So here’s my plan…

Altair from Assassin’s Creed (Click on picture for larger view)

Making the costume:

The main portion of Altair’s upper body is three pieces. He has his hood, which is attached to the “robe” and then he is wearing a long sleeved shirt under that. All of this would be relatively easy to make. I would need a big “urban” type white hooded sweatshirt to cut the shoulders and hood off of. Then I would sew that to a very plain white robe that has been modified and sewn together as one piece. Obviously with tails cut to resemble Altair’s. Then a simple long sleeved white t-shirt would be worn underneath that.

Altairs lower half can be made with a cheap pair of charcoal gray sweat pants. Something higher quality would be better, but jeans would be a little too modern looking and wouldn’t tuck into the boots as well. The boots are probably the hardest part of his wardrobe to recreate, so for simplicities sake I would just buy some cheap worn out leather boots from a garage sale or Goodwill and then wrap some thick brown clothe around the upper portion up to the knee. I have some old Hot Topic black buckle boots that could probably be worn down and colored to achieve a similar look as well (the buckles would have to be removed of course).

Now we move on to the really hard part, the weapons. Ideally, going to the local knife store and buying similar looking replicas would look the best, but that is REALLY expensive and I’m not sure what the local laws are in regards to walking around with multiple swords and knives. Making the upper brace would only need some brown leather and a handful of metal O-rings. The cumberbund type belt he wears again just needs leather (or fake leather) and put some sandpaper and maybe a woodburner to it to give it texture. The elaborate sword and knife holders/sheathes will depend on what fake weapons I can get my hands on. Also, he has a simple red wrap under need the cumberbund, but that just involes some stylish cuts of some basic red fabric from the local fabric shop.

Altair’s amazing gauntlets are different from each other. His right gauntlet is a simple wrap with no glove on his hand. His left gauntlet is much more involved with its metal plates and hidden dagger mechanism. Some thin sheet metal would do well and you could just give it a quick chemical dip to age it and give it a bit of a design. His left hand is missing a finger which can be folded down if I want to get that detailed, but he wears fingerless gloves with metal grommets on the knuckles. The grommets are barely noticeable, so I will most likely skip that detail to save time.  The knife mechanism is very detailed and I highly doubt I could make something like that given my complete lack of tools for metal working.

So here’s what I need:

- White hooded sweatshirt with deep hood
- Some sort of white robe
- Long sleeved white t-shirt
- Charcoal gray pants (most likely sweatpants)
- Brown left-handed glove
- Very thing sheet metal
- Red fabric
- Leather/Fake leather strabs and triangle for upper brace
- Handful of metal O-rings (Approx. 2″ Diameter)
- Large piece of leather/fake leather for belt
- Very old brown leather boots – or – age my current black Hot Topic Boots (as well as some other mods)
- Mechanism for hidden dagger
- Various fake weapons with brown sheathes
- Contacts, so I don’t have to wear my glasses (unless Altair is extremely near-sighted)

Without  any of the weapons or the leather belt and upper body brace, the costume is relatively easy and cheap to obtain the materials for.  That will be my starting point.  Then once that looks good I will move on to the more difficult portion of the costume.

Anyways, today I got notification that I was accepted to a new position at Microsoft working with the XBox Live Marketplace team through a local contract company. Words cannot describe how excited I am to start working again, especially in a position that I have been searching for almost a year. The people I met at the interview were very cool and seemed to have a lot of the same interests as I do, so it should be a good time.

Now I am off to go run the streets naked in celebration… or just sit in front of my PC to do paperwork and play CSS and TF2 until my fingers bleed.

I should be receiving my Intel E4500 CPU today and am very excited to have a more up to date chip for testing out games. Its nice to have a mid-level chip since most gamers don’t have an uber-overclocked quad core powered machine that doesn’t really give consumers an idea of how the game would run on their machine.

So, while all of you are eating turkey, watching football, or playing your Wii, I’ll be finishing up a review, building a system, playing Gears of War, and starting another review. Its really the only way to spend a four day weekend.

Woohoo!

According to FedEx, the NVousPC laptop is almost her, so you can expect a review for it popping up in the coming week or two.

Also, I think I need a better PC to test games as it can barely run Crysis on all the lowest settings. If things go well, I can get a rig together with a Dual Core CPU, 2GB of memory, and an nVidia 8800 or ATI 2900XT. Any sponsored (read: provided) components will get featured in every game and software review, so any assistance in piecing the system together would be a great help.

By the way, the cake is not a lie… and it was chocolate!