Leather Jerkin: Taking It Out for a Spin

In a Washington summer, when you look out your door and see this, you know that your day is going to end in a hot and sweaty place. By the end of Saturday, I believe it was 95 down by Lake Union, and according to thermometers on the faire site were hitting 105.

Fear the morning fog.

The local wildlife loves their Lord Mayor!

For the record, I want to take this opportunity to officially deny that I use illegal Parrot Labor in the creation of any of my costumes. It never happened. I wasn't there. You haven't seen me.

Garb in action: The demands of a high-pressure task like being a music stand on a sunny day are easily met by my leather jerkin.  ACTION GARB!!!

Oppressing villagers is taxing work. It's a good thing I have my Action Garb to wear!

I WILL OPPRESS ALL THE VILLAGERS!

If you can't invest in infrastructure because you pillaged the road-building 
fund, the least you can do is invest in a few signs...

With these people behind me, how can I not attain a dukedom?

Honestly. It was a million degrees out there and I managed to keep doublet and jerkin on almost all day.

More later after I've recovered... in a week or two.

The Lord Mayor photoshoot

The faire has been asking me for photos of my Lord Mayor, and I finally have enough of the costume done to take some character photos.  Today, we took advantage of the nice weather to do a proper photoshoot with props and all.

"Our Lord Mayor, the Right Honorable, Sir James Winterbottom likes to style himself as the consummate Elizabethan gentleman adventurer. Never mind that the Elizabethan adventurer is generally brave, stalwart, and daring, whilst Sir James is generally agreed to be devious, scheming, and greedy. Being an educated man, Sir James knows that being rich allows him to pay people to say he's those other things rather than go to the bother of being any of them. The passage of Her Majesty's court through his town is the perfect opportunity for Sir James to advance his fortunes and possibly buy his way into a proper title.

Do you solemnly swear you are up to no good? The Lord Mayor is always looking for minions! Visit him and as long as they promise to say nice things about him to the queen, he will induct thy children as members of the city watch, instructing them in the ancient arts of villainy and mischief."

Looking slightly perturbed at being interrupted as he counts his money...

A little too friendly for such a scoundrel...

More scoundrel!

MMmmmmmmm... pointy!

Just enough scoundrel! This is the one that will appear on the faire's website.

So you would like a loan, would you?

Reasonable interest rates!

I loved this one, but again, it's a bit too friendly.

The photographer said "Look more diabolical! Twirl your mustache or something!"

Arbuckle Rogers -- Steampunk Flying Ace

My house getting torn apart to make it more hypo-allergenic.  At the end of this, I'll supposedly have a happier, healthier me to share with you and 80-90% less Lego Head to worry about.  Unfortunately, this has also put some of my leather-sculpting plans on hold. 

In the meantime, let us digress somewhat into the realm of science fiction for a leather working project of a wholly different sort...

One of the iconic pieces of hardware in the science fiction arsenal is the jetpack. So much so that it has become an item worthy of simultaneous homage and lampoon.  Every kid wants one, every futurist, science fiction author and movie director is simultaneously frustrated and bemused by the insistence that the future just isn't the future unless it includes rocket belts.

I'm as guilty as the next for reminiscing fondly of the days of yesteryear when commuting by jet pack was always just around the corner.  I featured them in my humor-laden paean for golden-age sci fi Howard Carter Saves the World (click to read it free online).

All of which handily ignores the that you can now buy a "jet pack" from these guys for roughly the price of a decent sports car.We'll bow to the zeitgeist and keep pretending that the future is still just out of reach.

Enter the Steampunks. Not content with reenacting actual Victorian history, we've made it something of a mission to imagine the greats of modern science fiction as if they'd been written by Jules Verne instead of George Lucas. I did this with my "Arbuckle Rogers" costume, which brings us back to jetpacks and leather working.

Since WWI comes right on the heels of the Victorian era, as you might imagine, there's quite a bit of bleed-over into steampunk. This is in part owing to the fact that Steampunk relies heavily on the conceit of the "Airship Pirate" which itself often means the application of 1920's level lighter-than-air rigid airship technologies.

And since the Victorians didn't have a fully-developed aviation tradition of their own to speak of (well, they did, but it didn't come with snappy uniforms) and in the adoption of the so-called "Punk" aspects of this, a certain raffish WWI Flying Ace demeanor has come about.  That's where the leather biggin caps and goggles come from, mostly.

And indeed, my chief dissatisfaction with the Arbuckle Rogers costume is that I didn't -- at the time at least -- have a decent leather jacket appropriate for the milieu.  But the other day, I was wandering the aisles of a thrift store when I discovered the perfect jacket to rectify that problem.

It was decent leather, a little weathered and minus the liner, so it came to only $15.00

 A lot of people do the steampunk jetpack schtick.  I plan to do it differently.  Because I said to myself: If you really had flights of jetpacked soldiery winging their way across the skies, how would you tell your guys from the other guys?  With planes it's a bit easier because since they're coming from different engineers and different factories and design traditions, etcetera, you can spot them from afar and know a Fokker from a Sopwith.

That would be a bit harder with people.  Which brings us to the painting.  Even though both the Germans and the Royal Air Force allowed their pilots a lot of latitude on decorating their kites during the early days of flight, they quickly devised a system of painting and numbering to keep track of them and to tell quickly and easily from the ground who was who.  (At least theoretically)

I posit that this would be even more necessary with flights of jetpacked humans.  So I'm devising a paint scheme for my jacket that is inspired by RAF paint schemes used at the dawn of aviation.  Why?  Because as far as I can tell, no one else has yet done so.

I have some remodeling work to do.  I apologize for the delay in the leather sculpting demo.  And I'll be back soon to discuss paints and designs.

Cheers!

Action Garb!!

I said it a long time ago and I'll say it again... All garb should be action garb! Good garb doesn't impede what you want to do at your event. It doesn't get in the way any more than the laws of physics mandate and doesn't have to be stripped out of to do what you want to do at any given moment. Not even the buttoned-up noble garb needs to put that tight a constraint upon you. Even my wife's noble allows her to do whatever might strike her fancy.

So it is that I advocate putting it through its paces before you finalize the design, prototype and beta-test your costume! Can you dance? Quaff and ale? Prepare a meal? Eat a meal? Drag a fallen comrade to safety? Swing from a chandelier? Ride down a sail on the point of a dirk? Jump on a passing horse? Do a backflip? Catch a golden snitch? In short, can you really do all that you need to do in it?

Remember that these aren't Halloween costumes! People lived in this stuff. These were the clothes they wore as they danced, played, quaffed ales, wrote letters, cooked, fought duels, and even swung from the occasional chandelier when the situation warranted it.

Here are some pictures from last weekend of my new suit of clothes in action at WRFF this past weekend...

Penning a letter of protest 'gainst the tyranny of Henry, Lord Darnley "Does anyone know if 'doody head' is hyphenated?"

When I am not in my fool's motley, I play the character James Bynder, Bookbinder, Natural Philosopher, Anatomist. He writes letters and acts as a legal counsel for the unlettered villagers and takes a ghoulish interest in all manner of things, being especially interested in finding bodies to further his scientific research...

How would you like a nice career as an anatomist's skeleton?

Could I perhaps interest you in donating your body to science?

And here are some additional photos taken by Chris Yetter, a professional photographer who covers our faire. He got some good action shots of the sort of things I expect from my garb (and arrogantly think you should too). He has kindly given permission for our actors to use images of themselves for non-commercial blogs and so forth...

Staring pensively out over the approach hordes of... patrons!


Um, you know I can recommend a good poultice
that will take care of that rash on your leg...

Helping a fallen fighter back to his feet during the closing battle
against Lord Darnley and his mercenary army...

"Now get back in there and fight!"


Celebrating Darnley's demise outside the gate...
"Ding Dong, the tyrant's dead!"