Replay Memory

Time for an update on the Assassin’s Creed : Brotherhood costume. I've made a huge, and very visible (yay!), amount of progress.

I've finished the hood. That's 22 pieces there.

Mission: Spiral sleeve

Full synchronisation: no puckering; correct length

I've done the spiral sleeves. The first one went together perfectly (shock! horror! a perfect sleeve). The second one though, ugh, I had to unpick it and redo it I think 5 times. The undersleeve puckered, the twisting ended up with a sleeve that was too long, and the twists didn't align next to each other properly. But eventually it all went together right. The trick was to align the white layer just a little bit further round on the underlayer and pin very carefully, with many pins. The aligning and pinning all had to be done by feel, because, of course, using the same measurements and alignments for supposedly identical pieces can’t be guaranteed to work.

Mission: Trim collar
Full synchronisation: accurate trim

The collar/back pieces also needed a lot of redoing. Some of this was not surprising because I worked on this garment in January, then put it aside to work on some other things. I thought I had labelled and recorded everything I needed to know (and I did pretty well) but I failed to note a few things – like where to put the thin lace I had bought; and there is still one pattern piece I don’t know what to do with.

Anyway, I was looking at my main reference pictures and saw that the back pieces had a central brocade patch and a brocade edging next to the binding. So I got some brocade trim and binding and hand-sewed them all together. (Working out what order to sew everything to ensure they fitted together properly was a bit mind-twisty and involved a bit of unpicking.)

Done. (x3)

But then, when I was looking through my reference file for something else, I noticed another picture:

That's the place for the thin lace that I was wondering about!

I looked at it. I thought about it. The lace looks better. I have the lace. It would mean a lot of unpicking. A lot of hand sewing. A lot of re-doing of hand sewing I'd already done. The binding and some of the seams would have to be redone as well. I'd already made the decision in January - leaving it the way it was would be undermining past!me. I slept on it. The next morning the lace still looked better. So I unpicked.
I didn't speak to anyone else about it (still haven't - Hi Dad) because they might try to talk me out of it, sympathise too much, or say “lace is girly”.

Ta-da! – The lace looks so much better.

I'm glad I made that decision – I would have been terribly disappointed with the finished product being inaccurate in a way I could have easily fixed and had originally planned for.

Mission: Attach collar

Full synchronisation: align shoulder seams; align centre front; have all the pieces fit together

Riddle me this: How is sewing like computer programming?

Answer: Sometimes you do everything right - the numbers have been double- and triple-checked but it still doesn’t work (and then you do the exact same thing again and it does work!?!)

Once I had finally finished trimming the collar panels I started sewing them together. I carefully lined them up according to the seam allowance, decided they were too finicky to sew by machine, and hand-sewed them together. 

Then I went to add the third layer. It didn't line up. It was about half an inch short at each centre front. Further testing showed that the first layer was half an inch shorter than the body at the centre front. I still have my muslin kicking around, so I measured it. The numbers from the muslin and the final were both the same but one fit together and one didn't. What I did notice was that all the shoulder seams were supposed to match up. 

Time for a new approach. I decided the best way to deal with this was to pin the shoulder panels onto the back piece 'in shape' rather than flat. I padded out the dress form with wadding to roughly match my father’s shape. 

New experience...

I lined up the side seems, the centre fronts and the centre back. Then I forced the rest of the pieces to fit; and they did! There's a bit of puckering and a bit of seam allowance abuse but now everything goes together properly.

Mission: Skirt panels

These worked! The topstitched panels look pretty cool.  I got enough usable fabric for everything I needed from the damaged brocade offcut I bought. I’ve sewn these together onto the jerkin and it’s looking good. Seeing it hanging on the dressform whenever I went in the sewing room was a great encouragement in the face of all the things above having gone wrong.

Jerkin and hood as modelled by Mum, who's threatening to steal the outfit from Dad.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.