tactical vest

I think I've made the front pieces 4 times now... and I have to do it again for a 5th time because the velcro tape is coming apart, no idea what's causing it, maybe the stitch length is too short for the cheap material I also tried melting the cut ends to prevent the strip from fraying but it just splits right down the length regardless. I might have to find some higher quality velcro tape. Problem is finding a color match lol.

 

The vest along with the climbing harness are sort of a trial by fire learn how to do it from scratch. I'm flying by the seat of my pants with no patterns, very little measuring and just pure hands on effort, sacrificial material and time. Good news is that I have plenty of material to keep sacrificing in the name of education.

 

The bias taping is finally doing what it's supposed to be doing, if I can only get the stitching to look neater on it rather than going all over the place, part of it might also be my thread color match is not great so it's really showing up. Lots was learned about bias taping in this part of the project though.

 

The next thing I'll be trying is pouches to mount on the vest. At the moment I don't even know if the mounting system will work or if I'll have to devise something to make it work differently.

 

 

 

 

no close up of the back, she fell over when I tried to take it... that's her telling me she doesn't want to do any more photos. lol

quick test tonight to see if I can work the material to emulate how the life size pouches are made.

 

 

 

next test is to test to see if the strapping system to mount the pouch on the vest can work the same way, and if I can lock it into place.

 

I had a test pouch made with the straps but I sewed one of the pieces on backwards so I can't test the mounting. lol.

So after a bit of seam ripping and rearrangement...

 

 

 

 

I had reservations that the 1:1 life size method of making the box pouch would not work. The seams are dangerously close to the edge of the textile, and one of my seams actually split a line of the nylon off of it. Surpsingly though, a seam run only 2 or 3 lines in from the edge is strong enough to hold. The cut edge needs to be melted to secure it against fraying, but I'm quite impressed with the strength of this material.

 

Now that I know I can use the same 1:1 scale techniques to create the pouch in 1:3 using 1:1 scale thick fabric... I just need a way to cleanly heat cut the pieces to exact size. I wish I had a laser cutter, but I'm going to have to figure this out with a hot knife and a lighter after working out the size of the pieces I need.

Wow, this is very impressive! I love the idea of a tactical/bulletproof vest setup for DD's! The pouch looks like it worked out pretty nicely too.

 

What size bust is your girl? The vest looks like a tight fit so she's got to be an M-bust or smaller right? I'm guessing you could adjust the pattern for it to fit other bigger busted girls if you wanted to....

 

 

Billy

she's actually an L bust.

 

Because tactical gear isn't form fitting, there are no darts or princess seams in the vest to hug the curves better. Which is ok, especially for this character because she's supposed to be in loose clothing most of the time.

 

 

The vest comes apart like a real tactical vest of this type, though slightly modified from the real version. The real ones have cord or straps to tighten the sides down and the shoulders are adjustable with velcro, basically the vest should come apart into 3 pieces.

 

I emulated the design but instead of the cord or straps on the side, (DDs are way too thin and the strapping hardware too big to use) I used velcro to make the sides adjustible. This vest should in theory fit any size DD, in fact you could put this on any doll. I made it about 2cm shorter than it should be if I scaled the real one, DD torsos are shorter than real people torsos and her waist is very high proportionally. In addition to wearing the battle belt/integrated rappelling harness. Normally that waist belt is load bearing for gear so I could mount ammo pouches to it if I wanted to. You would typically wear this belt with a ballistic plate carrier that would sit higher on the chest. For DD's purpose, I mixed the 2 concepts together in order to play with the proportions. Her original drawing design didn't wear this type of belt.

 

With the prototype pouch to iron out the method and rough design of the pouch, I proceeded with hot knife cutting the parts to make 4 more.

 

 

I added some decorative stitching on the flap, you would typically see that pattern on real pouches where they stitch the velcro on the flap, they X the box to secure the middle of the velcro. I used a patch slightly too long but that's ok.

 

The first 'mass produced' pouch of the 4 used the old design, but after I made the first one and pulled the prototype off, the strapping on the back of the first pouch that secures it to the vest was frayed and pulled out of the stitching. I may have to remake a 5th production pouch as I revised the design for the following 3 pouches, the ribbon now wraps around and is stitched through twice so it shouldn't fray. I'll make a new pouch and record the process later in the week.

 

I now have to design the pouches that go over the ammo pouches in the drawing. I may change my drawing design again and not put the shotgun shells on them and move the shotgun shells onto her belt. I'll still need to do 2 pistol holsters as well, but I'm not anticipating any hicups for the rest of her gear as they're just variations on what I've already figured out.

 

I may make a 6th ammo pouch and try to seam bind the edges with the same blue ribbon I used on the vest and belt, but there's already quite a lot of sitching going on really close to the edges of the material, I'm worried about snagging the needle on preexsiting seams or tearing right through the side of the material. We'll see how that goes. If it works then the edges will look much cleaner.

 

There's a fellow in japan who is making an entire replica us marine marsoc setup for one of his girls, he's made a ballistic plate carrier and similar battle belt as well as a radio headset of which I'm quite jealous of. But since I started work a year and a bit ago, he's the only other one I've found TACing out a DD.

some more tweaking. It's rather frustrating to work this small. lol. More about the frustrations later.

 

As promised, a 6th pouch to bring all 4 on the vest to the same design that has reinforce webbing on the back that won't fray at the ends.

 

So here are the pieces after hot knifing from stock. Hot knifing is not precise, you can see the edge isn't perfectly straight nor is it true when it cuts. It has a bit of a waver to it.

 

I've roughly marked the important lines for the next few steps.

 

 

In this picture I've prepped the pieces for the first stitches that are needed. I also doubled up a piece of ribbon and sewed it lengthwise together. I'll need this piece later to make tabs that lock the straps into the webbing. You'll notice I'm using hair clips instead of pins. There's a good reason. After the first few attempts at sewing this size.. and even full size, I got tired of stabbing myself with pins. Also, I found pins to sometimes skew the position of the pieces, throwing off some of the precision I needed to assemble these parts. With the clips, there's no distortion of the material.

 

 

So what will become the pocket had the top hemmed and velcro sewed on, The back face had the webbing straps secured, the inside face and flap had the velcro secured, the top/outside of the flap had a decorative pattern stitched in. Normally that Xed box would be used to secure the velcro, but on my first vest attempt I found actually stitching the X would flatten a lot of the loop or hook on the velcro and make it less sticky to each other. So the less stitching I run through the bonding surfaces of the velcro, the better, so the box is just decorative.

 

 

Here I've pinned the webbing onto the back face. You'll notice it has to be precisely spaced, so when the back face mates to the vest, the horizontal bars will interlace. Then the vertical strap will weave between the alternating straps.

 

Here's where the finalized design changed from my prototype. In real gear the webbing doesn't wrap around. It's hot cut and at most folded at the ends so the stitch goes through a doubled up layer. Since the ribbon has almost zero width to it, I can afford to wrap it around to get the double stitch, and have some extra to prevent against fraying and unraveling. The extra ribbon also serves as more structure once I start putting more stitches down. I will be sewing VERY close to the edge of the material, and you can see, there is no seam allowance.

 

 

Back facing and wrongside after stitching. Would've been nice for the center seam to grab the ribbon as well but it's not necessary. The side seams do the job.

 

 

So that double ply piece of ribbon? I took 2 pieces of it and attached them to the trimmed ends of the vertical straps. These tabs will tuck back into the last row of horizontal webbing and lock in the weave, preventing the vertical straps from backing out.

 

 

Here the entire back of the pouch is now assembled. A stitch along the top and bottom of the back face attaches it to the top/front face of the flap and the inner flap.

 

 

A mark is made to reference where the top of the pocket will sit. The very bottom of the pouch panel is lined up to the bottom of the base and the excess is folded over itself. It will be stitched like this.

 

 

Here's the side view showing how the folded material will be stitched.

 

 

Back view of the pouch showing how everything is being clamped in place after the first seam has been run to attach the pocket. A few practice runs previously were needed to land all the seams on top of one another. You'll notice the seam that attaches the pocket ended up right on top of the seam that attaches the horizontal webbing. There's very little margin for error here. To far inwards and the gap is too narrow for the vertical strap to pass through. Too wide/close to the edge and the seam will split and fray the edge, though cordura is quite resilient to that, it can still happen.

 

 

Front view of the seam, I went along the entire height of the back plate to secure all the layers together.

 

 

The tricky part is closing the bottom. It's the same method of doing the side, but I have to account for both corners, so both ends are lined up and tucked. A seam will be run across the bottom to close it. Then using the pencil mark from the right side of the pouch, I line up the left side against the left edge, tuck the bottom, clip it all into place and close off the left side to mirror the right side.

 

 

And as promised, I managed to fight the seam binding on with 2 more stitches. That's a lot of repeated stitching. I'm not sure if real gear has that many stitches or not, but real gear also has a lot more room to work with.

 

 

So onto my frustrations.

 

You can see in the last photo some of the sloppy stitch ends. Sometimes there would not be enough material in the feed dogs and it wouldn't move while the needle hammered away causing a knotted mess. There are bits of melted edges in there from me sealing the thread ends or binding tape. It might have been better if I improvised a small hot knife by heating up piece of metal to apply the heat instead of a flame. That probably would've preserved the colors of the material.

 

The binding didn't go on evenly all the time. Sometimes I missed on one side or it bunched up and looks uneven, so it's not perfect.

 

Also with the camera so close you can really see how my stitch lines kind of wander around. I can probably improve on this with more practice. It doesn't help that my thread choice glows neon blue under certain light.

 

There are 2 more pouches to do and the vest is done enough. I may revisit it later on after I level up some more. The clbiming harness belts are going to be redone. I have some nice antislip fabric coming to line the back with, so redoing the belts would also eliminate a lot of the uglier seam binding that happened on these parts. I won't be dobleepenting that part, I'll just do it and it'll show up later.

 

I also have a smaller zipper coming so that might be swapped in.

 

Another thing that sort of bugs me now is that the velcro hook on the flaps is a little too long, I could've done with something more square shaped so it doesn't sit so high on the inside of the flap, but that's a lot more minor than some of the general sloppiness of some of the seams.

 

Will get to those 2 other pouches this weekend, then will need to figure out what to do next.

Thank you for this information, very helpful. ^^

Having tried my hand at sewing regular sized stuff I'm pretty blown away. I looked at your work and it's hard to tell it isn't from a stock item by a 1/3rd clothing/accessory manufacturer. You say your stitching wanders but you might be a bit harsh on yourself and notice it more because you've had to make it!

 

I'm really interested in your dollfie gear because I do want to put some tactical stuff on the custom DDS I'll be putting together. I have some life-size tactical stuff to work with, stuff like the HSGI battle belt, a Mayflower plate carrier, mag pouches (my faves are the ESSTAC kywi short pouches) but they're all set up for AR-15 stuff, ! can't really get into the G3/FAL/CETME (let alone a PSG-1) game sadly!

 

If you want to talk gear don't be shy, I'll help with whatever I can.

oh not to worry, I have plenty of reference material on hand:

 

oh not to worry, I have plenty of reference material on hand

 

 

Nice, I didn't know I'd find someone that would post a proper spread up in this particular forum.

 

 

You showed me yours, I show you mine

 

Looking at it I gotta say I'm impressed by your work. You gonna do a plate carrier next? The vest you did matches well with the rifle, all retro and stuff.

 

Who knows, if you do a good plate carrier I might offer you some currency for a set as I have a DDS that might need it later.

I could but at the moment I don't even have time to do the sewing projects I want for myself as I work a full time office job and do minimum 10-15 hours a week of airsoft rifle work for people.

 

One of my other girls does need a custom fit vest but I need an acu jacket made in blue first.

I could but at the moment I don't even have time to do the sewing projects I want for myself as I work a full time office job and do minimum 10-15 hours a week of airsoft rifle work for people.

 

One of my other girls does need a custom fit vest but I need an acu jacket made in blue first.

 

Bit of a shame that I'll have to look around some more for tactical 1/3rd, but I'm glad you can keep busy. One day, if you do free up and have a little setup to make it, I wouldn't mind seeing you opening commissions.

 

Here's to the future ^_^