The Armour Archive

Ok, I've drawn up a new one with paint. It would start with green leather, then the metal plates and blue leather placed on top. I guess the metal parts would have to be divided like this so it remained flexible.

Most ingenious! Use thin stainless so you don't have to be polishing it all the time. And take pictures, please!

Most ingenious! Use thin stainless so you don't have to be polishing it all the time. And take pictures, please!

Most excellent! Good idea.

Thor-

I think you might find it easier to start with a belt blank and incise the lines for the green bands and dye everything in the center blue.

Excellent suggestion! I'm guessing 22 gauge stainless plates? I wonder what the best method of attaching them would be. Rivets I guess, though I think any rivet would be too big.

I'm also thinking the best way to get this done is to commission someone to make the leather portion and someone else for the plates, then I'll put it all together. Seems making the plates would be a pretty tedious and boring job though.... I'll have to ask around in the classifieds.

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned:

Is your design in any way informed by medieval belt adornments? The original design is not, as far as I can see.

The metal plates addition might be, but shaping the plates to look like the vair is a (pardon) very modern way of doing it.

Period style as I understand it would be to have a single color belt with plaques bearing your badge or arms.

I don't think anyone knows waht all of the "knightly" belts represented are in images, brasses and effigies. We make suppositions that the ornate belts are either tooled leather, or cast/repousse' plaques riveted to the belts, but lack of evidence isn't much evidence. We do know that some belts were definately cast and mounted to leather backings, and others are articulated metal plaques. We know because there are either extant pieces or the effigies were just that detailed that we can tell. But those examples are the rare few.
The majority of belts depicted in other arts, it's anyone's guess how they were done. I agree though, that riveting large flat pieces of metal to a belt would look pretty chincy unless it was decorated well and I don't think I'd be very impressed by it. I think a nice deep tooling of the vair into a veg tanned belt would look much better and have more credible examples of similar techniques.
Vair is supposed to represent animal fur, and I think a smaller more intricate tooling would be much more impressive and knightly.
Just my 2 cents.
-Cian

I understand there's no historical example of this, because vair was a fur lining and the heraldic design I'm using is the modern varient. The metal may be gaudy, but it's the only solution to the white belt issue. It'd be much easier to heavily tool the belt but I'd be too tempted to use white leather and I don't want to seem disrespectful.

If you are using white leather (which can be hard to find) and dying/painting the rest blue/green, it really isn't different than using tanned leather and dying/painting it blue, white and green. It is probably easier to use the tanned.