As I’ve written about before, I (perhaps foolishly) offered to make new leather coronets for the worthies of my shire – not knowing there are a dozen of them! Having already made one for our Seneschal, Baroness Mathilde, I next offered to do one for Baron Master Daniel del Cavallo OL. Much of his reenactment gear was stored at his parent’s house, and they recently had a house fire. No one was hurt, but lots of property was destroyed or damaged, including Danny’s leather coronet, so I made him next on my list.
He wanted a more flared-out shape, rather than an upright one like Mathilde’s, so I made a new pattern. To get the flared out shape, you have to use a LOT of leather, because the whole thing’s a curve:
As before, I developed a working pattern, tooled in some details, dyed and painted it, finished the leather, then added hardware.
The dye is a dark red mixture of Fiebing’s spirit dyes, mostly red. The yellow and red paints are Vallejo acrylics, and the gold is Testor’s gold enamel. I used an Army Painter brand black wash on the coat of arms to give it depth.
The (almost) finished coronet has freshwater pearl finials on the six points, and gilded sun mounts from Armour & Castings in the Ukraine.
Rather than make this one adjustable, I wanted to keep the lines clean and so omitted the lacing on the last coronet I did. The back edges were butted together, attached with epoxy, and had a small patch of black leather glued to bridge the gap with Barge cement.
There were also supposed to be garnets mounted on this, in gold bezels, but sadly I ordered the wrong size bezels, so could not mount the garnets in time for Pennsic this year. This coronet is now on my bench again, and, having sourced the correct size bezels from a jeweler in Israel, I’ll shortly find time to add them and get it back to Danny.
No documentation, these aren’t period.
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