Finishing the Armour

All the armour pieces were finished, and ready to put together...

I had struggled with trying to figure out the best way to put the armour together, and took inspiration from my DreamHigh Studio Otto, whose armour made up of lots of separate pieces all attached to each other with thin elastic....

I wasn't going to use elastic, but it was a good idea to attach the armour pieces to each other. I decided to attach the front and back plates to each other permanently, which meant I'd have to take Matias' head off in order to put the armour on, or take it off. But that was easy enough.  

​I measured where one armour plate would go over another, and holes were drilled in the brown 'channel's along the edges of each piece.  Then I used strong brown thread to stitch everything together....

When I turned it over to take a photo of the underside, I realized that I'd sewn the shoulder armour on the wrong sides of the neck pieces. So I had to cut the threads and switch the two sides.  I also left long threads when I made the knots, as the threads from the first few knots were cut too short and undid themselves.  So, I left longer threads, and then glued them down.

*Notice the sets of two drill holes on both end plates of armour.  Those are for sewing leather straps, that will go under Matias' arms and hold the armour securely in place.

Finishing

After all the armour was done, and Matias was wearing it, the final job still left to do was to reattach the leather straps to the bracers.  I had removed them before spraying the bracers, so they wouldn't get any spray paint on them.  But they did have to go back on.

The shorter of the leather straps originally held a buckle, and the longer strap would be threaded through it.  But I found that it was a bit of a challenge to thread the leather through the buckles, and they weren't very secure, because there was nothing holding them in place and the two parts would just slide apart.  So I decided to rework the straps so they'd have tiny black snaps instead.

I moved the buckles to the longer straps, and stitched the snap directly underneath.  Then I stitched the other part of the snap onto the shorter strap where the buckle originally was.

When I put the bracers on Matias' arm, they looked pretty much like they originally had (except for some stitches showing) but they were infinitely easier to do up.

The last thing the armour still needed was the buckles at the neck.  The front and back chest pieces were permanently attached to each other, but I still wanted to give the suggestion that they were separate and buckled together.

First Photos

It was freezing cold the day I finally finished the straps on the armour, but I wanted to take some photos, so out we went....