The Armour Archive

Hey, guys- I'm hoping to make myself a pair of gamboised cuisses for SCA combat and I was wondering what you guys thought of a canvas dropcloth for the material. My Lady is concerned that they may be treated with something that might make them... undesirable.. for armour.

I saw some of that stuff in Costco the other day and was thinking about the same thing.

Can't imagine what. Does the fabric feel coated with anything? Dropcloths aren't expected either to stay clean or bounce paint off themselves, but to absorb it. Otherwise it might run off straight onto whatever it was you were protecting with a dropcloth.

If you can run it through a large-load washing machine such as is in a laundromat, you could certainly remove any less-than-stubborn coating or treatment. If the fabric wets in the normal fashion in the wash water, it's not going to be coated or treated with anything very drastic.

I used a micro fiber (pseudo suede ) for the outer layer. If I can find the pic I will post them.

I think washing the cloth as metioned above would take care of any coating problums as well as pre-shrink your material if it needs it.

Question: do you have a pattern for your gamboised cuisses or are you just eye-balling it? I'm thinking of getting some made in a bit.

My Lady will be eyeballing them... she's the seamstress in the household. She was just concerned about treatment since damn near everything causes cancer these days and wanted me to find out if/how they were treated.

I'll let you know as soon as mine are done and post pics- and I'm sure she'd be more than happy to make some more up once we have the pattern right.

The pair I made for Bkillian I had him wear old jeans drew chalk lines for where they should cover. Then i cut out that area adding a seam allowance and used that as a pattern.
Maddalena

Pictures . . . Yes lots of pictures.

I tried to use one of those cotton drop cloths as a ground cloth for camping once. The fabric seemed to be treated with some kind of starch. When I tried to use it the fabric it ripped estremely easily. Just my two cents.