After 3 months of traveling for work, I was finally able to get back to production during the recent holiday break. I was able to get to Tandy Leather while they had an amazing sale going for their "Kodiak" tanned leather. I was able to score a beautiful side of this amazing oil-tanned cowhide (not bear unfortunately) for less than a third of their usual Elite price. If you have not seen it in person, it has the most amazing hand I have ever seen. Merely running your finger along the back side of one of these hides produces a light colored dot on the front which follows your fingertip. It was a bit heavy at 4-5oz. but I knew if I was careful with it, it would make an epic flak vest.
I had previously made an attempt at this with some upholstery leather, and I learned some valuable lessons which I thought to apply to this build:
1. Trying to conceal zippers in leather seams leads to bulky, ugly seams.
2. Flat fell seams are impractical in leather heavier than about 2oz. Unless you can split or "skieve" your seam allowances.
3. A zipper straight up the back is the easiest way to close a flak vest.
4. For the armscye to lay properly, the "drop" (difference between chest and waist measurements) needs to be distributed between front waist darts, side darts and if the "drop" is > 4" (10cm) rear waist darts. Incorporating the drop into the side darts alone leads to puffiness in the front armsye.
5. Remember to sew the sleeve caps on BEFORE topstitching!
6. Heavy dyes coatings on leather suck! No matter how cheap the hide, it's not a good deal if you have to spend hours under a fume hood scrubbing the leather with acetone to remove an undesirable surface treatment.
See my post on sewing with leather
HEREKeeping all this in mind I drafted up a pattern based on a standard men's waistcoat block, modified with a standard shirt block neckline, and standard cap sleeves shortened to cover an arc at the top of the armsye equal to the width of my shoulder bell plus 3/4" of ease on EACH side of the shoulder seam. I developed the block on examining table tissue to make folding and tracing easier. Once the block was complete, I added a grown on (as opposed to sewn on) placket to cover the zipper at the rear seam. After walking the seams to ensure the pattern was true I drew in my seam allowances.
Once I cut out the pattern, I and made a full mock up out of cotton duck to finalize my technique and ensure fit. This was the result:
Please note that this is a mock up for fit. I intentionally left the shoulder bells off to allow me to assess the armsceye and shoulder seam for fit.
I did end up needing to do some minor modifications to the pattern. I needed to move the shoulder seam back by about 1/2" or so. Other than that it fit great. I felt ready to move on to the main build.
The first things I made up were these shoulder bells, they are constructed of the leather with a cotton duck lining, quilted over 3 layers of 1/8" wool batting:
As I stated above, there is approximately 1 1/4' inches of ease distributed over the top of the sleeve. This is what gives the sleeve the "rolled-in" appearance at the top. While I love the look, easing leather of this thickness was no easy feat.
Here are photos of the finished piece front and back:
The placket at the back is "grown on" to save bulk. The final version adds a leather underlap to keep the zipper from catching the flightsuit when closing the vest. The zipper is mounted upside down. I have found that this has the dual effect of hiding the pull at the waist (if the placket was not enough) and I can close the zipper myself with a detachable pull line.
The Armscye, neck, and sleeve cap hem were sewn with a single straight stitch right sides together, the seam edges of the cotton duck liner were overlocked then the leather trimmed back to 1/16" to reduce bulk. Bulk was reduced further by clipping the corners and grading and notching the curved seams, then turned right side out. I finger pressed the seams open with a tailor's fid (Point turner) then topstitched the seam closed.
Due to the thickness of the leather, all of the major seams in this vest are double top stitched, Lapped seams. This is accomplished by trimming the seam allowance off of the overlapping side, gluing the overlapping leather to the seam allowance on the underlapping side with contact cement and machine or hand stitching the leather pieces together once the glue dries. This leather was JUST lightweight enough that I did not feel the need to groove the leather prior to stitching. But it was almost to heavy for my vintage Kenmore to handle. If I were to do this over again I would hand sew the entire garment or use a triple feed walking foot industrial machine or a Sailrite surefeed heavy duty machine. It was very difficult to get good looking, even stitching with even an extremely robust home machine.
Finally here is a picture wearing the vest with the flightsuit:
and a close up profile shot with a good view of the flightsuit neckseal:
I probably need a bit of a beard trim. I think those whiskers will poke out from under the helmet!
Here are some additional views of me wearing the vest.
Finally, here are 2 views from the back:
Using the WOF Large templates as a starting point, I created a set of templates for my main armor plates. Being a bit more "full" around the middle, (more than I'd like) I realized that I had to do a bit of a "slash and spread" to the templates to get them to remain proportional around my abdomen. To do this I placed the templates on my cutting table with appropriate spacing and extended a line from the notch in each chest plate down to a point 1.25" out from the lower corner of the ab plate.
Cutting, shaping, fiddling and much Sintra shenanigans later, I ended up with this:
To attach the plates to the vest, I picked up some 5/16" grommets and 1/4" Chicago screws from Tandy Leather. The posts are attached to the plates by supergluing the post into a small divot drilled into the plate then sandwiching them between the 6mm plate and a small piece of 3mm Sintra.
The posts are then put through the grommet and screwed to the vest:
The posts ended up being a bit long, but I found a few 1/4" plumbing washers in my toolbox which worked great to take up the space. Once I screwed down the plate, the washer had the added effect of locking the screw in place.
Here is a shot of the inside of the vest. As you can see I ran out of plumbing washers I guess I will have to pick some up the next time I am at Home Depot.
The plates are cut from 6mm Sintra. My next step is to really give the edges smooth taper to the edge and give them a gentle roll at the edge to smooth them out.
