hivemind

I agree. Hell, I would have been satisfied with a nice Celtic concho where that round stamp is on the bottom of the throat, but the customer requested "no bling".

Here's a second one:

I gotta be honest, it looks more like what I'd call a jerkin than a corset.

I'm pretty sure he just recycled the blade (with a ton of grinding and filing). The handle, fittings, etc. are all his work, I'd imagine.

I'd like to buy some stamps from them, but the inconvenience of having to make a phone call means it's always going to be a future-tense activity for me...

As Kathy said, Dap Weld Wood contact cement from a Lowe's or Home Depot is good stuff. I use it for all kinds of things, including leatherwork. If it's not something that needs to be flexible, I also use plain old super glue sometimes.

Azmal, I do a lot of the same types of stuff you do. I own a nice Osborne head knife, but I've never used it. All my cutting is done with either a utility knife, a strap cutter, or (90%) shears.

Those pegboard display cases that close up are slick. If they were mine, I think I'd just add four eyebolts on each half so that I could stretch two bungee cords over the belts in either half and hold them in place during transport. For credit cards, another option is a laptop, wireless internet card and PayPal. PayPal takes a percentage, and there's a couple more hoops to jump through, but there's no setup fee or monthly charge. The wireless internet card is going to hit you for probably $40-$60 a month, depending on your usage, but up where I live in Central NY, the coverage is fine and, while it's not cable or DSL, it's always several times faster than dial-up. If you don't have a laptop, you can usually snag one on eBay for a couple hundred used. It really doesn't need to do anything but internet and email. An old Pentium 3 or Pentium M laptop with 256 or 512 MB RAM would be fine for this type of use. Obviously this is more accessible if you already have a laptop, but if the monthly fees on a merchant account or the lease on a credit card machine are making you balk, it's a workable option. Plus, when business is slow you can watch porn read the forums here!

For a little more durability and water resistance, you could hit the bottom of them with this stuff: http://www.sodhoppers.com/html/goop.html Off topic: the guy at that link makes really nice moccasins...

Their website leaves a little bit to be desired... How do you guys normally lay your hands on them if you don't have a local vendor? Is there a place to buy them online? Do I have to call them and order? I've seen some of you reference some package deals offered, but I can't find them online. Help?

Care to show some pics for the rest of us?

If there's no detail work on the good side, I sometimes just whack the leather where the snap is going to go with my small ball peen hammer to flatten it out a tad, then re-punch the hole (whacking it will close it up). Of course, I mainly build armor, and scuffs and imperfections are all part of the process there...

I see what you did there...

That's pretty accurate from what I have seen. If you're a squaker or a problem tenant, they'll make things uncomfortable for you, enforce their regulations to the letter, etc. If you're quiet, make an effort to play by their rules and don't rock the boat, no one will call you on things like a few discreetly placed halogen spotlights up in the rafters.

What are... are those... chaps? Really?

Seems like the simplest thing would be to pick up a brass or bronze muscled cuirass and mold it directly to that.

Yep, I can definitely see the mini painter influence in your work. I also have that background, and it's pretty easy to see carved leather as just another medium for the base>wash>drybrush>shade methodology...

Well, I'm in Central NY, over near Utica. We have a nice little leather distributor here, D&L Leather, owned by a fine fellow named Rocco Carza. There's also a Tandy store in Syracuse where people leave business cards, etc. Having said that, I only know a couple guys who do leatherwork near me, and we all do the same types of stuff - armor, belts, etc. for ren faires/SCA/LARP games - at about the same level of proficiency.

Art, many of these shops at ren faires work on a sort of "apprenticeship" system. This means that there's a guy who owns the shop, and he takes in "apprentices", then works them like dogs for little pay. The bonus for the apprentices is that they get to learn how to make the nuts-and0bolts stuff, and that they can usually get into the faire for free. There's a whole lifestyle that goes along with being involved with big production faires in the US. Many of the vendors and performers are free-spirited, off-the-grid type people who travel around the country from faire to faire. Lots of the vendors and performers from the faire I took the pictures at (Sterling Renaissance Festival, near Oswego, New York) will pack up their stuff after seven weeks in Sterling, head back to where ever home is for a week or so, then they'll head to Pennsylvania for Penn Ren, and spend another eight or so weeks there. Then they move on to another faire. But anyway, suffice it to say that most of the vendors at the faire have a whole troupe of "apprentices" slaving away for them simply for the privilege of being inducted into the faire lifestyle. They're the 21st century version of carnies or a traveling circus. As for the presentation bit, the shops at Sterling are hampered by having no lighting. They're not allowed to use electric lights at all, nor visible cash registers. They hide their credit card machines below the counters and write out hand receipts for most everything. The smaller shops, like the guys selling the butterfly barrettes and the nicely stamped belts and pouches, actually are better off than most in their small three-walled booth. The larger a shop gets, the more enclosed it gets, by necessity, and the darker it gets.

So I took a few pics for you. I missed the boot sellers, and also forgot about the mask guy. But I got three other places for you to check out.

I've been to quite a few faires, and have inquired at several about becoming a vendor. This is a link to my "local" faire: http://sterlingfestival.com/ Here's a link to their vendor requirements: http://sterlingfestival.com/ArtisanInfo/ta...Default.aspx#A2 It looks pretty lucrative to me, provided you can come up with enough stock to cover all seven weekends. This place has at least a half-dozen leather vendors of various flavors: One sells MASSIVELY overpriced stuff (think $2000 sleeveless coats and $1200 sleeveless jerkins) mostly made of garment leather on a machine. Another sells handmade waterformed and airbrushed masks, which range from a simple Lone Ranger mask to incredibly ornate headpieces that range from $25 to many hundreds of dollars. Another is two guys who do really nice tooling/stamping on belts and small waterformed pouches. I like them, and they have reasonable prices. A handtooled belt with a solid brass buckle will run you between $50 and $90 if I recall correctly. I bought a very nice pouch, basketweave stamp with cobbled edges, for $42 a few weeks ago. There's a place that sells boots ranging from $500 to $2000. And a place that seems to exist only to see how skimpy of leather halter tops they can get women to try on. I'm going back there on Sunday with the wife and some friends, I'll see if I can remember to snap you a bunch of photos.

I think I'd start by digging up all the known artwork of Drizzt from canon Forgotten Realms stuff (not fan art, but art from Bob Salvatore's books and from D&D FR stuff) and see what you can see. Here's a good start: http://images.google.com/images?q=drizzt

Odd, I thought I had replied to this. Did we have a database rollback? Anyways, yes, the sword is a foam and latex sword. The sheath is all leather.

Just finished this today. The sword is a custom sword I got from Ateliers Nemesis. I plan to hang the whole deal from a baldric (which I haven't made yet). It's made from a vegetable tanned belly, waterformed around the blade of the sword, and lined with blue felt. I Elmer's glued in the felt after it was cut to size. The throat is made of a separate piece of leather, with a celtic concho, lots of stamping and dyed blue. I hand-sewed the throat on after super gluing it in place (man, super glue is the best thing...). The back is all hand stitching as well, then hand skived with an X-acto knife and slicked hard with a wheel and spit. No rivets anywhere, I'm so proud of myself. This was supposed to be the proof-of-concept piece, so future ones will be a little more ornate. I'll probably line them with velvet rather than felt also. And I have to be careful, I was using metal binder clips to hold the wet leather around the blade to form it, and they marked the leather on the back pretty good. Fortunately, the marks are in the crease down the backside, and it's dyed black anyways, but I'll have to pad the clips with some scrap leather next time.