What kind of armor were you thinking of making?

The easiest vambraces to make are basically a piece of leather with holes punched in two edges to lace them together. If you can get some poster board you can use it to cut a pattern and make sure it fits you before you cut into any leather. If you can't find any poster board, old cereal boxes work just fine.

Here's a slightly more complex version that includes finishing touches like lining and studs.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/here-be-dragons/pages/vambrace.htm

Or if you don't want to make them, buy them for like $15-$25 at clan.

But you should try to make them. Artisanship is encouraged everywhere that does not lurk a :crickets:

If you want I can help show you how to make bracers, I am making my own pair right now. Also, if you ask nicely, Tiwaz might help you if you need your leather to be hardened.

Take a trip to the Leather Factory and dig through their scrap bins until you find what you need. Probably end up with enough to do 2 for about 6 dollars, maybe a little more if you get leather for lining the insides as well.

The scrap at Tandy is all tooling leather (1/16 inch or 4 ounce) and wouldn't be very good for bracers. I haven't checked leather factory so I'm not sure what they have currently. If you do hardened leather bracers I'd highly suggest you line them with something soft as hardened leather tends to dig into your wrists. It really depends on how many points of armor you're trying to get out of the leather. If you go with some 1/4 inch (16 ounce) leather thats oiled up you should get 2 points off of it assuming it looks decent. adding studs will up you up to 3 points and will still be wearable. I personally wouldn't use hardened leather on bracers unless you absolutely need to. I plan on making a new bracer because my current one is uncomfortable to wear. Scrap leather is around 5 bucks a pound I believe whereas tooling scrap is around 8. If you can't find any leather let me know as I have a full hide of some 16+ ounce leather I got a few months back, I can cut off enough for you to make 2 bracers and just charge you the per foot cost (typically they don't sell partial hides you have to buy the whole thing or find scraps).

Leather Factory usually has a good mix of leathers in two huge crates in the back and one or two up front. A lot of saddle skirting, tooling, upholstery, and weird random scraps in various weights and colors.

Here's another guide that is easy to follow.

http://www.geocities.com/craiggoetz/leather/bracer_tutorial.htm

A plain leather bracer using latigo or something along those lines to simply tie together can be made in about 5 minutes. If you're not going for 2-4 points I'd recommend using suede. I can bring my leather working stuff Thursday and/or Saturday and rip them out very quickly.

If you want something a little more fancy than that you'll probably have to commission work from one of the armorers. As for cloth armor there are several garbers who might be able to help out.

Well grellen, it depends on the cloth... If you want something like my, Quilted/Studded armor, It is hard to make. And would take alot of time.

Quilted armor wouldn't take very long to make, you can buy quilted material from Joann's fairly cheap then just make a shirt from that with very basic sewing skills. Alternatively you could take several layers of cloth and sew them together which would be a longer process but the finished product would look better (imho). Studding does however take a while and I wouldn't recommend doing it on a cloth shirt as you may at some point want to turn the shirt into a gambeson for maille.

better armor. He refers to chain maille, and wearing a gambeson under it for a total of [chain base] + 1 armor points. It's in the rulebook(read it).

Quilted armor is easy. it's just sewing cloth, and you can develop sewing skills by sewing weapon covers.

wikipedia for the win....
Gambeson
Maille

You win negative 1 internets for not using google.

http://www.geocities.com/craiggoetz/leather/bracer_tutorial.htm

just wait til I can help you with the project grellen...I can still fix those up so they look a little better. plus that guide isn't what you want for hardened leather.

while there are multiple ways to harden the way I found works best for me is:
Place bees wax in a double boiler and let it fully melt (this will take an hour or so depending on how much wax you use).
Take the finished leather product (once its fully assembled) and place it in the oven at about 150 degrees (my oven goes as low as 170 so thats what I use).
Once the wax is melted and the leather is hot to the touch and the studs are too hot to touch begin painting the wax into the leather while it's still in the oven. (putting tinfoil under the leather helps to keep the oven clean).
Allow the wax to soak into the leather and repeat the painting process several times over the next half hour to hour (typically 3+ coats of wax will be needed depending on leather thickness and knowing when its fully saturated but not over-saturated basically requires experience)
Once done remove the leather from the oven and allow it to dry around a mold roughly the same size and shape as your arm.

the down side to this method is that on hot summer days the wax will start to melt on the outside and will rub off on things also it's not as hard as it would be on a cool day.

alternate methods of making cuir boille include hammering, water boiling, oil boiling, and using some type of laquer to harden the leather.

I've personally tried the following methods:
Wax Dipping
Wax Painting
Wet leather dipped into boiling water
Dry leather dipped into boiling water
Hammering
Wet leather baked at various temperatures
Dry leather baked at low temp (170deg) and high temp (400deg)

I personally liked the results of wax best because it did not deform/shrink/warp the leather while almost all other methods did in some way change the size/shape/thickness of the leather or simply warped it beyond usable limits.