Making buckskin leggings.
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- Опубликовано: 2 дек 2020
- In which I make a pair of Iroquoian leggings from brain tanned deerskin.
What makes the leggings Iroquoian is that they were made by a Mohawk.
The design isn't based on anything other than what I could get out of the leather. Historically, most examples would be made with the seam either on the outside of the leg, if there was a fringe, or on the front of the leg if there was no fringe.
This was incredibly useful man. I've been considering making myself a pair, and this video is inspiring. Not boring in the slightest
They’re not difficult.
I love the bits of dry humor you include. Watching a lot of your stitching is actually pretty interesting to me as a fiber artist and clothing maker, especially someone outside Iroquois culture who is generally interested in pre-contact and developments early after trade with colonizers began (before more blatant annexation/invasion became common in an area). Thank you for going through so much effort to share your explorations with the wider public and doing such a great job with lighting and composition. Your videography accentuated the reproduction vibe and it’s always a pleasure to see videos with good sunlight. I feel gratitude and respect for your work in creating this contribution of knowledge and experience. Thank you.
Thank you for your pleasant words.
Thank you for sharing your learning while doing process with us.
Nice work..sir.
Very cool.
Think I'll make some leggings today.
To go with my buckskin ghost shirt and mocs.😊👍
Wonderful video. Letting the leather lead by "suggestion " awesome.
Lovely to watch! I made a pair of leggings a few years ago out of reindeer skins (easier to get here in Scandinavia) and followed a similar pattern of length and dimensions. Love wearing them outdoors. My only problem that I would change are the belt-loops. I followed a seminole pattern of one in the front and one in the back, but they keep sliding around on my belt 😅 Yours seems better 🙂
Great job
"... Riveting stuff. I don't know why I thought this would make a good idea for a video but it's too late to turn back now" surprisingly, this is very interesting. Keep doing what you do
Great job .....
I really appreciate videos like this, it's sometimes hard to find a person local that knows how to do things.
Glad to be of use.
Beautiful, helpful, personal. Much gratitude.
Really beauty work! Thank you for such a great video!
Don't hesitate, though, to have long shots of you simply walking or sewing. There are entire channels dedicated to wordless videos of people crafting mud houses, knitting, walking in various locales, etc., and it really was very, very enjoyable to simple watch you work with and sew the sinew!
those are mighty fine!
Re: Are trousers superiour tech over leggings and breachcloth: Yesterday I saw a pretty good documentary about an international and interdisciplinary team on their mission to recreate the oldest surviving pair of trousers from a mummy in China that died around 500 BCE. They suggested that trousers suited the needs of riders in a cold climate better than an "open midsection". Those were woolen trousers, though. The original pair showed different weaving techniques for the main leg, the knee section and the upper part over the pelvis area.
My modern bias would say yes, trousers are better. But there are certain minor advantages to leggings and breechcloth. Ease of manufacture, durability, versatility.
If it were a clear case of one design being superior, that design would quickly replace the inferior.
Over here, we would have known about trousers from our dealings with the Inuit. Even if we hadn’t, pants aren’t that great a leap. And after contact we didn’t adopt them wholesale until the mid to late eighteen hundreds.
Other cultures went from pants to leggings. Such as the french trappers, who mostly adopted native dress. Or for a better example, anglo-saxon england wore pants, but norman England wore hose and braes.
@@MalcolmPL the braies prevent chafing of the inner thigh region, in my opinion. Trousers only came back in the 1700s. The 1700s are notable for a couple phenomena, the mass production of clothing and the introduction of cotton. It is probable that cotton undies and wool trews were easier to mass produce than linen undies and wool hosen. This perhaps evolved to todays cotton undies and cotton trews for ease of mass production, or because (theoretically) a moisture absorbent underlayer under a heat trapping outer layer would cause a very sweaty wet underlayer.
Cotton was not a cheap or common textile before the cotton gin. Picking, and especially cleaning was laborious. Linen was the textile of choice prior to cotton.
Edit. Speaking from years of experience, I can say a couple things regarding riding horses while wearing leggings.
1. Use a blanket. The buildup of sweat from both horse and rider, with bare ass and inner thigh skin against horsehair really chafes. A middle barrier solves it. I always used a saddle.
2. Breechclout and leggings are ideal for horseback due to freedom of movement. Far superior to trousers.
3. As cold as it gets, the horse will keep you warm enough. Your outer thighs can get chilly if exposed, but a simple blanket wrap is an easy fix.
Very inspiring and informative. Thank you for your video and and explanations.
Interesting and relaxing video
Good to hear. I was expecting people to be bored stiff.
@@MalcolmPL It's something that ive never seen or heard much about before and it was a well filmed video
I imagine braies and hose allow for more leg mobility at the crotch where the leg meets the hip, since it's looser around that region than trousers. But that's just speculation.
These would be great for hunting! Gotta make a pair with my next deer 🤔
I am planning to make a pair. Thank you for taking the time to make this great video 😁
Very well done great work
Great to see. I especially like your point on working with what you have. After a few years of working with furs and leather myself, I have learned the hard way that making clothes is lots of splicing (unless you kill a moose).
Thanks for sharing this video! I enjoyed it! Your work is amazing!
You’re welcome.
Thank you for making this video!! I’ve been looking for this kind of content.
You're more than welcome.
Great video,Thank you
Cheers.
Nice, enjoyed watching.
Good.
One of the biggest complaints from historians and is that the so called “boring” stuff that everybody knew about wasn’t written about.
Never complain that what you show us is boring. We follow you for a reason, we love your mind and unique perspective.
Yeah, but there is a reasonable amount to show in a video. Nobody wants me to include all twenty plus hours of the project.
@@MalcolmPL 😖🥺🙏 What about 45+ minutes, simply, of you sewing .. as a treat?
I'm loving this, I wonder if this is the style used by Frontiersman Daniel Boone...
I made up this style, so I don’t think it likely.
Nice work
Cheers.
Nice job
Cheers.
Nice man. I wanna make traditional native clothing to wear. Wonder what the people at work gonna say haha
I wish I had the nerve for that.
Could you of resmoked the lighter pieces to darken them to match closer to the darker skin? I just did this. Made a pair of eastern Woodlands side seam. Thanks to your video giving me ideas they came out quite nice. I used buckskin lace I made from scraps to tie up the seam side rather than stiching. Kind of looks like spaced out fringe but yet I kept the flap on the side seam. I like them anyhow. I like yours too. Great way to work with what you have.
Yeah. But I'd need a proper smokehouse if I wanted to do it evenly and reliably.
If you want perfect, ya, but close is good enough. Nothing is perfect .I just hang my hides over a small smokey fire. What happens happens. Lol the longer they are there the darker they get.you do have to adjust them time to time to cover the entire hide. My breach clout came out a few shades darker then the leggings .but I like the difference in coloration. Now I'm working on a shirt. I'm going to smoke it again after it's done and made into a shirt.
@@tonykaczmarek278 Oh, you've had success with that? I've never been able to get something like that to work, it's like the smoke would rather go around the skin rather than into it. Maybe I just don't have enough patience.
It takes a long time.
Your leggings turned out great.
Malcom, I had a friend who became a cobbler and he told me something very interesting about leather. He said it stretched in specific directions. Large herbivores stretch from back to belly (so they can eat a lot) but don’t stretch nearly as much from head to tail- there’s no reason to stretch that way. So, leggings (assuming deerskin behaves like this) would probably work best if the stretch around the leg,
And don’t stretch from waist to foot, though perhaps I’m wrong about that if the knee really needs to stretch when the leg bends. I’ve never thought about this before with leather pants, but it certainly matters with shoes (stretch around the foot) and belts.
@@DavidGonzalez-oi8jb You're right. Ideally speaking you want to make the leggings, and pretty much all clothing, run parallel to the spine of the animal. You don't really need to stretch lengthwise.
In this case it was more a question of, how do I make something out of these three pieces here and now, given that it will be a year before I can get more.
Something else I should have mentioned in the video is that it's important not to stretch the leather to fit your pattern, otherwise things will become wonky and ill fitting when the grain relaxes after wetting and drying.
What does the PL stand for?
Platoon leader.
I think the benefit of leggings is ease of replacement. Once they’ve been worn thoroughly and can’t be or not worth patching anymore you could simply just a new legging or a set. Pants or trouser if one thing goes bad would have to be replaced in their entirety.
I hadn't thought of that.
This phenomena comes up in the patchwork silks of renaissance mercenaries as well. Scraps can be repurposed into a legging much more easily than pants (trousers). The crotch section is actually pretty tricky to sew, and there have been many different solutions to that issue with no clear winner. Maybe its just easier to wear a tunic and a breechcloth than futz with a seam that takes a ton of wear. Jeans were an advanced technological leap in creating sufficiently durable crotch seams in pants. Without that durable crotch seam, the tunic and leggings approach seems pretty superior
Hey, what about the Tuscarora, people of the shirt? I know they were invited into the Haudenosaunee confederacy, but they wove shirts from hemp.
To cut a long story short, it's debated whether or not that relates to precolonial or postcolonial culture. There isn't much information on the Tuscarora prior to about 1700.
I'm not well versed on the subject, but to present one element of the discussion, hemp is not a native plant, it was brought over with the Europeans. Dogbane and milkweed can fill a similar role, but are far less efficient producers, leading some to question whether clothing would have been feasible.
@@MalcolmPL I think the term hemp in this case refers to any plant that could make cordage, in the same way that European settlers call all grain producing crops "corn" at the time. The Tuscarora were a displaced people, I've been told by elders that they were originally Anishinaabe and were fully adopted by the Onondaga. I think milkweed would have been a great candidate considering its abundance in plains, plateau and low brush terrain. It was also a wild food crop, so it would make sense to use the whole plant.
@@jeanarcouette2897 I agree that milkweed is plausible, but I haven't done enough research and am not well enough versed in the material culture of the region to speculate.
As to the origins of the Tuscarora,. Linguists comparing the language to others tell us that they shared a common ancestor with the other Iroquoian speaking peoples. The shapes of words are very similar, but different enough to tell a great deal about divergence. One theory speculates that they migrated south about a thousand years ago during the bad times out of which the confederacy emerged.
A final minor correction, they were sponsored for membership by the Oneidas, but their adoption was never finalized, the loss of land in the American revolution threw a wrench into the process and people sort of forgot to finish up.
@@MalcolmPL That's very interesting because I was always told they were outsiders who were GIVEN their language, but that might just be xenophobia.
@@jeanarcouette2897 We know it wasn't given them as their language is very different from the other five. Only a few words, the grammatical structure and the general shape of words are the same.
It seems to me from watching the uppers are one piece? How many vamps did you cut out and how did you create two separate legs and crotch and not a skirt?
Did you slice the pattern down the middle forming legs and crotch?
Each legging consists of an upper and a lower, both of which contain a spacer.
The two leggings are separate, the pattern shows how to make a single legging, it was then repeated to get a pair. The leggings are not like modern tights, they are not connected to eachother. There is also no crotch, this being covered by the breechcloth.
Does that answer your question?
Thanks for answering so quickly!
I’m referring to the upper part with the belt and fringes. Is that what is called the breach cloth? Or is the breach cloth another piece of leather?
I see how the lower leggings are separate pieces but I’m confused how you constructed the uppers or second half of video at minute mark 7:30.
It seemed the uppers were one piece and when you walk around in them the upper part with fringes had two separate leg holes. like shorts that wrapped around your two legs separate unlike if it was a skirt.
For example of what I’m trying to say is it looks like you when you put them on you would steep into the uppers and both legs would enter two separate areas instead of an open skirt.
For more clarity on my question I’m wondering if the upper is one piece of leather and if so how did you cut it out and sew it to have the two leg holes to step into?
Or is the upper two pieces with a separate pieces of leather that is the breach cloth?
I appreciate your communication and hope this helps you understand my questions.
The uppers are constructed in pretty much the same way as the lowers, each upper is constructed separately, each upper is then sewn to their corresponding lowers.
You might have misinterpreted them on account of the thigh length tunic I'm wearing in the video which hides things.
Here's a link to a brief article I wrote about them a little while back. The accompanying pictures might explain things better than I can. It's often true that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I'm not the most articulate person.
sites.google.com/view/malcolmplforge/leatherworking/leggings
I hope that helps clear things up.
Thanks again for the information I was completely miss understanding the upper construction.
The web site is great and was very informative learned allot.
Cheers, glad to have helped.
It's far from boring
Polyester causes hormonal change and imbalance which can cause skin problems or other health issues…doesn’t sound very modern to me
I hadn’t heard that about poly. One more reason to dislike it I guess.
@Heyman Coolmanilikeitverymuch Yeah, who wants to wear clothing made from distilled petroleum.