Dame Fiona Armour v2.0

About a decade ago, I was commissioned to make my first (nearly) full suit of armour for a group of folks who traveled to different Renaissance Faires up and down the East Coast US. I was quite pleased with my work at the time and I still consider it a huge milestone in my career, but as the years have gone on and my skills have developed, looking back at it makes it feel like the early effort that it was. Sadly, that particular suit is now somewhere out in the world and belongs to… who knows? I had assumed that was my one and only full suit of armour and let it rest at that.

So imagine my surprise when years later, I get commissioned to make another suit for the very same person! Making any armour at all was something I never expected to do again for any individual, let alone two suits for one person.

This project was an extreme challenge for me in many ways - not only had I stepped away from making armour for a number of years before this, but I had modified or otherwise stripped down my toolset for doing exactly that to make my equipment more streamlined. In addition, the customer wanted the entire suit to not only be made from stainless, but also to have a mirror finish throughout. Thankfully this suit is not intended for even mock combat, it will be entirely for show. This led me to choose a very thin gauge material which, in retrospect, I probably should have gone with slightly thicker material. Stainless is a very stubborn material to form, especially when you’re asking it to take the sort of shapes that will fit around a human body. Also included was a custom brass horse head medallion riveted to the breastplate. In addition, all the buckles were cast in bronze from handmade originals by me. Quite the visual upgrade from the original suit in every aspect.

Luckily I had a wonderful volunteer for a model in my friend Larissa, otherwise I think this would have just been hanging from the body form I used to draw measurements from. Even more lucky is the fact that it fit her as well as it did; armour tends not to be very forgiving with bodies that it wasn’t made for. There were some minor differences between her and the intended wearer but she wore it fantastically and I’m very appreciative of her enthusiasm for wearing the suit and posing for the camera!

And last but not least, these last two photos are something of a before and after “outtake” - These are among the first few shots we took and it was pretty clear that neither of us had much experience with modelling on either end of the camera and there was a little stiffness all around. After I snapped a few shots I told her “this feels like you’re giving me very ‘choose your character’ vibes” and I couldn’t help but take a picture of her reaction.

In addition to the body armour, the commission also included the need for a helmet. It was unusual in the sense that instead of padding the helmet itself, we decided to build it as a “shell” that covered a modern horseriding helmet. This made certain aspects of the construction fairly straightforward, but also presented a number of unique challenges. For this piece I went with much thicker material than the rest of the armour.