Pauldron Update

Ok - We left off with the lames cut, floating articulation holed and set but with plain leather. If you know Ray, that won't cut it - so, part three was taking everything back apart and beginning the tooling. He wants the armor to be two-color, red with a thick black edge.

If you like your hands, don't tool armor grade leather. Really. It's a BAD idea. But it turns out so pretty I can't stop yet.

Here is the basic tooling (And wow did it eat my hands. I seriously need to find a better way to hold utensils than I do)

We did all the tooling Saturday, let it dry Sunday and on Monday when I got home I did the borders black. I know I could have done the red interior as well, but since I have lots of work this week, I wanted hands that were skin colored for Tuesday and more work would not have given me that.

Neat note that I discovered on Monday night is that washing dry hands with Dawn dish soap actually removed most of the black dye that had gotten on my hands. That doesn't sound all that impressive until you understand that Gojo won't even get the stuff off. I was (and am) thrilled with this new trick. Of course I still had one fingertip that is black, but it was my right pointer finger, the one that gets the most dye and the soonest so it soaks in more. Sigh.

Here is Monday's labor - black edging and attempting to shape the right-side lower lames into a better approximation of correct.



One of the issues we are having is we used scrap leather here for this piece. Which is awesome, I like using as much as possible and not throwing things away. Which also sucks because each piece is from a different hide, so they take dye differently, they tool differently, they warp differently. It's hard enough working out new idea's - but doing them with materials that are a challenge in themselves is hard. But still fun.


Tuesday night I did tooling the main right shoulder with Ray's traditional wolf and finishing the black edge dye on the other pieces. Then I will complete the edge dye on Thursday and Ray and I will finish plotting the harness and will do the red dye on Friday after I get paid and buy a new color. He is hoping to have it done enough to wear when we are up in Denver this weekend - I wonder if he's planning on wearing it to the club :) Gotta love the boyo :)

Here is tonight's work with the red


More updates to come :)