Project report on the 2018-2019 Gorillambeson

The main lesson I learned from the previous 2017 gambeson project was that I was going to need a better and more compact padding material for future endeavours, so naturally I went off to look for stores that sold something similar to the recycled wool felt I’m used to seeing in the internal filling of SPES jackets and the like. This turned out to be rather easier than I thought. Just to give a rough idea of what the material looks like on its own (i.e. not stuffed inside a jacket), here’s a picture of the first lot I bought back in 2018.

Unfortunately I still ran into the problem of different production lots being not exactly identical in thickness and density to each other, but in the event it has been considerably less serious than what I had experienced with the previous gambeson’s Dacron filling — mostly because I only need one or two layers of the wool felt to get a reasonable degree of protection as opposed to anywhere from two to six for the Dacron/polyester fluff. Here’s one of the test patches I made to figure out the correct thickness for the whole thing. Most of it had two layers sandwiched between the shell fabric and the lining but there’s a part along one edge with only one layer of padding.

The gambeson project itself wasn’t started immediately after I finished the previous one; I actually spent much of 2018 working on my personal jacket project with a more fitted cut (which shall be the subject of a different post), but I soon figured out that such a fitted cut didn’t really work with the goal of making something relatively simple and affordable for Indonesian clubs (as I whined about back in early 2017). So, between that and simply not wanting to get too experimental while working with a new and unfamiliar filling material, I decided on an extremely simple cut based on the T-tunic with a neck opening wide enough to let the new gambeson be put on over the head without any fastenings or the like. I didn’t bother to take any pictures of the individual pieces before they were put together so the earliest pictures I have of this project (from October 2018) was already in the initial stages of assembly with all the body and sleeve pieces roughly sewn together.

One fairly noticeable difference from the previous gambeson is that the wool felt filling was far less puffy than Dacron/polyester fluff, so it also compressed less under the padstitching/staystiching I used to fix the layers together. As a result, I was also able to get away with far fewer lines of padstitching on the main body and sleeve pieces than on the brown gambeson.

I still wasn’t entirely sure about the sizing and comfort of the whole thing so I only put in some crude assembly stitches before I brought it out to its first event, namely the workshop that the Jakartan branch of my club was invited to hold in GOIFEX back in early 2019.

Believe it or not, the image was taken years before Squid Game came out, so any similarities were purely coincidental. And yes, I was wearing that smile of existential despair before it was cool, partly due to how tired I was from both the workshop itself and the need to travel to a different city to attend it. But maybe the most important thing was that the cut of the gambeson — while far from perfect — seemed to be good enough for my purposes at the time, and I decided to continue the assembly without further alterations for the moment. This was also probably when I started calling it the Gorillambeson due to the way the sleeves ended up being too long for somebody my size.

It should be fairly easy to see the small underarm gussets here. But for a better idea of the general shape, here’s another picture while I was airing the Gorillambeson out immediately afterwards.

Long story short, the initial version of the Gorillambeson was finished roughly in time to feature in the next event the Jakarta branch was invited to: the Ancol cultural festival in the middle of the year. The thing should just be visible at the right edge of this picture, hanging as the backdrop to the main table in the club’s stand.

Shortly after this mid-2019 event, some people in the Jakartan branch expressed the desire for a front-opening jacket. I decided that I might just as well experiment with converting the Gorillambeson into one rather than making something entirely new. The first step was to cut up the front body piece along a line extending downwards from the edge of the neck opening.

Then I added an extra layer of the felt padding on top of the shell fabric, and one more layer of the tan lining fabric on top since I didn’t exactly have enough of the blue denim left to completely cover the front. In case it’s not obvious, I only added the second layer of padding to the front; the back piece and the sleeves retained the old single-layered configuration for the internal padding.

I also made the collar smaller since it no longer had to be large enough to let the wearer’s head pass through, and as a result I had to patch in a small piece to cover the gap on the inside. This picture also shows the zippered closure I added underneath the front opening, though in this case I hadn’t sewn it to the other side of the opening yet.

The conversion procedure as a whole wasn’t very dramatic or difficult and I finished it fairly quickly, but it wasn’t until the first interclub Indonesian HEMA workshop in Surabaya at the end of January 2020 that the modified Gorillambeson got the chance for a field trial. Here it is being worn on the left by the then-leader of the Surabaya club (and yes, if he looks familiar, he was also the one who asked for the earlier brown gambeson to be modified into a coaching jacket). By comparison, I was wearing my own personal jacket (the subject of a separate report) on the right.

Just as in its original state prior to the modification, the Gorillambeson-turned-jacket worked well enough but was far from perfect. Maybe the most noticeable issue is that the wide front body pieces means that the padding in the shoulder section tends to bunch up when both of the wearer’s arms are extended forwards. This is probably more obvious in the most recent pictures from 2022 during a practice session of the Jakartan branch of my club (which has become the Gorillambeson’s forever home after the workshop).

But on the whole I wasn’t dissatisfied with the Gorillambeson since it has provided me with some valuable lessons to apply in subsequent projects, especially the Nellie (NLE/No Longer Experimental) jacket I made in late 2020-early 2021.