MamaFae's Knit Whits: How my kids challenged my skills this Halloween; or how to make armor from craft foam Part 2

So we left off with Link's Tunic and Hat........I forgot to mention that I used the most awesome spray adhesive to glue all the different armor pieces and details together.

Now on to Austin's choice of character. Ezio Auditore da Firenze from Assassin's Creed II. Here is the screenshot I found online that gave a good view of the basic armor set for this character. The items that were most important for Austin were the hood, the cape, the bracer, and the belt/sash.

Since I was already working with craft foam for Colton and Lily's costumes I started with the belt buckle and bracer first. The bracer is from an "upgrade" armor set not the one in the picture above. The cape we chose was also an upgrade that was black with a red liner. here's a good pic of the bracer.

I didn't find nearly as many or as detailed tutorials online for this character as I did for Link and Zelda, but I did find some that were helpful:

Using the same techniques as the shoulder armor for Zelda, I created this bracer using the templates in the link above.

After this I riveted the "leather" part of the bracer to a piece of faux leather fabric. I tried to use eyelets to allow for leather lacing to tie the bracer onto the arm, but the eyelets wouldn't work, so I just threaded the lacing under the craft foam piece and tied it onto the arm that way.

For the second bracer I just cut a piece of foam, sealed and painted it black. Then I drew a design from a template I made off a picture I found online. I used silver puff paint to fill in the scored design.

The belt piece was a lot of fun to create. First I used this picture to create a template to draw off of:

I edited it in picasa to get a line drawing I could trace by taping it up to the window. Once I had that i cut it apart and cut out the separate pieces you see in the unpainted picture of the buckle below.

I used the same basic technique as in the second link above. I used a ball point pen in black to draw/score the details into the foam.

Sealing it with the same glue/decoupage mixture as the other armor I then started with a coat of black paint. Then I did a few coats of sliver paint, rubbing it out of the scored details. Finshed with a watered down coat of black to really make the details stand out and make the buckle look more like it was made out of silver metal.

The cape was another challenge, but I found using the craft foam riveted to faux leather to make the shoulder armor allowed me to sew the cape onto the shoulder piece. I attached the belt to a piece of red satin. Here's Austin modeling the belt and cape for me.

After a trial run of the costumes as the school's harvest fest, we realized that the cape wasn't as sturdy, so I redid it adding more rivets and faux leather to hold it all together.

The most challenging part of Austin's costume was the hood. It is very iconic and quite specific in design. There were a number of patterns online, but when I used them the effect wasn't right. So, I decided to create my own pattern using the screen shot above.

I spent quite a bit of time taking measurements from the picture and scaling it up to make a usable pattern. I found that using heavy interfacing in the band and point around the opening of the hood gave it the same stiff appearance from the screenshot. Sadly some how the paper pattern pieces have gone missing in the chaos following trick or treating or I'd post pictures of them here. Here are the front and side views of the finished hood:

I ran out of time, so I wasn't able to finish the jacket that the hood should have been attached to. I choose to tack it to the shirt Austin would wear instead, and I think it made a good substitution. The shirt is from last year's Legolas costume. I made it from an off the rack shirt I found at Goodwill (notice a trend here?) that I replaced the sleeves on with fabric taken from a shower curtain!