Ben wrote:By the way the monstrosity is the first helm I tried to make, that..weird..nasaly..bascinetty..thing.
Guess I didn't see it; what I did see was pale-gray painted spangenhelm parts with the () shaped nasal. A more than somewhat unusual shape, and what should I say of the color?
Seriously, though: for most people, My First Bascinet is welded together out of three pieces: left and right skull and a wrap-around nape plate for the rest of the hat. So you gotta be a welder. Or know one. You do the forming and he sticks it together. (Then follows the SCA-type bargrill visor, either one piece or three, depending on how close you're trying to copy temple-hinge visors.) The identical procedure with some different metal shaping here and there and minus the visor will make you a barbute too. Terribly Italian, and not frightfully common in SCA-land. Some barbutes had nasals, but never, it seems, as long and proboscidean as the original Corinthian helmets they were echoing.
I'll try to get some taped ends for the coif, and I'll try another one with the skunk stripe you mentioned, might fit my weirdly shaped head better.
Or if you like, just rip the central seam of the hood you have, and put a strip in down the middle. It'll do you fine; your head does not seem noticeably pointy...
Nor, frankly, weird in any way. You're a rather good-looking fellow.
. . . to my my understanding on the aketon, I need to connect the front and back, and have a section that connects the shoulders to this ring around the neck?
I'm sorry, you just kinda lost me on that point.
Sew the front to the back, at the side seams. At the shoulders, the front and back join with a seam, which is, whattayaknow, called the shoulder seam. You can see a nice clear example of it on any T shirt you own. That's about the only way to close that sort of shirt up. A "short shoulder seam" = really skinny shoulder strap. Like two inches across. There's nothing in the way of a ring of fabric involved; seam tape/bias tape is just colored tapelike stuff that you can use to finish edges or cover raw seams smoothly, and that is what I had in mind. Comes in little packages in the "notions" rack.
And if I may ask, do you have any ideas on how I should go about modifying the [mail] hauberk's arms to end in mitts?
First, have your SCA-protective mitts. Without knowing exactly what you're going to try using, I can say little that would be useful to you. Pics would be good again. If, and I'm going away from what you're trying to get here, you go for hourglass demigauntlets for use with a baskethilt sword and basket handled shield, frankly it wouldn't be worthwhile trying to cover the bell cuffs of such gaunts with anything. With gaunts of that kind, I'd say you're better protected leaving the sleeves at 3/4 and putting hard vambraces on your arms and bell-cuff hourglass gaunts on over these -- a mid-fourteenth century sort of arm armor and a good bit later than what you're trying for. Though it would keep your arm from injury.
Mail shirts typically have the mail lying in closed hang on the torso, but open hang on the sleeves, with the mail linkrows simply extending out from the shoulder section and down the arm. Closed hang molds the mail to the body, fitting it well, and also allowing the wearer to get out of his shirt easily. This is not so crucial with the arms, so open hang happens there. This actually helps with a couple of other details: it's easy to make the elbows take on the shape like the heel of a sock that is needed so your elbows can bend freely without getting squeezed, and it allows mail-backed mitts to freely let your fingers flex open and closed, because the resilient direction of the mail is running parallel to the fingers.
However, it is possible to make shirts with the sleeves in closed hang. Some types of shirt shoulders naturally present linkrows so that closed hang is the easiest way to make the sleeves. This one is good with short sleeves, not as convenient trying to construct long sleeves, and it doesn't play well at all for mail mufflers at the hands.
Maybe you're trying for lacrosse or hockey gloves; you haven't said. If you have the usual kind of open-hang mailshirt sleeve -- a pic of this would have saved some inquiry -- you just extend the linkrows of the sleeve down until the sleeve ends at the wrist, and the mail continues over the back of the hand and the fingers, with an extension angling out over the back of the thumb. It is handy to have an intermediary piece of leather like half a mitten or fingered like the silhouette of a hand -- half a glove -- to which the mail is stitched down all around the edge of the back of the hand extension, and then the protective glove is semipermanently stitched to this leather piece at the finger ends and along the sides of the hand (index finger down to where the thumb joins the hand and the edge of the hand on the opposite side).
Be advised you may find this heavy and somewhat bulky. Period harness and SCA safety requirements don't mesh well for 1200AD. Excess weight at the end of your limb will make that limb slow, which will lose you matches.
Any remark on the Earle arms of
Gules, three escallops and a bordure engrailed argent? It would be very good practice -- particularly in good, ethical
noblesse -- NOT to precisely replicate a mundanely-existing coat of arms, particularly as your persona is really supposed to be at least in some sense a person separate from your modern earthly identity that you got at your birth. Playing around with the number of charges or some of their type or alteration of the line of flection of the bordure -- all these may establish for you a nice device. There are a lot of things that may be done in devising your device, and it's often a real community effort, involving counseling (freely gotten right here among other good places, as some few of us are present or former heralds), your local Pursuivant of Arms who is to help with design and research and to forward your registration of Device and Persona Name up through Kingdom and thence to Laurel, and too what the findings of the Kingdom heralds researching for conflict, correcting blazon to a good SCA style (slightly different from the blazon above, for instance), and basically making sure your device can get away clean, as it were: yours alone, with no encumbrance of any sort.
When I have no idea what somebody wants, I start with the Monty Python & The Holy Grail series of questions:
What is thy Name? [And he telleth me his persona's name.]
What is thy Quest? [He seeketh not the Holy Grail, oh no; not quite that ambitious just yet. But verily, he seeketh a Device (of Arms, not clockwork) that passeth even Laurel King of Arms.]
What is thy Favourite Colour? [And he telleth me a color or two. Thuth, we thtart; and thith lithp ith killing me.]
New Mexico is quite to the west of you! Also quite south, come to that. Anyway, land navigation and compass reading, rubbing two sticks together, and all that. If nothing else, the terrain around Liberal, KS might be conducive to learning celestial navigation! Though I suppose you're getting more towards the, er, rolling terrain end of the state.