Step Eight: Final Assembly All your pieces and straps should now be ready to go. So you can punch your final holes and rivet, leather lace, or sew your pieces together, as appropriate for your design. As you can see here, I went with domed rivets for a little extra style. I also assemble the major sections first, so I can align them on my dummy to verify where I want all my straps to sit before punching those holes. Here are some images of the final product... at least until I start on greaves and tassets. :) I Hope you've found this helpful and inspiring, and I look forward to seeing what the rest of you build!

Step Seven: Stain / Color Once you have all your pieces cut and your pattern tooling done, you can color or stain your leather. Here I've used 2 tones - Saddle tan on most, but some accent pieces I dyed with walnut. I tend to prefer alcohol based leather dye to water based as I find it's less likely to get spots if I get caught in some weather. I also recommend wiping it all down with some kind of resist after your dye has dried to help protect your leather.

Progress Check: By repeating similar designs on multiple parts, I think the armor will have a nice overall look. Here you can see the pieces that will make up most of the breastplate along with the first bracer. Then here are both outer bracers fully tooled, and the first of the pauldron pieces. The bracers are already water hardened and shaped, the pauldron is just starting to dry.

Step Six: Leather carving and tooling. This takes a few steps and some practice. First you need to case your leather. By getting it damp you can easier transfer your designs to the leather with a simple scribe. My first few I did with the rounded edge of my beveling tool while waiting for my stylus to show up in the mail. Here I personally do not fully case my leather, I only get it samp enough to slightly soften the top layer. I save doing a ful casing for when I'm ready to do my tooling. Once your image is transferred, you can lightly score your lines with a knife. This works a bit better while it's still a touch damp. Depending on how much you want your edges to stand out, or if you're going to paint the lines with dye, your project may not need this step. When I'm actually ready to tool the design, that is when I then finished casing my leather. I get my best results wetting both sides. But don't fully saturate your leather. If it's too wet, your edges will be soft when you bevel. At least for me, I keep it just barely wet enough to get a little floppy. First I run a beveler around all of my edges. This let's me get a fairly decent impression quickly and see how the leather is behaving, and gives me a good look at the design so I can decide if I want to do any backgrounding. Keeping it at the semi damp casing through all this time still leaves me the option if I want to fully harden it when I'm done tooling by finishing saturating the leather after I'm done carving.

More progress: Pauldrons designed and cut out. This is where the cardboard patterns really start coming in handy. You just flip them over and cut out a second time to get the other shoulder.