Padded Armour

[Marcus Aemilius Longinus]

Regarding the straw turning to "mush", it has sometimes occurred to me that the vertical quilting often depicted on aketons/gambesons/subarmali might have been open ended, enabling old straw to be removed and new, more rigid, straw to be inserted in its place, before the 'quilting' was sewn or laced up again.
Just a thought.

Crispvs

I hope no one minds if I revive the thread again :roll: by posting about something relevant to an earlier part of this thread even if rather outdated.

I made my newest subarmalis in a similar way to the method described here with vertical quilting or tubes and the use of straw as stuffing. Unfortunately it is machine stiched but otherwise is in the came general spirit of this type of subarmalis. When making the subarmalis, I found that most of the effort of making it actually went into stuffing the staw into the subarmalis(allowing for the machine stiching) IMO by the time the staw had turned to mush one would be almost as well replacing the entire garment as much as the straw. This is keeping in mind the rate at which soldiers seemed to go through their tunics. I should mention that the subarmalis itself is light weighing less than my white tunic which is 1.4 by 1.5 metres and quite heavy duty with the depth varying somewhat between 2-3cm thick. I will try to post pictures up later tomorrow.