Costume-making 101: Post-Comic-Con Hang-ups and the Plan Ahead

So, here we are a few weeks after the big event, fully rested and fresh from a couple of weeks of not blogging, not making anything and giving Assassin’s Creed 3 another try.  Prepare for a complete 180, but I now think it’s a pretty decent game all in all – don’t get me wrong, it’s no AC2 but worth a punt for the right price.  Just stick with it past the first 4,000 boring hours and it will start to get good.  Promise.

Where are we now then?  Well, Comic-Con first off.  This was the second event we’ve all been to and I was pleasantly surprised by the huge turn-out on the Saturday and the consistently high standard people achieve for the costumes, be they shop-bought or painstakingly hand-made.  Everyone we met (and had about a million photos with) was enthusiastic, polite and genuinely interested and discussing all things nerd; loved it.  However, if you’re listening Comic-Con organisers, how about next time around we try filling all that extra space with some more/different stalls?  Hard to believe I had a bonus from work burning a hole in my pocket and I managed to spend zero.  Well apart from about £20 on disappointing noodles.

Anyway, what did we learn from Comic-Con as far as costumes are concerned?  Well, lots of people go dressed as an Assassin’s Creed character.  A lot.  Mostly as Connor from AC3 (now a good-ish game, but always a fantastic costume) and mostly in some variation of shop-bought costume, which generally look quite good.  My friend Scott’s Ezio-esque outfit attracted a lot of attention, as did my other half’s and step-daughter’s due in no small part to the fact that they are girls who Cosplay Assassin’s Creed, which seems to be a bit of a novelty still.  The one “weak” link in the chain was my costume.  I was happy with the quality of work and the general “historical” nature of it – a lot of research and design went into getting looking right.  So what was wrong with it?  No flair.  None.  I looked really hard for it as well and I couldn’t find any.

Bugger.

So naturally with the event out of the way I set to with designing the new coat for October.  No rest for the wicked.  Given the abundance of Connor/AC3 costumes on show I took my cue from the masses and decided to build an AC3-inspired coat, but I a more realistic way.  There are plenty of patterns online for this, but I wanted to do something individual to make it stand out.  So, time to break out the crayons and canvas and get cutting!

Base Pattern

After some searching online and through the Big Drawer of Patterns I decided to base my new project around Simplicity 2333, widely referred to as the Captain Hook pattern.  I’d used this before for my first AC3 coat largely unaltered, save for the sleeve attachment as I couldn’t figure out set-in sleeves at that time (more on this later), plus the added hood.  This was produced in a blue and white drill cotton, and turned out ok.

This time around I planned to use the upper body and sleeves in their original state and then adapt the two skirt parts to give the shape I needed.  Rather than destroy the pattern I had, I sent about creating a canvas replacement, made from a donated roll of printing canvas I rescued from work.  Some measuring cutting, re-cutting and copious study of an AC3 statue I had on the shelf and I came up with the following:

The idea behind this is that the tab on the far right turns back and buttons down along the whole length to give the blue turn-backs, then the large extension folds back over itself and buttons to the rear of the coat tales, giving this:

I believe this is fairly close to what is being represented in-game and it differs somewhat to other patterns I’ve seen out there.  Please feel free to use and adapt this idea, but as with anything credit for the idea would be appreciated.  The back portion of the skirt overlaps itself to create the buttoned recess we see on the back of the Connor coat so rather than simply sew a contrast piece over the original fabric, I decided to divide the rear skirt into three pieces, to create a more believable overlap.  And a lot more work, of course.    Here’s where we end up, following another mod to the leading edge:

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself at this point – a custom patern for a tricky coat design, fabrics on order and my colours pretty much down, plus a completed hood, which I’ll show you next time around.  And then something bad happened.  Or rather, something very good, which was also bad; I watched the Assassin’s Creed Unity trailer from E3.  Then I watched the making-of video.  Then I watch the co-op gameplay video.  Then, I decided to buy an Xbox One and the game the day of release. 
And I fell in love with Arno’s coat…

Now what?  Ah yes, spoilers: 

More to come folks, will most likely be moving the blogs to the weekend rather than mid-week so stay tuned!  Oh, and Blogger appears to be playing up, so apologies for the poor format...

Until next time.