Mushroom Leather Bodice 🍄 Making Femme Leather Armor for Closing Weekend at Ren Faire

Join me as I craft a leather bodice inspired by an autumnal, woodland mushroom vibe to close out the Maryland Renaissance Festival season! In this video, I’m starting with a cosplay bodice pattern and putting my spin on it, replacing foam with leather and adding hand-stamped details and mushroom accents. From cutting, punching, and dyeing to applying an antique finish, I’ll walk you through the process (with a few bumps along the way) as I dive deeper into the art of leatherwork. If you're into handmade costumes, leathercraft tips, or all things Ren Faire, you’re in the right place!
⚔️ Leather Patterns ⚔️
Cosplay Bodice: www.etsy.com/l...
Leather Mushrooms: www.etsy.com/l...
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⚔️ Music Credit ⚔️
Bouquet
By Maroon Lake
Where We Once Met
Like You and I
Wish You Were There
Sophisticated Gentlemen
When at Grandma's
With Live Performances by:
Piper Jones
⚔️ Transcription (limited by character count) ⚔️
Hey, it's me Hannah. We're getting down to the end of faire season, and we'll be closing down the Maryland Renaissance Festival this weekend. And the best way to do that? Fine leather goods. At least I hope they'll be fine. Because as you probably gathered from the title of this video, I'm making a leather bodice to wear alongside my friends for the closing weekend. And we're not making just any old leather bodice here. Let's add a little bit of spice.
I want to go for an autumnal mushroom in the woods look, to kind of go along with some of the more nature-inspired looks that my friends are planning. I'm actually going to start with a cosplay bodice pattern, which I'll link to down below, but rather than cutting the pattern pieces from foam, I'm going to cut them from leather.
Alrighty, it’s day two. I have half of my leather pieces cut out with the holes pre-punched for stitching. And that took me, like, all evening yesterday. I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but it's Wednesday. I started this yesterday, and the faire is on Saturday. I've given myself three more days to work on this. So, yeah, I'm going to get the other half of the bodice pieces cut out as quickly as I can. Then I can get started on using some of these stamps to add a little bit of texture, a little bit of a pattern to the bodice pieces themselves. Then, if the stars align, maybe we can even get to some dyeing tonight too. That is a tall order for today, so wish me luck.
Look at how cute these turned out. I actually do really, really like them. I really like the texture. The mushrooms are maybe a little more psychedelic funky than I was trying to go for, but I do still think it's a cute little detail. To round out the specific mushroom detail, I think I will go ahead and get some dye out tonight, and add just a little bit of red dye to the tops of the mushrooms. I don't want to finish dyeing the rest of the pieces because I still need to punch holes for the stitching, which I'm so excited to get to. I can't wait to stitch this together, but I ordered a tabletop hand-press hole punch, so I am going to wait on that. It should be arriving tomorrow. So, yeah, a little bit of red dye to the tops of the mushrooms, and then that'll be all the dyeing I do for this evening.
Speaking of mushrooms, I found a pattern-well, I guess it's a bunch of patterns-for leather mushrooms from Nils Beardfoot. Specifically, leather mushrooms that are meant to sort of adorn other leather pieces, like leather chest armor or a leather bodice. I want to use a couple of these patterns to add little fungi to my leather bodice. I'm sorry, that was so bad.
Okay, it's day three. I believe I have all of the pieces cut out that I'm going to need for the rest of this project. Cutting the leather pattern pieces seems so far to be the hardest part of all of this, so I'm glad that's over. I still haven't received my tabletop hole punch press, so in the meantime, while I wait for that to arrive, I am going to work on putting together my mushrooms.
So now that I have all of the panels ready to go for the actual bodice of the piece, in terms of cutting, punching holes, adding stamps, and some texture, I'm ready to dye the leather. However, I can't find my dye. So what I'm going to do instead is leave it undyed but add an antique finish to the piece. This is a dark brown antique finish. I was doing some testing just to see what color it might change to and see how it would fit in with the grooves and the red color that I've already added to the piece from a dye, and I think I'm pretty happy with that. I think it's kind of like a nice natural color, and I think I would have wanted to use this regardless of whether I had the dye. So I'm just cutti...

[@SKHemp]

LOVE this!! so beautiful!

[@kryysberry]

The mushrooms look so cute! My partner also recently got into leatherworking, its really facinating all the possibilities people can make with the material

[@kalliamazing]

The bodice turned out beautifully! I'd love to know what brand your punch press thing is. I've been wanting to get one for grommets, but knowing this model would work for leather punching too is very enticing.

[@makinghannah]

I'm definitely pleased with the purchase so far! This was a *relatively* inexpensive one from Soiiw.