Costume-Making 101: The Hoods Have It

Hello again and this week I'd finally like to take a look at the hood designs I've been working on over the past few weeks.

Now regular readers (there must be some out there...) will of course remember that some time ago I' set myself the challenge of coming up with a design for an Assassin's Creed hood that held its shape, looked correct, but didn't feature any "cheats," such as wires, Velcro, etc.  My first crack went fairly well, relying mostly on layers of interfacing and lines of stitching to create structure.

As it happened, working from scratch on the templates, the hood turned out to be too big for me to wear without it looking a little silly - hopefully I'll be able to adapt it for someone else to use.  Despite all of panel lines on the shell of the hood, the actual pattern is pretty simple, based in part on the hood of a coat I own.  

To clarify, the parts are as follows:

1. The centre back part of the mantle, which will button to the coat

2. The centre of the hood itself, which runs from the base of the neck over the head

3. Side panel

4. The sides of the mantle, which sit on the shoulders

So a fairly simple pattern, but once I'd added in the panel details, doubled up some of the details etc, the  final part count for the shell was pretty high:

So, one hood under my belt, where to next?  I'd dabbled in the past with the fantastic pattern designed by Yulittle on Deviantart's website, which I'd used for the little 'un's coat, plus another white version, which I expertly modeled in a previous blog post:

I was pleased with how these had turned out, but really wanted something of my own design to wear to this year's events.  So, break out the crayons!

The Brief: create a simple hood pattern that can be adapted, added to or scaled to fit the majority of people.  

The idea was to create a design that could be created from two panels for the hood itself, with a third part to act as a mantle over the shoulders.  I wasn't going to use wires to keep the front opening in place, so trial and error it was.  Following a few glasses of liquid inspiration, one evening while the girls were out, I set to creating a pattern.  

Having been playing through Assassin's Creed Unity at the time, I decided to make things complicated for myself and go for something that resembled the "Sans-Culottes" hood from the game, featuring the Medieval-looking tail on the back.  I had some corduroy laying around from a previous project, so after cutting two rough panels, I pinned them together and proceeded to adjust them with pins, wearing it in the mirror.  A small warning here, be careful when pinning things onto your head after three glasses of wine.  Enough said I think. 

After some refining, re-drafting and test hoods, I had the following pattern:

Some more sewing time later, I'd put together the finished hood.  It was constructed using red cotton twill (to match the in-game reference), lined with cotton calico and bias trimmed in dark blue.  A bit like this:

You can see the "tail" is pinned down to give a neater look and the small tucks to help gather the hood into a more fitted shape.  In the end it turned out a little too large for me to use, but a useful learning tool.  

From here I reasoned that a more fitted approach was needed, along with a wider opening across the bottom of the hood at the front - my original design gathered the front together in a similar way to modern hooded coat when buttoned.  So, out came the scrap material, the pins an the crayons again, and I came up with this:

Once again I went on to construct the hood using red cotton twill, with a matching cream fabric at the front as a contrast.  Inside, it was lined with cotton calico again, with a small tuck in the front edge to pull it into shape around the opening - you can see its position in the photo above - on the side panel piece there are two gather lines, giving me this:

The front opening is bias-bound, with the mantle still needing to be finished.  Alas, I don't think this one will see use either, mainly as one too many people have commented on its Santa-esque qualities...

Third times' the charm then, which I adapted slightly, pulling the top of the side panel down and including a small, central dart to help define the shape.  With the second hood above, I'd interfaced the front cream-coloured stripe and the mantle to help add structure and with my third attempt, I planned to use it a lot more.

So, some more patterning later, the final design looked like this:

I decided in the end to match the fabric of this hood to the coat I'd be using it with, so went with my usual dark blue cotton twill, lined with a matching deep red twill, with interfacing through the front opening and the mantle.  I'm cursing myself for not photographing the construction, but here is the finished result:

The font opening has been heavily interfaced, building up in narrowing layers up to the applied embroidered piece, where it is approximately six layers thick.  The embroidered panel has its own interfacing, plus the additional stitching around the panel help create a very structured finished.  The raw edges have all been bias-bound and stitched using the "rustic" pattern from the coat.  I should point out that my new polystyrene friend in the photos has a differently shaped head to me, so the hoods don't sit exactly as they do on me, but they're close enough.  

So there we have it - I've not included pictures of the other eight or nine half-finished hoods I showed in the previous post as they're pretty much the same design but incomplete as I changed dimensions and details.  I'll cover the construction of the next hood in greater detail, once I can get some time sorted out with its future owner.  Please feel free to use, adapt and improve the designs above - I'd love to see results of what everyone else can add to them!

I'll leave it there for today, other things to do and probably more sewing I need to get on with.  There has been some progress on a couple of other projects, but I'll tackle those next week. 

Until next time.