"We work in the dark to serve the light"

The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations outfit has a number of decorative designs on the fabric. In some images they look like embroidery and in others they don’t, so I have chosen to make the designs by bleaching the fabric.

To get the hood and skirt designs, I traced over reference pictures in GIMP with my drawing tablet. I then manipulated the picture to make the designs symmetrical and flat.

For the doublet I decided to use the assassin logo which is how it appears in game, although there is a different symbol on most of the promotional art. The design I used is readily available online, being printed on t-shirts and the like. (I would like to express my gratitude to Ubisoft for making costumers’ lives easier for once!)

My design patterns for bleaching – not to scale:

Hood Back

Hood Top

Hood Beak

Hood Side

Upper Skirt

Lower Skirt

Once I had my designs, I printed them on overhead transparencies which I then cut into stencils.  For the bleach, I used a Milton bleach tablet moistened in a small amount of water and applied it with a paint brush. I had to be careful with the consistency – I mostly had it at ‘almost a paste’. If the mixture was too liquid the bleach would run under the stencils.

Once I had finished the bleaching I let it sit for 8 or so hours, then rinsed out the fabric.

Out to dry – but not outside because by this time it was 9pm.

And here are the finished pieces:

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

"Everything is permitted"

The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations costume for my cousin was the harder to fit than the other two assassin outfits I am making because he lives in a different state. I mailed a muslin for him to try on, but found I couldn’t really get enough information from the exercise to be confident of a good fit. I know there are people out there who can make fitted garments just from measurements - I must learn this skill.

I made all the skirt shapes by draping and cutting the desired shapes, based on my reference pictures.

The centre-front doublet piece extends up to form the front panel of the hood.

This costume needs a sturdy grey-blue fabric so I am using a light denim.  It has to be lightweight because there is so much fabric in the outfit. I will use the leftover red poplin from the other outfits for the sash – and that’s all the fabric I need.

This will one day be a costume.

I have resisted the urge to hand embroider all the decorative trims on this outfit and will instead use a variety of braids. The variations between the many reference pictures gave me some freedom in choosing the trims so, although I have not achieved exact matches, I’ve ended up with a set I am mostly happy with. 

There are designs on two of the skirts, the front of the doublet, the hood beak, and down the side front of the hood.  I am going to bleach these motifs into the fabric. 

 I will soon have a more detailed post on the bleaching process.


Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

"Where other men are limited by morality or law"

When I saw the outfit from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood my first thought was, ‘that will be really tricky to do; I hope I never have to make that’. Over time this developed into, ‘I hope I get a chance to make that; it would be an interesting challenge’. So far it has not been as difficult as I was expecting but still an interesting challenge.

To make the spiral sleeves I taped a paper sleeve pattern at the seam, drew the spiral I wanted (being sure to start and end in the right places and have the right number of rounds) and cut along the line. It will be lined in black to get the slashed effect.

The sleeve pattern and mock-up.

The rest of the doublet came together without too much difficulty. I drew all the patchwork shapes onto front and back pattern pieces, cut the pieces out and added seam allowances.

I took this photo so I would know how to fit the pieces together after they were cut apart – digital cameras are wonderful.

The mock-up fitted on the first test. The only changes I decided to make were to extend some of the armhole-adjacent pieces so that the armscye shape would be better defined.

The original pattern piece with attached armscye extension.

Because this pattern has a ridiculous number of pieces – 59 in the doublet alone, not including linings – and many of them are tiny, I have had to be very careful with how I label the pattern pieces and where I put them. Before I cut out the patterns I worked out for every edge whether it would be bound, hemmed or in a seam. In some cases I also noted the order in which each side of the piece had to be sewn. My choices of edging were determined by looking at my reference pictures and deciding which kind of edge would give the closest match. There were a few textures I just couldn’t work out how to do, but I am comforting myself with the thought that this is a uniform and there would probably have been slight variations between individual garments, so my construction needn’t match any one picture exactly.

Some joins have a seam; some have one piece hemmed and topstitched to the other piece. Some edges are bound with thin bias and others are finished with thick binding with three rows of cord stitched in underneath.

The skirt patterns were also mostly made by looking at reference pictures and trying to get my muslin to look the same. I measured from the end of the jerkin pattern to where the skirts ought to end on the wearer. Of the three assassin outfits I am making, this one was the easiest to fit because it is for someone else (fitting on yourself is a pain) who was around to have fittings (managing long-distance fittings is a skill I need to improve).

The main fabric for this outfit is cotton homespun in white and red. The red linings will be cotton poplin, as will the white shirt. For the brocade panels I have finally, after some searching, found a brocade with a small pattern, but I’m a bit worried that there might not be enough, especially as I will need to work around some damaged areas. (It was end of roll with some flaws – but ‘perfect’ enough to warrant buying it anyway.) The outfit also needs two varieties of lace and a lot of bias binding.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

"Where other men blindly follow the truth"

To make the pattern for my Assassin’s Creed II outfit I started with my body block. It took several iterations to get it to fit with all the seams in the right positions. I had planned to do the red lines as slashes, in order to be historical, but the more I looked at my reference images, the more I became convinced that the red lines on the outfits in the game just didn’t look like slashes. After searching through some online museum collections I found that putting braid on a doublet was also a technique used at the time. I couldn’t find a braid I liked so I have settled for a velvet ribbon. To get the effect of the white layer under the red stripe I have decided to sew the doublet with the seam allowances on the right side, allowing them to protrude from underneath the ribbon.

A doublet from the Met; art from Assassin's Creed II; my tests – I’m going with the technique in the bottom right.

It took several iterations to achieve the fitted look for the hood that the costumes in the game have while retaining the same construction pieces. I am happy with how my mock-up turned out; I just hope it translates to my actual fabric. Getting the sleeve caps to have the same shape as the original was the hardest part of this pattern. I ended up taking the slashes all the way up the sleeve and using the seams there to give the sleeves the proper shape.

My pattern – still at the 'I hope it works' stage.

I am making this costume out of the same fabric I am using for the Brotherhood outfit. This means my outfit will be white rather than the pale grey it appears to be in some reference pictures, but it allows me to economise on fabric. Between the two outfits I needed nearly 30 metres of fabric.

Both outfits laid out for cutting – a jigsaw puzzle of tiny pieces.

The only extra fabric I needed was brown poplin for the cape and pants. I haven’t worked out what lace I will use for this outfit yet, but I like the style of the one from my stash in the picture below (which probably guarantees that I won’t be able to find anything like it should I need a different width or greater length).

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.