Crown Tourney Successes and Lessons

Our Crown Tourney was this past weekend and what a day!  We went hoping for Ed to make a good showing and ended with him in the semi-finals! Surprise!  He fought extremely well and I am very proud!

I made him 2 new fighting tunics for the day and am please with them, but I will be altering them for the future. He wanted to be able to wear all his armor under the tunics to hide the modern pieces as much as possible and have a double layer to Viking tunics in his heraldic colors (green & yellow) be what you see. The under-tunic is a green linen with long sleeves and a keyhole neck and a center front slit for movement.  I am pleased with and probably won't be changing the under tunic.

The yellow over tunic currently looks too much like a sack.  I am very happy with the stitching and how the key hole facing turned out, but the sleeves have a lot to be desired.  Ed wanted them to be about elbow length and roomy, but I think I went a bit overboard.  I did need to add a lot more room to the shoulder area because he wears huge lacrosse shoulders as part of his armor (did I mention HUGE?) and I didn't taper in the sleeves much from the shoulders.  It also is a bit too much YELLOW for his 6 foot 8 frame worn this way.  He has a set of beautiful metal lamellar plates that this tunic would look great under, but they are currently in pieces as we re-work them.

So, my ultimate plan is to convince him to ditch the shoulders for smaller metal caps, re-work the lamellar into a new complete set, remake the sleeves on the yellow tunic to be more fitted and add a green border to the edge of the sleeves and the hem. I think I'll start with the tunic. :-)  Ed wants me to play around with leaving the sleeves partially open along the bottom for movement so I'm hoping that will make it look more fitted because I can leave out the underarm gussets.