I've been working on making myself a tooled leather bodice. Above you can see the front panel tooled and dyed with the grommets applied and the holes punched on one side for the decorative leather lacing applique stitch.

I've got both sides stitched now (It looks FABULOUS!) and the back two pieces have been cut, tooled, dyed and holes punched for all grommets and lacing stitch lines. Progressing along nicely.

I didn't think the design was showing up well, especially on the back because somehow (uh, yeah, DON'T forget which dye dauber you used for the blue with the one you used for the black. It doesn't help!!!) the blue base dye came out too dark on one side due to contamination with black dye. So I tried going over the design on the front with some thinned down white acrylic. I was planning on running the blue dye again over the white, to get a brighter shade, but that SO didn't work.

I now am figting with oil-based dyes and water-based acrylic incompatability. HOWEVER, the solution came to me last night (alas, far to late to work on it) I need to break out the old oil paints and get that sucker painted up proper. I can't wait. I just hope I have the right paints to mix up the proper shade for this.

Then I can test for size/shape, and assuming it's OK move on to doing the shoulder straps and skirting armor.

It's a fun project, but I have a LOT of bits and pieces I want to add to make it a complete outfit.