Progress check: Here you can see the front and back pieces all trimmed and roughly set into place. If you're not going to do any leather carving, from here you can cut your strapping, get it all stained, and start final riveting/ assembly. If you want something more decorative, get some tracings and iterate some designs on paper to finalize your plans.

Step five: Get to work! Here I've traced and rough cut the major pieces to get them into manageable pieces. Heavy duty clothing shears worked well enough. They then need to be nicely trimmed (I'm using exacto blades I have onhand). Depending on the level of finish and time you want, you can stop there. But if you get a beveler, you can give your pieces a much nicer, more finished look without much additional effort. And they are easy to use.

Step four: Choose your materials. I picked Leather. For my armor I'm using vegetable-tanned tooling leather. Tandy Leather had a decent price on double shoulders, and this leather is great for leather carvings and takes takes dyes and finished well. This should give me enough to also make bracers, greaves, and hopefully spalders as well. You can also use simple water to form and / or harden this type of leather. Just be careful you don't heat it too much or too long or you'll go too far down the hardness road and end up in brittle. At the moment I may do some shaping, but probably will only do hardening on the spalders, bracers and greaves that will eventually join this breastplate in battle.

Step three: This step can vary. You can then cut up the shirt to make your patterns, but I prefer to then draft my shapes into cereal box level cardboard. This let's me have a rough simulation of how leather doesn't like to bend in more than one direction without forming, but also gives me a pattern I can reuse easily if I need to recut any leather later. During this rough assembly you can also begin to better visualize mechanics such as buckles, straps, etc. Once you have a rough assembly together in cardboard and duct tape, you can also try it on to double check your fit.

Step two: If you drop an old tshirt over it, you can now easily use markers to block out the forms and basic look you want. You can even draw variations on each side. Here I started with an old orange highlighter, didn't like most of those designs, so picked out the few lines I liked in black and kept revising. So the lighter color you start, the more you can experiment.

Step one: Whether for clothing or armor, if you need to make a pattern, it helps to first have a form. This is a torso I got online for under $20, then added cut up pieces of old towels until the measurements at waist, chest, shoulders and neck were about right.