"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.