The original costume in the movie consists of a white chemise, a brown fabric vest, and a corset of brown suede. I chose to make mine in only 2 pieces--the chemise and a vest/corset combination entirely out of the suede. While not totally accurate, you really can't tell the difference. The trim on the vest proved to be the most time-consuming part of the costume. I spent a over a month hand embroidering strips of leather with gold thread. I started this costume last summer, and almost didn't finish it in time for Trilogy Tuesday! (although I did have about 10 other costumes to make, so this one kind of got pushed aside.) I still haven't embroidered the strip of neckline trim, I machine embroidered a strip of leather in a swirly gold design for now.
For the chemise, I was originally going to use a silk paisly jacquard like in the movie. But that proved hard to find and expensive, so when the Silkessence at the local Joann's went on sale for 99 cents, I bought 9 yards, thinking that would be plenty. I actually needed more! But that's because I used a circle skirt, and lined it with another circle skirt to make it nice and full. You can tell I've grown an inch since I hemmed it! There is a slight train in the back because...I like it that way. The sleeves required a lot of fabric too-I forget how much exactly but it was something like 4 yards. I lined those as well, because the silkessence was rather sheer. Now that I've seen Return of the King, the real sleeves seem to be very sheer, so maybe I shouldn't have lined mine. Oh well, live and learn! For the sleeve pattern I took a normal sleeve cap and widened it out to get the nice "poof".. Then I measured how long I wanted the sleeves to be, and marked that length on my fabric. I made the sleeves the full 43" width of the fabric. They tie at the arms with a simple off-white cord from Joanns, which passes through a loop of smaller cord which gathers the fabric with an eyelet. Kind of hard to explain, but its like the movie version. The bodice was just a regular 6 dart pattern and I lined it with white muslin. The neckline of the chemise has 5 pintucks made with the coverstitch on my serger of all things! I was able to mess with the tension of the bottom looper enough to pull the fabric into a pintuck. Yeah, I have a serger with coverstitch but I don't own a pintucking foot, go figure. The edge of the neckline is finished with a bias strip, and I stitched along the top of that with a decorative leaf/vine machine stitch with gold thread.
For shoes I'm wearing some flat Mary-Janes that used to be black but my dad spray painted them cream. I left my hair in braids all day to get the Eowyn waves....too bad its red! ;)
I wore this costume for about 10 hours at Trilogy Tuesday and had a blast! It did get a bit hot though...all that synthetic fabric! I also wore it to a Tolkien event at the local art museum, where my friend and I were interviewed by the paper because of our costumes!
