Making a leather gauntlet

So it’s been over a week since I said check back tomorrow for results or some rot like that.  Truth be told I took the process with baby steps and it took me a week to actually get the final product together.  The first attempt I made I used a pattern that I like that I had found online, Google “gauntlet pattern” and you’ll find plenty of them.  I put it together using the step by step instructions.  The particular pattern I used was designed for metal, well leather is just as workable and a lot less sharp edges and well frankly I’m more experienced with leather than metal.  The first attempt ended up being far too bulky for my preference and needed to be attached to a glove in order for it to stay connected to your hand.  I didn’t like it.  I gave it some thought and started etching out a pattern for the fingers and body of the gauntlet.  I knew how the pieces had to go from previously looking at them and the previous attempt so it was a matter of customizing the pattern to my particular preference.  I decided that I liked the ½ finger style instead of the full finger because it would limit the lack of range of motion with the whole hand.  I wanted this to be interesting and functional at the same time.  I started out with the fingers and once I had a general outline in paper transferred them to leather and did more work to get them to fit comfortably.

The next step was designing the body, I knew I wanted to have it covering the back of the hand and it had to be secured around the wrist.  At first I intended to use a buckle to secure the wrist piece but elected to change my mind later (we’ll touch on that later)

There was a gap between the fingers and the main body of the gauntlet that I wanted to address so I did so with a rectangular piece of leather. 

The gap that concerned me was mainly between the fingers and the tops of the knuckles so the leather was wet down and placed over the knuckles where it would sit and taped to my hand for an hour to help form it to my hand.

Once all the forming and hole punching was done it was time for me to tool the leather.  Using different tools and designs I stuck with the leaf theme that would complement my other leather armor along with the color scheme of leather dye.

Once the tooling had set in and the dye had dried it was time to seal the leather to prevent the dye from bleeding should it get wet.  Once the seal had dried it was assembly time.  I used copper rivets to hold the fingers and thumbs to the main body and a copper buckle on the top of the wrist.  Once the buckle was attached it was immediately obvious that it was adding too much bulk to the overall design so it was removed in favor of a pair of dual brass snaps to ensure that the wrist would stay in place and keep a secure fit to the hand.  One of the great things about leather is that while it is sealed and set it will still get wet from sweat, rain, etc. and the more it’s used the more it will continue to shape to the hand; this is something that I wouldn’t be able to have had I used metal.  Nor would I have been able to add the tooling or personal flair to it (could have etched the metal but I don’t have access to such tools at this time.)