They're everywhere, they're everywhere, they're everywhere

Assignment for Introduction to Psychology this past summer:  create a model of a neuron and submit a labeled photograph.

The myelin sheaths are rolled-up plant labels, while the nucleus and ends of the axion are brass beads.  Everything other than the beads is solid copper.

Experimenting with cupric acetate

Many if not most leatherworkers know that a solution of ferric acetate, aka vinegaroon, will turn vegetable-tanned leather dark grey or black.  Thus, while it's not actually a dye in the strict sense (the black color is not the result of black pigments in the solution but of a chemical reaction that takes place in the leather) it can be used as one in a limited capacity, and is cheap to produce using just vinegar and steel wool.

Years ago I saw a post on the myArmoury forums mentioning that if you use copper instead of iron, the result is blue.  I bought some copper wool to try this out, and finally got around to it last week.  After soaking the copper in vinegar for a few hours, I wondered if it might not take a long time to create the acetate, since copper is more resistant to corrosion than iron.

It turns out there's a way to speed the process up enormously.  All that's needed is one more common household chemical, et voila.  The video doesn't show it, but the midpoint of the steeping looks amazing, like a breaking wave filmed underwater.

It was at this point that I began to worry.  Was the blue color just a reference to the liquid itself?  What would it do to leather?

The answer is just a little.  The dry leather stained with cupric acetate is on the lower left.  To the right is the same piece after oiling, next to an unstained, un-oiled piece from the same hide.

The color doesn't seem to wash out easily after drying, so there may be some chemical reaction taking place, but the visual effect is modest - and this is after getting the leather sopping wet with the solution.  It probably contributes to the darkness of the oiled brown leather.  What you see in the photo, though, is the test scrap at its darkest - freshly-oiled leather will lighten with time as the oily and dry areas reach equilibrium.

Fibula 2

Here we go again:

This one is made from 1.5mm steel rod (a hair less than 1/16-inch).  I think this is a bit too thin, and might not stand up to the strain of fastening a heavy cloak.  But it works much, much better than the 1/8-inch in any case.  I might consider using a thickness up to 1/12-inch or so.

The use of only a single brass bead is intentional, as I wanted to keep the amount of metal to a minimum.  The round copper-plated beads on the first attempt already had 1/8-inch holes, so they were easy to use as filler.  However, for this pin, that wasn't necessary, since it was easier to drill out enough bone beads to fill out the bow when I only had to increase the hole diameter from about 1mm to 1.5mm.

And one more time:

Of course it turned out wonky due to the metal bending too much where the large round bead should be, forcing it over to one side.  I also made the pin too short, which didn't help.  Due to the wonky bead and too-acute bend in the bow, I think this attempt looks much less elegant than it could.  I might remake it someday.

A few notes:  Some of the bone beads - which, according to the package, come from the "Cherished Collection by Nicole" (um, sure) - had tiny seed beads jammed in the stringing holes which had to be pushed out before the bone beads were useable.

Also, the steel, which comes from the spine of a marker flag, is apparently high-carbon.  Between the second and third successful fibulae, I accidentally quench-hardened another pin while forming the coil, which was the first time I'd ever successfully quench-hardened anything, causing the coil to snap like dry spaghetti.

Fibula

Steel rod with bone and brass beads.

Lessons learned:  For this purpose, 1/8-inch steel is much too heavy.  Shaping it required a lot of annealing and forging.  The rod is also too stiff, making it difficult to clasp and unclasp, and pressing on the bow of the fibula in the process puts a lot of pressure that I fear will eventually crack the bone beads, even though they're not packed together.  And, of course, I wasted a lot of time enlarging the stringing holes on each bead (except the small smooth brass ones).

The bone beads are from an inexpensive packet I got at A.C. Moore.  The brass ones are from Crazy Crow.  Actually, the smooth brass beads are copper-plated.

I would like to try again with a thinner steel, in 1/12 or even 1/16-inch if I can find it.  I also wanted to incorporate fewer metal beads and some animal horn ones.

All-purpose leather cap

A side project I made using this PDF pattern.  The shell is made from a leather remnant I got at a craft store, while the visor is some "blacksmith" leather I bought years ago and have never found a use for.  I would've preferred the visor to match the crown in color, but a number of experiments failed to produce a construction and finishing method that wouldn't bleed dye and deform when wet or "crack" when creased.  I wanted this cap to be functionally indestructible.  The blacksmith leather is extremely dark brown, but appears blue-black in the photos due to outdoor light (it was slightly overcast this morning).  For the same reason, it also has a smooth leather lining inside the band with a replaceable cotton sweatband hot-glued into place.

This is what the cap originally looked like.  However, after completing it on Sunday, I decided that the bright gold buttons and lacquered brass buckle were too ostentatious and military-looking.

Luckily, I had some antiqued brass-plated buttons and two of these 1/2-inch buckles from Tandy Leather, and an uncle of mine had given me a bottle of Blacken-It.  I sanded the lacquer off the remaining buckle, darkened it, brushed back the Blacken-It finish with steel wool (it's still darker than it appears in the photo), and put together a new chin cord yesterday.  The cords are just attached with twisted copper wire through a pair of holes on either side, so they can be easily removed and replaced with needlenose pliers/clippers.  The other cord will probably be used for a costume hat project.

While this style is recognized in the West as a Greek fisherman's or sailor's cap, it was common peasant or working-class headwear, especially in Eastern Europe, so it would also work for any early 20th-century costume.  And because it's made of leather, it also counts as a motorcycle cap.  I like to think the functional chin cord would also work better for that purpose than the simple chain that a lot of them feature.

I modified it in two ways:  First, the band is a bit wider than in the pattern, for more headspace, and second, I also made the visor wider from side to side.  This forces the ends to be pulled in more when stitched to the band, which causes the visor to curl down more, protecting the eyes better from the sun.

Peace, love and revolution

I made this rosette yesterday according to the instructions in this demo.  I'm not sure why mine turned out so messy; it may just be lack of practice, or it may be the fact that it's a very narrow (5/8-inch) ribbon.

The pin is heavy-gauge sheet brass, etched as usual and painted with Testors enamel.  As I didn't have an extremely fine brush, the enamel tended to slop out of the recesses, but with the brass well burnished, I was able to scrape off the excess with a needle when it was half-dried.

The pin has not yet been lacquered.  In my experience, spray lacquers invariably take away some of the metallic shine, but the alternative is to let the metal tarnish.  Lacquer will at least keep it bright and glossy.

The rosette is sewn to a circle of blue garment leather with a hole poked through the middle, and I soldered a tie tack back to the face, sanding the back of the face and the top of the tack to make sure the solder would adhere.  The solder this time was a low-temperature paste, and I slid a pair of heavy brass beads around the actual pin to act as a heat sink, all in an effort to prevent the pin from annealing and becoming too bendable to poke through fabric.  I'm not sure how well I succeeded (the beads were glowing orange by the time the solder melted), but it seems to work okay.  All of this, of course, was done before the final polish, burnishing and painting of the face.

Into the Demilitarized Zone

Years ago, I got into wearing old European army coats because of their low price and retro appeal, plus the fact that, unlike American menswear, they're sometimes small enough for me to wear.  To avoid possible misunderstandings, I don't wear them when I go abroad, and I never wear anything that resembles current or recent U.S. issue.

While searching for a replacement for my worn-out Swiss army jacket, which I've been wearing as a winter coat for nine years, I came across a Slovakian army jacket on sale for 10USD.  Unfortunately it's too light for winter, but similar in weight to a high-quality sportcoat, and the extra-small is a pretty good fit on me.

It has one major drawback:  It is, at a glance, somewhat similar to an "alpha" jacket, the everyday non-combat uniform of U.S. Marines.  But I wanted a sportcoat, thus this project follows.

The first and most obvious step is to get rid of the sleeve insignia, which is accomplished quickly with a seam ripper and tweezers to pull out all the bits of stitching.

Next I removed the right breast pocket, which isn't normally seen on civilian sportcoats except those specialized for hunting.  The end goal here is a sportcoat derived from a hunting coat.

Unfortunately, the stitching that attaches the pocket to the coat also seems to be connected with the front dart.  This is going to need to be closed up at some point.

The epaulettes are made from thick, stiff, laminated layers of canvas with a self-fabric facing.  They can't be simply cut off; I had to open the seams to remove them.

I'm not used to sewing fabric or buttons, so I had to ask my mom for instructions on some of the following steps.  She told me to close the seams up with a blind stitch, but I really failed at making it "blind."  It should hold the sleeve on, though.

All the buttons are replaced with leather ones.  (Well, faux-leather, since we're on the cheap.)  Since major retailers like Jo-Ann don't sell this type individually, two cards of the larger buttons are required, plus one of the smaller.  They're stitched heavily with button/carpet thread and tied off several times.

Elbow patches are essential on a creaky old professor's jacket.  This is a small garment piece from Tandy which I ordered after a brief conversation with the store clerks, who were nice enough to e-mail me a photo of their recommendations, and luckily one was an almost identical color to the buttons as well as having a nice aged, grainy texture.  I actually bought several pieces, as this coat will have a shoulder patch as well.

I based the dimensions (4.75 by 5.75 inches) on those of an old Orvis travel jacket.

The Tandy piece, which is 8.5 by 11 inches (same as a standard sheet of copy paper) was a bit too small to cut two patches that were exactly the same size as the Orvis one, so after some consideration I went for making mine the same length but a half-inch narrower.

The pattern is cut along straight lines, folded into quarters and trimmed to try and make it more symmetrical.

It's then traced onto the flesh side of the leather and cut in the usual manner.

The pattern shifted in and up a hair more than 1/8 inch for the guidelines, and holes pre-punched.

The patch is centered horizontally on the sleeve seam and vertically through trial and error by checking where the elbow is located along the sleeve along a range of movement with the arm bent.

Sewing without going through the jacket's lining is trickiest, but sewing through the lining risks misaligning the lining and distorting the jacket's fit as well as exposing the stitches to internal wear.  So on the whole, you want to do the former if at all possible.  The leather is folded with the shell fabric pinched between.  I then reach into the sleeve and pull the lining out of the pinch.  Then I slide the needle in pointing a bit backward until it goes through the shell, orient it so the point presses against the shell and slowly drag the tip back until it's pointing at the next stitch hole in the leather, and push forward again.  This way a bit of the shell fabric is caught in the stitch.  I did have to redo many, many stitches along the way, and the needle often winds up exiting the leather a tiny bit in front of or behind the pre-punched hole.

The shoulder patch is the last major alteration.  (It's strange if you think about it, because the shoulder patch is meant to protect against wear and tear from firing a rifle, but I've never seen one on a military jacket.  I suppose combat jackets are expected to wear out all over and be replaced before that becomes an issue, while sportcoats are more curated, and obviously dress jackets like these don't need any such thing.)  I cut the pattern to run all the way from the sleeve to the crease of the lapel and collar, and estimated its length based on several photos of sportcoats found online.  I cut it to the maximum length seen in these photos, which is roughly two sevenths of the jacket's length.

As you can see, this is kind of large.

After examining a few more photos, I re-trimmed the leather to a length that's closer to two ninths, and made it a tiny bit narrower so that it would be easier to fit between the sleeve and collar.

The shoulder patch is punched and sewn in much the same way as the elbow patches, except that just below the collar were several points where the coat's layers were sewn so close together that the whole becomes extremely stiff and it wasn't possible to go through only the top layer, so the patch stitches go all the way through here.  Luckily, the tight assembly in this area means that sewing all the way through won't cause distortion or affect the fit.  I may, however, hot-glue some thin patches of material here just to protect the stitches from internal wear.

Although not an alteration per se, closing the dart is the final important step.  With more coaching from Mom, I tried to do a proper blind stitch here, but still decided to knot the ends on the outside, which leaves them visible.

 

English country attire!  The finished product is fairly close to a half-Norfolk jacket, although it lacks the "action pleats," bellowed pockets and loose fit around the lower body and so isn't quite as functional as an actual hunting jacket.  Besides patching over the internal stitches, the only other alterations I'd consider would be shortening the sleeves a little and adding cuff buttons.