Pourpoint

With the recent acquisition of my new spring steel leg armour, I decided to revisit how I attach my legs to the rest of my kit. Previously, I've had a wide, shaped belt that I attached my leg armour to and also my groin protection.

One of the problems with this set up was that the weight of the legs tended to pull the belt forward, which resulted in the belt riding up to the small of my back and tilting my pelvis forward. Not very comfortable and was causing pain in my lower back.

I'd seen the pourpoint that Count Sir Stephen uses to point his leg armour to and decided that this would probably be a better option than an arming belt.

Here is the pattern I made:

Back piece on the left. Front piece on the right. I have had to make further adjustments on this as the back piece flares too much at the side and centre seam. It needs to come down more straight like the front piece does.

My pourpoint is made from two layers of linen. As it is going to be laced snug, I reinforced edge where the eyelets go with a strip of canvas that is sewn to one layer of linen, then sandwiched between the two layers.

And here is the final product on me with the leg armour attached.

The pourpoint stretched a bit after the first time I wore it to training. This turned out to be a good thing as I had forgotten to pattern the pourpoint over my groin protection. After ditching my old arming belt, I needed to get new groin protection and decided to just get a commercial martial arts groin guard. Fortunately the pourpoint still accommodates the groin guard. For future pourpoints, I think a tighter weave of linen may reduce the amount of stretch. I'm not sure of the thread count of the linen I used, but it feels a bit looser in weave than other linens I've used.

I thought about how to reinforce where the legs are pointed to the pourpoint and I know Stephen has a square of leather sewn to his pourpoint. As I wanted to be able to throw this pourpoint through the wash, I decided to use canvas covered with the same linen as the pourpoint. The attachment points are slightly hourglass shaped when flat, then folded in half and the top square sewn firmly to the pourpoint, with the tapering section forming a loop that I feed the laces of my leg armour through, as shown below.

I'm still getting the exact pointing right. On the first wearing, the legs "dropped" about an inch so I had to adjust where the laces attach to the legs. I'll probably have to unpick the attachment point on the pourpoint and adjust it at some point. I do want make a set of chausses and point them to the pourpoint as well, so that might be the time to revisit the attachment points.

On the whole though, it is incredibly comfortable. It fits snugly from under the bust down to my hips. It distributes the weight evenly and I don't feel like I'm being "pulled" in any direction, in fact I feel like I've actually got some more support in my lower back. I can swing my arms around and the lower part doesn't budge.

Plus as some have already commented, it looks dead sexy :)