, in fact, shamed me that I haven't done squat in a while...

Thank you.

as promised...the final product. enjoy

I would recommend the addition of an extra strip to cover the gap at the front there, I don't know what you'll be wearing over this but movement will tend to open that up real easily with only a few ties holding it closed.

Otherwise it looks pretty good- well done!

JonT

well i will have a tunic and chainmaille over the top of this. i may just add a layer of canvas under the opening so that i will have coverage all the way across the chest area.

If you have a haubergeon on over the top of this (even with the possibility of a tunic between) I'd also highly recommend additional ties up the front. The friction of mail moving around your chest will cause the ties to want to open up time and again, and with such limited support as that provided by three, it's likely their life span before fraying or coming loose will be seriously shorter than if you had five or six ties.

It looks great, though. Wow. Excellent progress, Varuhk!

-Gerhard

thanks Gerhard. i may add 2 more in between the ones i already have.

Looks great I've been thinking abut trying to make a minimally padded gambison as most off the shelf ones are way too hot for central TX (and unfortunately due to repeated heat exhaustion in iraq I overheat easily)

Or even two ties between each and yet another up at the collar. Some of us take to lacing these things closed like they were boots. They have reported complete satisfaction with their gamby's performance then. File this under "stuff to think about."
And what Gerhard said.

@Chris -- linen all the way, then? Then maybe eyeletted shell fabric or simply wetting the linen a little before donning. I gather with a little breeze that feels quite chilly.

Yeah mine is spiral laced. Easy to install with some cheap eyelets from Wal Mart. You could even hide them by stitching over the top of them.

chris19d wrote:Looks great I've been thinking abut trying to make a minimally padded gambison as most off the shelf ones are way too hot

Yeah me too, that's why I'm trying to make one. I like the one I have but it's made for that heavy duty Ukranian rebated steel stuff, and it's extremely thick. I have winter coats I go skiing in that are less restrictive. It holds sweat too, so as the evening goes on it gets heavier and heavier.

I'm going to go for linen and bamboo batting. Thick around the shoulders, thin everywhere else. Except maybe the forearms a bit.

Isabella E wrote:Yeah mine is spiral laced. Easy to install with some cheap eyelets from Wal Mart. You could even hide them by stitching over the top of them.

Oh, covering them up with buttonhole stitch?

Yep. I'm going to do that with my surcoat. It's pretty easy to just stitch around it like that by hand.

How do you take the quilting and batting into effect when measuring and cutting the outer and inner shells?


I'm not a tailor by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd probably tackle something like this just for giggles.


G--

bryanrobbins wrote:great gambeson, but PLEASE DEAR GOD TAKE THOSE WRECHED THINGS out OF YOUR EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!


Cheers
Bryan

No, keep them! make them huge! I assume you take them out under your helmet (I do), but if you don't like taking your plugs out, try getting some Kaos brand soft eyelets, they're squishy and might stay in.

Great gambeson too!!!

I second the Rev's sentiments!

Galileo wrote:How do you take the quilting and batting into effect when measuring and cutting the outer and inner shells?

I'm not a tailor by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd probably tackle something like this just for giggles.

It's not hard -- simply cut everything, shell, padding, and lining, about an inch and a half bigger around the body. Vertical quilting doesn't affect top-to-bottom measurements at all, but may contract width some. Cut generously wide, expecting to snug it up in the fitting, and don't get your quilting-stitch lines too close to the edges of any piece, especially those edges parallel to the quilting stitches. You don't want them getting in the way of laying your seams flat. Trim away excess as you find it. Gambesons make a great volume of scraps anyway, no matter what you do, from the sheer amount of material involved. You get tempted to stuff a throw pillow or something.

RevBigEars wrote:

bryanrobbins wrote:great gambeson, but PLEASE DEAR GOD TAKE THOSE WRECHED THINGS out OF YOUR EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!


Cheers
Bryan

No, keep them! make them huge! I assume you take them out under your helmet (I do), but if you don't like taking your plugs out, try getting some Kaos brand soft eyelets, they're squishy and might stay in.

Great gambeson too!!!

i have been contemplating making them bigger, maybe step it up to an inch, and Kaos plugs are awesome but they tend to fall out when i put my helmet on and i don't realize it until they are long gone. most of the time i take my plugs out and throw them in my armor bag. don't really worry about the lip ring much though.