Chemical Bluing Rapier Gear

My gear is notorious for getting rusty (let's face it, I sweat), and because I happen to live in the ample humidity of the southeastern US, it’s never going to not rust.  I had to learn how to take care of my rapier gear or find ways to mitigate the affects as best I could.  When I purchased a nice steel gorget years ago, the maker performed a chemical bluing process on it which looks gorgeous, and it turns out helps with the rust.  When it did start to rust a few years later, I had no idea how to take care of it and re-do the beautiful work he did.  Luckily, folks who came to the local practice (Rosalind & Gaston) did know the process.  They taught me this method that I will share with you today.

Wikipedia has a lovely article on steel bluing.  I use a process they term cold bluing, because it requires no heat, but is also called chemical bluing.  Read that if you're interested in how this works.  I am not a chemist.  It should be noted that this process only works on steel, so those of you with aluminum are on your own.

Materials

Materials you will need for this process:

• Abrasives (i.e. sandpaper, sanding sponges, etc.)
• Clean rags
• Painters or masking tape
• Protective gloves - the rubber/nitrile kind, not the woodwork shop kind
• Degreaser
• Chemical bluing agent (sometimes called gun blue)
• Cotton balls
• Black shoe polish
• Protective sealant (I favor gun oil, and it comes in wipes)

Some of the materials needed

Rust Removal

I’m going to assume you have a rusty piece of gear to start with.  Use your favorite abrasives to remove as much rust as you can.  This is the most time consuming part.  My gorget has been bad enough that I needed to start all the way with a wire wheel a couple of times before progressing to sandpaper.  Move through progressively finer abrasives until you get to the finish you want (a dream) or you’ve reached your point of patience (depends on the amount of time I have on my hands);  220 grit is a good finish, 320 is better.  Some people use a lubricant while you’re doing this; it will be your bane later if you do, so leave it out this time.  Once you’ve got as much rust off as you can, wipe down your object with a clean rag to get off all the dust you’ve created.

Mask

If there are any parts of your object you don’t want blued, now is the time to cover it with something.  My gorget has a lovely stripe around the outside edge, so I usually try to very carefully cover it in painters tape so I don’t have to worry about the chemical bluing accidentally hitting it, and having to clean it up later.  This last time I cheated and didn’t do it, so to each their own.

Degrease

Now it’s time for the gloves.  You are about to start using chemicals, some of which are caustic to humans, so these are important.  I have a pair of longer kitchen-type rubber gloves that come out only for this process (but they’re black, so it’s cool).  Nitrile/latex gloves might also work fine.  Spray your object with degreaser, and wipe down with another clean rag.  You’re looking to get all the oil from your hands off of the object so the bluing will work well, as well as any remaining dirt or grime.  Wait for the object to dry - it shouldn’t take too long, especially if you place it in the sun.  Leave your gloves on (dry them off if you got degreaser on them).

Blue

Now on to the fun part.  You might want to lay down some newspaper or cardboard to protect whatever ground you’re over.  Grab a cotton ball, get some bluing agent on it, and go to town on your object.  Be liberal, but try to get consistent coverage, and don’t rush.  The results will be almost immediate turning the metal a lovely bluish black, but it will probably look splotchy.  You will likely need to go through many cotton balls as they’re not much use after the first go round.  After a short while, a sort of yellowish scum will form on the object where you’ve put the chemical; this is a normal byproduct of the chemical reaction, and we’ll deal with it later.  Any spots that look particularly splotchy should get a second coat (and you might want to just do a second coat all over anyway).

Finish

Once you are done bluing, find yourself yet another clean rag and start buffing the yellow scum off - it should rub off with a little elbow grease.  You will have an object that is darker, probably a bit splotchy, and kinda dull looking.  Apply black shoe polish liberally, and buff it to a shine (you’ve shined a shoe before, right?).  The shoe polish helps even out the bluing and applies a nice wax coating to that section.  Remove any masking you have done, and your object will be complete.  For the masked portions, apply your favorite protective substance be it a wax or oil - my penchant is for gun oil, as it’s designed to seal out water and comes in handy wipes :).

Gorget & 2 guards that have been chemical blued

All the Fingerloops

As evidenced somewhat by the lack of posting about it on this blog, I've become somewhat disenfranchised with the leather doublet project.  I still love the idea, but I look at what I have to do next, and I just can't bring myself to pick it up.  Sometimes I just need an easy win to get over the hump, so I found a distraction that I hoped would do just that.

I have been contemplating for a while on ways to make period appropriate trims or small weavings, and had generally been curious as to whether tablet weaving was period for a 16th century persona.  When cursory research down that route proved inconclusive, I started to look at fingerloop braiding.  My wife already had the wonderful book Tak V Bowes Departed, but this talks about a 15th century manual.  I did some braids anyway to learn the techniques, and started digging further.

As I dug, I found references to later manuals: https://fingerloop.org/ has two 17th century manuals, but with limited pictures & samples.  And then I started looking at bibliographies.  Eventually I found that The Met had put almost the entire Phelita Millward manuscript, with blow ups of the samples, on Pinterest, and I was hooked.  That spider motif kept calling my name, and I just had to figure it out.  Unfortunately, there's no text around the motifs, just these charts which are nigh undecipherable without the right resources.

Some of the best early resources for loop braiding come from the author Noemi Speiser, but the one referenced over and over again, Old English Pattern Books for Loop Braiding, is out of print and was a self-published book.  I got lucky and found it in a local university textile library (NC State), and thanks to a friend that works there, I had it in my hands.  In addition to that, the follow-on set of books by Noemi Speiser and Joy Boutrup, specifically European Loop Braiding: Part II: Instructions for Letter Braids, was instrumental in deciphering these motifs and charts.  I finally had all the resources in hand to make that spider, and oh was I excited.

Luckily, I'm married to a fellow re-enactor and textile enthusiast, so we practiced the technique for a 7-loop Spanish braid using both the Boutrop and the lovely blog post from Ingrid Crickmore which is the basis of the 14-loop charted motif braids.  Working out most of the hiccups there, we attempted the spider the next night and all I can say is SUCCESS:

 

For those that care, the materials used for all of my samples so far is Aunt Lydia's Classic 10 Crochet Thread.  It's easy to find, comes in a wide variety of colors, and is big enough for me to see what's going on while I'm learning. I'm hoping to get a complete sample book of all the braids in Tak V soon.

Amsterdam Vacation - History pieces

I had the pleasure of taking a vacation with my lovely wife and family this summer that included Amsterdam and Norway.  While our selections in Norway were limited by the ports of call of our cruise, we had free rein in Amsterdam to do as we choose.  Being who we are, our choices of stops were fairly historical in focus (duh!).

In Amsterdam in no particular order, we were able to visit:

Rijksmuseum

Probably the best known museum in Amsterdam, and one of our highest priorities to visit, we probably could have spent a week here and not seen everything we wanted to.  Museums with children are always challenging, luckily big kid is getting old enough to entertain little kid while mom & dad do their thing.  The biggest draw, of course, are the Night Watch and other Rembrandt paintings.  The Rijksmuseum is fairly good about having their collection available digitally, but the things you just don't get from the online presence is the sheer scale and vibrancy of these works of art.  They are massive, and so, so beautiful in person.

Hermitage Amsterdam

This museum is a branch of the famous Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I honestly didn't even know it existed until we were already planning to go here and were looking for things to do.  Then we found out they had a Dutch Golden Age exhibit running in coordination with the Rijksmusem and the Amsterdam Museum, and it quickly came to the top of the list.  They had a huge collection of civic guard portraits in this exhibit, and the presentation was awe inspiring (I'm pretty sure my jaw hit the floor when I walked into the big room).

Museum of Bags & Purses

A personal interest for both me and my wife, this was pretty high on our list and we didn't figure it would take too long.  It's not a huge museum, and all of the pre-1700 items were on a single floor, but they do have a nice little collection with several sweet purses, a bead purse, and a lovely leather purse that I've seen before (it's WAY bigger than it looks):

Museum Van Loon

This is the house of one of the founders of the Dutch East-India Company.  Again, a small museum, but unique in that it consists of the house, the garden, and a coach house still together.  While the house itself is later than our period of interest, the Van Loon family is not.  There are several portraits and a few artifacts for anyone researching the later 16th/early 17th century times.

Rembrandt House Museum

This was one from the wife's list of priorities, and I'll admit I wasn't that interested until I got there.  With it being the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's passing, this museum like others in the city were well stocked.  This was probably the busiest museum we went to as we managed to hit it right as a school group was leaving, we think.  There is evidence that some of the furnishings in the historical portion of the house are actually from other museums in the city, like the Rijksmuseum; it's nice to see that partnership and sharing among the local museums again.

Oude Kerk

It's hard not to end up in at least one historical church while in Amsterdam, and this was our choice while we were there.  Translating to Old Church, it truly is, originally built in the 12th century, there are various additions throughout the centuries.  The entire floor of the church, practically, is full of graves with some very interesting grave stones if you're into that kind of thing, but the painted ceilings were especially nice to see.  They also have a few artifacts on display from varying time periods.


We also managed to visit a couple extra gift stores: those in the National Maritime Museum and the Niewe Kerk (New Church - new is relative, being consecrated in the 15th century).  If I had to do it over again, I would have liked to find time to do a full visit to the Maritime Museum, as they apparently have a very nice collection of historical maps.

All in all, a wonderful vacation filled with a ton of history.  Pictures are spread across at least 3 devices (2 phones and a digital camera) so haven't fully been gone through yet, but I'm hoping for some gems in there.

Old Fencing Curriculum

In a time that seems so very long ago, my wife and I moved to a new state and found a lack of consistent SCA fencing practices.  So what do young upstart Freescholars of Atlantia do?  That's right, we made our own.  We had a good friend who lived in the area, we called him up, and found a place to practice.  Over time, the practice grew, we became white scarves (I suspect partly because of this practice), and several members joined us.  At one point, we gathered a group of people to sit down and generate a list of topics to cover and hence was born Percy the Pontificating Provost's Practical School of Defense.

Kate has mostly retired after kids (although they're almost getting old enough for her to come back out), and my activity waned for a bit, so others stepped up and led the charge.  I have since become active again, but other life priorities prevent me from taking charge any more, but I promised some folks at the current practice that I would put up this, for lack of a better word, curriculum.

I will state that this list of topics was not just from the minds of my wife and I, but a contribution of various people, many of which I will likely forget, but I will try (SCA names only, no titles because I'm lazy): Galen of Black Diamond, Rosalind Delamare, Gaston du Valmont, now Iskender Bey al-Istanbuli, Marion le Red, Chris MacConing, Ysane de la Selle, and so many more.  (If any of you remember more, please let me know so that I can add note their contributions.)  The list was also heavily influenced by our primary teacher, Giacomo Vincenti (yes that Giacomo), without whom Kate & I would not have been the fencers we became.

This list has not been touched in quite some time.  I leave it here in it's last form of a teacher's list and a student's list.  Neither has a lot of information, mostly being just lists of topics.  At the time, it was what we needed.  I hope that these inspire others and if you can use it, they are free for your use, just please give credit where credit is due.

PPPPD Student

PPPPD Teacher

Class on Leather Doublets & Jerkins

This last weekend with my lovely wife, we taught a class at an SCA event that presented some details and inferences of the research I've been doing in regards to extant leather garments.  I think the class went pretty well, and it was pretty well received.  For those that couldn't make it, the link to the slides is: https://tinyurl.com/ybl8h49r and the spreadsheet that drives it is at https://tinyurl.com/y978b3gb.  The one thing we didn't share with class was a link to my curated Pinterest board with the available museum pictures.

The short version is leather doublets & jerkins were more prevalent than what we generally see in the SCA.  From what I've been able to discover, these type of garments made out of leather were treated just as if they were from any other cloth: could be decorated or not, assembled with regular sewing-type seams, etc.

To recap some of the class, I've found 81 extant doublets and jerkins between the periods of 1540-1650 so far.  43 of those are from the Mary Rose wreck which pretty much requires access to a copy of Before the Mast to get details, and can definitely skew any kind of analysis.  The next single biggest cache comes from the Royal Museum of Sweden, which contains a total of 11 unassembled doublets, which are absolutely stunning.

There was no way I could go over the entirety of what I've found so far in a one hour class (or even on this blog).  I encourage anyone interested to go through the main tab of the spreadsheet for the full list, as many of the items either can't be captured to Pinterest or have no available online pictures.  If you know of one I haven't captured, please reach out as I'm always interested in finding more.

And again, make more leather jerkins.

Making of a Leather Jerkin - Part 3

In The Modern Maker book, Gnagy describes only a single type of skirting: a one or two piece skirt for the whole circumference of the waist.  I'm not a huge fan of this and wanted a more traditional tab for the leather jerkin.  We went to another great newish resource, 17th-Century Men's Dress Patterns, to help us get the proportions right.  We drew up a new tab pattern and an separate pattern for the two front tabs (actually we drew up two different ones for the front and decided which one we liked better).  I also wanted a paper pattern for the short sleeve, which was a simple trace of the existing sleeve, just cut off at about 9".

Figure 1 - Tabs and short sleeves

With new patterns in hand, 2 short sleeves, 6 tabs, and 2 front tabs were cut out of the good leather.  In addition, I cut out body, back, sleeve, and collar linings of a white linen; this stuff multiplies in our house, so I honestly have no idea what weight it is or where it came from, but it's not as fine as what we used on the blue cloth doublet.  Lastly, I cut out lining for the tabs from a cinnamon colored leather that had leftover from my previous leather fencing jerkin.  Look for something interesting coming with the tabs.  We'll see if I want to add the linen lining to the tabs later or not.

Figure 2 - Tab interlining layout

Figure 3 - Tab interlinings cut out

Note that I've chosen not to do any interlining or shaping layers on this jerkin.  That is a conscious choice for a couple of reasons.  First, even on the cloth doublet it's hot.  I live in NC and regularly fence in 90+ degree weather, and I just don't need to add heat stroke to my list of chronic injuries.  Second, I think the leather itself will hold the shape well enough, but only time will tell.

This marks the completion of all of the primary cutting.  There may be some minor additions, like a waist lacing strip, extra collar stiffening, etc., but nothing major.  Now on to sewing.

Time: 5 hours 47 minutes (across several days)

Total time: 11 hours 22 minutes

Making of a Leather Jerkin - Part 2

Figure 1 - Fronts, backs, necks, & epilets

Well, real life got in the way, but I'm back to making a jerkin. If you'll remember from Part 1, we had an initial layout of parts.  Unfortunately, even with the picture it had been long enough that layout had to be redone, plus I suspect we had forgotten we wanted lengthen the back pieces by an inch from the original pattern to provide slightly better protection for fencing.  Once the layout was done, I traced and cut out the jerkin fronts, backs, collars, and epilets.  It was a gruelling 3+ hours of crawling around the floor (no permanent work area in our house) with plenty of back and knee aches slowing things down.

Figure 2 - Traced layout

Side note: Tracing on leather provided an interesting new challenge.  Typical fabric marking items (chalk/chalk pencils) don't work very well on leather without a whole lot of work and a high potential of causing the "fabric" to move on you.  When I've traced on leather in the past, I've just used a sharpie (permanent marker) but I've also been tracing on the bad side of the leather.  Also remember that I'm using the flesh side of the leather as my good side; this is normally where modern tanneries put markings, as they assume it's going to be on the back of whatever is made.  Because of using the flesh side as good and having to avoid the markings, I would be tracing on the good side, and I didn't really want to use a permanent marker in case I slipped.  Child's washable markers to the rescue - see having kids does have its advantages ;).

Going back and reading my previous post, I realize that I haven't listed the materials I'm using.  The good "fabric" in this case is a Nappone Bone colored deer skin purchased from Zack White Leather; they're relatively local (less than an hour away), and I can walk in and choose my leather, which I really enjoy doing.  For cutting, I use a pretty boring pair of leather sheers that I've had forever.  I don't have the surface, skill, or time to use a traditional moon knife or other period equivalent (although I do own one).  And of course, an orange Crayola washable marker for tracing patterns :).  More on the materials as they come up.

Time tonight: 3 hours 5 minutes
Total time: 5 hours 35 minutes