Summer holidays are great. When Uni finished I finally got to spend a significant amount of time (and brainpower, which is actually the more important thing) on the remaining assassin costumes. (A post on the brotherhood costume will come soon. I’ll stick to my Assassin’s Creed II costume for this post.)
Once I had decided to
paint and use braid instead of embroidery, the skirts and then the whole costume went together very quickly.
There’s a bit too much contrast between the braid and paint, but it’s still infinitely preferable to finishing in two years’ time with poor embroidery.
The tunic does up with
Dorset buttons, because they looked just like the picture.
Here are the slashed sleeves:
When I made the sleeve pattern I went through many iterations until I finally got one which sat the right way. On the finished product one sleeve sits right and the other not so well, which I find exceedingly annoying (and other people probably find exceedingly invisible).
Here’s the hood:
This I think is as good as it could be (the in-game hoods are not made of real fabric). I didn’t lose the tiny beak pieces, which is a win, although there were a few games of hide and seek around the sewing room. My original plan was to make the hood removable, but instead I constructed it as a separate piece and attached it to the tunic at the front points and the centre back. Wearing the hood gives you horrendous visibility; for most of the photo-shoot I couldn’t see above knee-level (which made it very had to look in the direction mum was pointing).
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| I cannot see a thing. |
So, not the best uniform for aiming or fighting or climbing or jumping…
Usually I make costumes that don’t involve trousers but I had to make pants for this costume. Actually, this is one of two
costumes I made pants for last year. Both times I went to mum for help and she did most of the patterning. Making these trousers was no fun. Actually that’s not quite true. At the very beginning they were great. You sew this bit and this bit and here and tada! it looks like a garment in no time at all, and all that is left to go are the hems and - wait, no, it doesn’t fit and also looks bad. I spent the rest of the afternoon taking them apart over and over again. They fit now, but they don’t look great.
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| Since taking these pictures I’ve bought taller boots, so even less of the pants will be visible. |
One of these days, I’m going to have to learn how to make pants properly myself. More enjoyable (and successful) was making Dorset buttons that aren’t white to go with them.
The other undergarment for this outfit is a shirt. Mine is made of cotton lawn and constructed, mostly, out of rectangles. The shirt is so comfortable I don’t know why this isn’t a standard feature of modern loungewear. (Probably because loungewear isn’t a thing nowadays.) Ezio has on odd curved seam in his sleeve that I had to try to match.
It took some finagling to get the collar to sit at the right angle but it worked out in the end. The shirt closes with lacing through hand-bound eyelets. These are the first hand-bound eyelets I’ve done and I was exceedingly pleased with how they look, although I will need to work on my technique so that I can get the holes big enough to take something other than thin string.
I’m calling this costume finished for the moment, but I plan to start work on the leather pieces and weaponry later in the year after I’ve made my dresses for the upcoming Jane Austen festival.
Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.
