My cosplay of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, as worn at NYCC 2014. Yes, I forgot the cape. I facepalmed when I got home that night and saw it still hanging there in the closet. Thanks to Kathleen for taking the picture.<\/p><\/div>\n

I promised a few people I\u2019d blog the construction\u00a0of my Ezio cosplay, plus I’ve been meaning to start a blog for ages, so, well, here it is. The costume isn\u2019t quite done, but I’ve worn it a few times now and I figure I might as well document the work that\u2019s gone into it so far.<\/p>\n

In summary: everything except the boots is\u00a0handmade, by me, mostly over the summer of 2014. I\u2019ll get into the details of each individual piece later, but that includes a shirt, vest, and hooded doublet with trimmings and embellishments, sculpted belt insignia with straps and buckles and so forth, and cape. I still need to do the hidden blade and vambrace and so forth, and I want to rework the belt with some sturdier straps, but I\u2019d say about a hundred hours of work have gone into this so far.\u00a0I didn\u2019t keep close track, but I know that the embroidery alone took six audiobooks to get through and then there was drafting, sewing, embossing the velvet, attaching trims, etc.<\/p>\n

I used a sewing machine for construction, and even serged a couple of the edges before binding them, so it\u2019s not really a rigorously historical project. It\u2019s a video game costume not a reenactment piece. But a lot of the details and basically all of the embellishments were done by hand, because that\u2019s how I like to work. At some point I might re-do the bindings since they\u2019re the only place where the machine stitching is really\u00a0visible, but I\u2019ve got some other bits and pieces to finish off before I get to that point.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll leave you with this, as a sort of preview:<\/p>\n