My googling skills drop off sharply when leaving the tech domain, but it appears that when it comes to sewing a robe of archmagi, nobody has ever done that in the history of D&D (or at least, published their work to the internet). Seems that I’m going to be the first — meaning that when the end costume ends up being of the “at home” variety, I can put a blame everywhere else but me and my lack of skills.
By the way, if you’re here to blatantly copy my patterns — then you’re gonna leave disappointed. This post will contain a few approximate pattern sketches that illustrate the general gist, but for the end result was achieved by tracing an old T-shirt for base and applying the “logic” to its outline.
Probably the reason why the end result is rather underwhelming.
Yolo-able layers
Fortunately, we can probably largely #yolo the patterning on the bottom three layers, as any deficiencies on those layers will be covered by the outer layers (with some asterisks). The bottom layer layer can get away with me eyeballing four correctly-sized two-trapezoid combos:

Note that I haven’t bothered drawing sleeve holes on the above pattern, even though they’re kinda non-optional. The sleeves are also missing, but — since they should be relatively small pieces of cloth (at least compared to layer 4, I’m saving them for … later.
In reality, this two-trapezoid pattern kinda sucks, but it’s the only way to go if you want to have a single sheet of fabric. Ideally, the waist-line (and the bottom edge) of the fabric should curve on the bottom half of the bottom layer for uniform waist-to-floor length — but for now, it will do. We can always fix that later.
We will yolo layers 2 and 3 the last, since they’re minimally visible from the front and not at all visible from the back. If we run out of cloth and “cheat” on the backend, nobody will notice. This isn’t the case with layers 1 and 4.
The top layer
Having sewn one costume so far, I am very non-uniquely unqualified for this job. Let our headaches begin.
The difficulty of the task at hand begins with paying attention to the shoulder area. It appears that around the shoulder area, the outer layer folds inside out, and the inner side of that layer becomes the outside layer for a short bit. This appears to be a point where sewing machine music stops.
Tracing the image, we get the following pattern:

This looks like something I absolutely do not want to yolo, so let’s do a quick scale model proof-of-concept to see if we’re on the right path:

Yeah, sorta? But here’s the thing: with the time running out, I decided that instead of trying to figure out how exactly the patterning of that outer shoulder patch would work, I’ll go for a different strategy.
… let’s take inspiration from Billy Mitchell. We’re going to cheat with a very short, feather-trimmed cape instead.
3 Replies to “Robe of Archmagi R&D: Patterns”