Making a Leather Gorget

First things first, let's talk materials. Whenever I'm making gorgets, or armor in general, I prefer using a 10-ounce / 4mm vegetable-tanned leather. This is for costume armor specifically, if I was doing something for sport fighting it would be 12 to 14 ounce / 4.78 to 5.57mm.

Vegetable-tanned leather is great for its versatility. Whether you're dyeing it, carving intricate designs, or shaping it, this leather is certainly one of my go-to's.

The weight is important and will help give your Gorget a solid structure. In a pinch you can probably get away with something a little thinner but I wouldn't deviate too low.

If you weren't worried about carving or dying your gorget, you could get some stiffer chrome-tan or even latigo and make your gorget from that withoutt needing to dye or carve it.

Need Tools? I've got you covered with my curated list of tools. These include the Basic Tools everyone needs, Carving Tools for adding Art, as well as other tools and supplies necessary to complete this gorget.Better yet any purchases made through my links help me directly. 

The paint job on this Gorget was what I'd consider a very successful experiment. I've recently returned to the hobby of painting Miniatures and decided to use this new Painting Technique that people have coined the "Slap Chop" Technique.

It has to do with using a combination of dry brushing and contrast paints. I like how it turned out, though it's certainly better on mini's.

Obviously this gorget pattern comes with all the appropriate holes for stitching and rivetting this project together, but since I own a sewing machine... I'm going to use a sewing machine. This isn't always the case, and I often bounce back and forth on whether or not I should hand stitch in my videos, but with so much to do, saving time is a good idea.

I use solid brass peening rivets a lot, and this gorget is no different. I use them a ton in my work because I just love how real they are. They're a bit more work and are obviously totally unnecessary but hey... that's just what I like to do.

You can find solid peening rivets over at rivetsonline.com who I am not affiliated with in any way.

You can certainly put your finish on your Gorget before you assemble it. I've used some neutral resolene and a paint spray gun to put mine on, you're probably going to be using a sponge. Applying finish can be a giant pain in the ass, so make sure you dig around for some best practices if doing it by hand instead of cheating like I am with my spray gun.

I decided to use a chicago screw to fasten one side of the gorget together. In hindsight I should have just used another peening rivet, or done double buckles. But hey, live and learn, what will you do?