the armorer is in

adventures of a kink & costume leatherworker. Website - Facebook - dA - Instagram

[armory-rasa]

Pinned post: Welcome!

Hello! I'm Gabriel, the guy behind cosplay leatherworking studio Armory Rasa.

My specialty is tooled veg-tan with a fantasy flair, which includes armor, masks, bags, quivers, horse armor, knife sheaths, and random one-offs like the cat saddle. Some fandoms I’ve done a lot of replica work in are Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, The Hobbit/LotR, The Witcher, and the MCU and DCU movies.

If you're here to look at pretty things, you can browse my finished works tag to see some of the projects I've made in the past, or check out the Armory Rasa shop to see what's currently available.

I enjoy improving my skills and learning more about the craft, and sharing what I've learned with others. It can be difficult to find information on non-traditional leatherworking, so I try to be a resource. Leatherworking has an intimidating reputation, but it's my goal to demystify it and make it more accessible to more people.

If you’re looking to get into leatherworking yourself, the best place to start is probably the Learning Leatherworking section on my website, where I've collected and organized the best tutorials I've written, or in the posts tagged #instructional or #long-form tutorial on my tumblr. I like to document projects as I'm working on them, and you can ride along with the #liveblogging projects tag to see them go from nothing to done.

I’ve discussed some of the business considerations involved in making your living as an independent artisan, along with the shady stuff that Etsy has been pulling in recent years. 

And also there are many pictures of my cat. 😺

As a final note -- I don't talk politics on this blog, but with leatherworking as a field that’s heavily populated by older, right-wing-leaning men, and with the increasingly vocal contingent of white supremacists in reenactment circles (particularly viking circles) who would co-opt and misrepresent history for their own ends, I would like to clearly state that I am not onboard with any of that shit. Those people don’t own the hobby, and they don’t get to speak for everyone else in it. This blog is a pro-queer, anti-sexist, anti-racist space, the end.

So enjoy your stay, respect and encourage and uplift each other, and don’t hesitate to hit me up with your questions, I love talking leather. 😀

[armory-rasa]

I am so bad at remembering to post about what I'm doing. Anyway, here's an Ezio shoulder in progress. 😀

(Screenshot below the cut for comparison)

[vinceaddams]

Leatherwork patterns/designs from Le Cuir: Compositions Decoratives by Jehan Raymond, 1908.

[lady-arryn]

THE LORD OF THE RINGS set design appreciation: ― The Golden Hall

[themboots]

[menofcolorinfantasyart]

Knight Duties by La Draws

[armory-rasa]

New workshop space! 🎉

So much natural light! 🤩

(lol and the worst view in the house, currently staring straight at the back of that decrepit fence, but I plan to cover it in ivy and jasmine. 👌👌)

Monster is "helping"! 😺

POV: she wants your chair.

Dappled afternoon sunlight filtering through the redwoods. 💚

Armory Rasa is back in business, baybee. 😎

[armory-rasa]

So Armory Rasa recently moved again (my second move in less than a year >_<), but this should be the last one for a long time, and as of today the workshop is up and running again!

My new space is GORGEOUS 🤩 and there will be more pictures incoming soon, but for now, enjoy Miss Monster on the new rug. 🥰

[armory-rasa]

Needed a new coaster, wanted to practice doing a verdigris effect. Image from Jonas Lau Markussen's A Compendium of Viking Art. 10 oz veg-tan leather.

With 6 lb cat for scale:

[once-a-polecat]

This is badass: Medieval Nubian Fashion Brought to Life. Click through to the link because there’s more replica clothing and it is all stunning!

[eyes-alight]

[sca-nerd]

This is AMAZING.

[armory-rasa]

Four Dragon Age games, and Bioware still doesn't know which direction buckles are supposed to point. 🤦‍♂️

Though I suppose they're in good company, Ubisoft doesn't know either:

[armory-rasa]

[armory-rasa]

Embroidered tunic I made for my lawyer.

[armory-rasa]

WIP pic of my current project -- the walls at our new (much larger) place are extremely bare, so I took one of my favorite pieces by Vitor Gonzales and adapted it for carving in leather. 18" diameter, out of 10-oz veg-tan. The tooling took about nine hours all told; haven't decided yet how I'm going to dye it to best bring out the design.

Not for sale -- this was done entirely for my own enjoyment, though I may find some royalty-free designs to make similar pieces available in my shop.

[fmstonecarving]

New to Tumblr, going to start dumping some of the stone carving that I've done here.

This big slate carving is based on a design from the Book of Kells, all hand carved with hammer and chisels.

[marzipanandminutiae]

So I've seen conflicting stories about the colour black in history.

Some say it's very expensive and hard to maintain, so that's why rich merchants wore black. Evidence in portraits.

Some say that for dyes it's on the cheaper side actually.

Some say the expensive black doesn't come from dye but rather the colour of the animal, so black fabric comes from black fibre which comes from black sheep. How exactly would black sheep be more expensive than regular white sheep?

Which one is right? I know this is probably influenced by which century it's set in, like maybe some eras have an easier time getting black dye

I found a well-sourced blog post about this, luckily, because I'm a 19th-century focused researcher and I've heard conflicting things about black in earlier periods. It seems to be that high-quality black-dyed fabric was difficult to obtain in the west from the Middle Ages potentially through the 18th century because it required massive amounts of dye to get the color very deep ("true black"). Lesser black shades were quite common, though, so black, period, doesn't seem to be more expensive than any other color. Possibly the intensively dyed, deep blacks might have been? But not black in general.

source

Rich merchants did wear black- but so did other people. They just usually didn't have portraits.

The black sheep thing I've never heard before. And anyway, that could only apply to wool- not cotton, linen, silk, leather, etc.

[motsimages]

Oh I have info about the black sheep thing!

Have you heard of merino wool? It's a very reputed type of wool, the one that made Spain's wool industry famous up until the Industrial Revolution.

Merino sheep are originally black. Like these ones my parents have (recently sheared in those pictures):

They look brown-ish because the sun and the dust make it so that the outer part gets lighter coloured, the inner part or the wool in babies (lambs?) is actually of a quite dark and uniform black that turns more brown as they get older (again, the sun). If you notice, the skin in the head and legs is very dark black.

Those white sheep are also merino sheep but: that is the mutation.

Other than being very well adapted to the weather and space in Spain, they produce wool of good quality (about 2 kilos of wool per sheep), so the white sheep were chosen over the centuries because well, you can dye white wool easily. In recent years, some shepherds are trying to get back the original black merino sheep and they often work with artisans like these (where you can see what black wool looks like): https://dehesalana.com/

Now, I agree that the wool itself is more dark brown than black, but I guess with certain shearing (either shearing sooner than needed, or separating fibers?) or with certain dyes or chemicals, it can easily be dark black or dark colours.

When reading about local history (Extremadura, Spain) in the end of the 18th Century, many villages had "industry" (not a real factory per se, but many people making a living of this) of "paños pardos", that is "dark wool fabric" (paño is a type of work for the wool, where you spin it and weave it, and then felt it; pardo means dark brown). This is because, these sheep were frequent and the easiest way to dress.

Also, in Catholic countries, mourning for years was a very frequent thing (an aunt of my father spent over 10 years of her youth wearing mourning clothes, that is black, because different family members died), so obtaining black colours to dye all of your belongings was probably frequent and not that expensive.

But, in short, if the wool you have comes from black sheep, half of your clothing will be dark, if not black.

And to end, a nod to the Spanish speakers in the room. The idiom "no confundir churras con merinas" is in reference to two different type of sheep that are very common in Spain but not the same, it's used when something looks a certain way but don't be fool, it's actually a different thing.

[marzipanandminutiae]

So cool! That actually points to black/dark wool being MORE common in some times and places, then

[headspace-hotel]

Llamas, alpacas, and other animals used for fiber also produce black wool/hair

Most dyes i know of for black shade into brown. So I think it would be common to have black, it would just be hard to get a true, deep black rather than a murky dark shade

[armory-rasa]

I can't speak on textiles broadly, but I know you can over-dye the wool from black sheep with blue dye (which, from woad, was a super common dye stuff in Europe all the way back to the Neolithic period) to get a richer black fabric. In viking-era Scandinavia this color was called "blar" -- a term that has caused academic fistfights among subsequent historians over whether it means blue or black -- and while it seems to have been a striking color for clothing (based on saga evidence), it doesn't seem to have been all that rare.

Leather is even easier to dye black (despite the common misconception that black leather in a historical/fantasy setting would be impossible, or impossibly expensive). All you have to do is soak iron shavings in vinegar to get vinegaroon, which is not quite as intense as modern black dyes, but will look black once it's been waxed/oiled.

In any case, there certainly are processes that can achieve a true black in leather and textiles even using pre-modern materials and technology, but whether people would have had local access to those materials (like the black merino sheep), or know how to do those processes (some of which are quite involved and counter-intuitive), is going to vary a lot by time/place.

[armory-rasa]

Raven bracers, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, hand-tooled in 10 oz veg-tan leather.

(Available from Armory Rasa)