We share the glory of our victories

And here’s the last Assassin’s Creed costume: a Brotherhood outfit for my dad.

Last time I posted about this outfit I had finished the jerkin and hood. The doublet took longer because it is made of 64 pieces. For instance, there are 6 tiny pieces in each lower sleeve cap.

I used several different techniques to join the pieces in order to look as close as possible to the references. (Topstitching with zig-zag turned up a lot.)

 Shown here: bound and topstitched, straight-stitch topstitching, and zig-zag topstitching.

I had been planning to line the doublet, but in the end I decided to have a red facing only on the collar. Any more would have been unnecessary bulk.

The fit of the doublet was disappointing. The muslin I made fit properly but the real thing ended up being too big, and I’m not sure why. And fixing it would be very complicated. Thankfully, the original is not a closely fitted garment and the sash holds it together. (Actually, I haven’t made the sash yet – how I make it will depend on how I decide to make the insignia for the belt. The sash in these photos is just leftover fabric)

To get the decorative design down the side of the cape I didn’t even consider hand embroidery! I found a trim at Lincraft that worked perfectly.

I haven't made the leather attachments for the capes yet, but I plan to work on that later in the year.

I made both our undershirts at once, assembly line style.

Mass producing cuffs.

All the cuffs do up with small Dorset buttons left over from the Lucy costume I made earlier in the year.

Dad’s shirt has a ruffled collar which I made with cartridge pleating. My test run worked, but wasn’t quite right so I opted to be lazy and sew it down by machine. If I figure out a better way of constructing it I might redo it more carefully.

Overall, I was very happy I got to make this. Working out how to put it all together was a great challenge which I enjoyed. However, in this, and several other outfits I’ve made recently, I have not been as successful at achieving the desired fitting as I would like to be, especially when working from measurements. Even though I would like it to be a bit better, it has turned out fine and I’m happy with it and Dad is very pleased with it.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

2014 Review

In 2014 I made:

Lucy from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

A fantasy gown.

  A Viking outfit.

Ezio’s outfit from Assassin’s Creed II.

Ezio’s outfit from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

Ezio’s outfit from Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

A cotton petticoat (not pictured).

* * * * *

In the past year I discovered Dorset buttons which I first made for Lucy and then for my AC II costume.

These buttons are inexpensive, light, flat and soft which makes them very useful. The downside is that they take 40 minutes to an hour each to make, but for these costumes I found that manageable.

I used bleach on fabric for the first time ever to decorate the AC: Revelations costume and was very pleased with the outcome. I also discovered the usefulness of string as part of the trimming toolkit.

With the Lucy and Assassin costumes I started to come to terms with myself about not always needing everything to be screen accurate. I’ve often observed that the overall impact of a garment is more important than whether the small details are right but that doesn’t stop me getting worked up about them. However I managed to be satisfied with having the Lucy outfit and the AC II outfit trimmed with a gold pattern rather than trimmed with a screen-identical gold pattern.

 

These are not the same.

Very few people other than me will notice, and if I had adapted or hand-done something for the sake of accuracy but of poorer quality, that would have been noticeable.

While attempting an accurate trim on the AC II outfit I discovered my limits in the field of handsewing which might, if I am very sensible, help me to make more realistic decisions about future garments. I ended up painting the motifs and using braid instead.

While I didn’t develop many new skills making the Assassin outfits I still learned a lot from them. I had to solve many challenges with regard to patterning, fitting, historicity, accuracy and construction, and went through the process with a lot of doubt as to how they would turn out. Happily, I think they eventually turned out well. Of course, in 2015 they will require me to develop a new skill-set as I try to make the armour and weaponry to go with them.

Given that I am largely self-taught and am constantly putting myself in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing, it was kind of odd to take on a mentoring role in the last year. At the beginning of the year I was asked for help by a girl from church who had never sewn before, so I walked her through making a sundress. It was a fairly complicated first project, containing darts, front/sidefront construction and a zip, and required fitting a mock-up. However, I am of the belief that it is better for a beginner to make something they want rather than something simple but dull.

I also spent some time sewing costumes with my young cousin. I have achieved my goal of corrupting the next generation! When we visited in the middle of the year I did some corsetry with her. When she visited us a few weeks ago she made this Victorian-inspired gown (McCall’s pattern 6097).

It’s not completely finished in the picture, but it's pretty good for three days work. I’m very proud of her.

Now, I’m going to stop typing because I have a new project to start.

We are assassins

They’re done! They’re finally done!

I’ll have more detailed write-ups for the AC II and Brotherhood outfits soon (the Revelations one is here ) but I’m so excited to be finished I wanted to share them now.

Next year I will start on the accessories.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.

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.

"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.