Eowyn's Green Dress

My friend Katie asked me to make her a dress for Dragon Con.  We decided to make Eowyn's green gown, though she wasn't concerned about being super accurate.  I used The Costumer's Guide to Movies as my main resource.

For the pattern, I used Simplicity 4940 (surprise, surprise - the green dress is even on the packaging).  The outer dress is made out of green crushed velvet from Jo-Ann's.

The under dress, which was used for the reverse of the outer dress as well as the lining, was a metallic paisley brocade, also from Jo-Ann's.  I dyed all nine yards with apple green Rit dye.

The original fabric laid over the dyed fabric

It turned out so well!

Attaching the reverse to the sleeves and skirt was a bit annoying, but it worked out.  I ended up sewing down the seams of the outer fabric to tack it down nicely.  The front panel is open, like Eowyn's.

I also added a collar.

The final touch was adding the embroidery along the collar.  I couldn't find anything I liked, and even dyed some cotton trim before deciding it wouldn't work.  I finally ended up using a gold lace.  I tacked it down and hand-stitched it around the entire collar.  I actually ended up straightening it a bit more from what you see in the photo, as I didn't like how uneven it turned out.

 

The final product ...

Eomer and Eowyn Photo Shoot

Two weeks ago, my husband and I met up at a local forest preserve with Lulette Gehron to do a shoot of our Eomer and Eowyn costumes.  She did a lovely job - we got some fantastic shots!  These are some of the stills that Lulette edited for us.  I'll post a separate post in a few days with some of our other favorites!

Eowyn Victory Dress Part 8: Finished at Last!

Whew!  This monster of a project is finally done!  It has been a tough couple of weeks, I can tell you that.  Between canning everything coming out of the garden (and off the peach trees), I've done nothing but can and costume this entire month.

I'm not entirely pleased with the final result.  There is a lot I don't like about the dress, but I'm not going to start pointing it out.  Here are some shots of the jacket.  This is before I tacked down the sleeves so that they aren't so poofy.  I will mention that I know that the "belt" isn't correct in the back, but I had a lot of issues with where to put the zipper, and I ended up making it a lot tighter than I'd originally planned, so that threw everything off.  I wasn't going to start ripping, though.  I'm also not thrilled with how the sleeves lay, but the fabric just didn't lay correctly to begin with.  It's on the lightweight side, but I chose a heavy satin for the lining.  Unfortunately, with all of the gold embroidery, it makes the fabric a bit too stiff, and because it's so light weight, it just doesn't sit correctly.  Oh well.  There's nothing I can do about that.  I could either have it lay perfectly, or have a more authentic pattern.  I determined that the pattern was more important.

The interesting thing about the bodice and front panel is that the majority of it all is hand-stitched.  I did use the machine to stitch the bodice together, make the seams on the sides, and add the two pieces of ribbon down the front, but the rest of it is hand-stitched.  The front piece, the belts, the ribbon along the top, and the sleeves are all hand-stitched to the bodice.  And don't forget the beading!  It might not seem like a lot, but that was maybe 10 hours worth of work.  I also had to rip the belts out once and redo them, as they'd somehow gotten bunched up without my noticing, and the one side was markedly different from the other.

Here is the complete, finished piece.  This includes the dress and jacket with front panel.  Some day I'll get some good photos, but not at 1:30 in the morning the day that we're leaving.

I will probably be posting the work I did on Matt's Eomer costume when we get back from Dragon Con, so keep an eye out for that!

I'm also now on Instagram, so look for me there as CasualCostumer!

Eowyn Victory Dress Part 7: Accessories

This post is going to be short and sweet!

Eowyn's wig:  Something you may not realize: shopping for a wig online is INSANELY difficult!  I bought one that seemed perfect, and not only was the color totally wrong from the photo (it had streaks of brown), it wasn't the same shape, either.  I had to send it back.  I purchased the Cassie wig from Amphigory, which was about $30.   I purchased color 24B (which is not the color in the photo).  I found out about this wig from a Cosplay Island Eowyn costume.

Eowyn's shoes:  The shoes for the outfit can be seen in only one shot of Miranda Otto walking to set.

I bought a $20 pair of ballet slippers from Payless, and spray-painted them gold.  I used Rust-oleum that I had laying around from repainting an umbrella stand, and it seemed to work really well.  I didn't want to spray the insides, so I put on a pair of old socks and sprayed the shoes while wearing them, let them dry for a few minutes, then slowly peeled the socks off.  It seems to have worked really well!  We'll see how they hold up after a night on the con floor.

Eowyn Victory Dress Part 6: Where Were We?

I haven't blogged all week because I've been working on a lot of little stuff here and there.  It's too much to put into one post, though, so let me start with Eowyn's jacket and front panel.

I really put off making the sleeves because, frankly, they scared me.  After draping a few times and making several tests, I did finally buckle down and make a pattern.  I used the sleeves from Simplicity 4589 as a starting point. 

Here's the pattern that I made:

I cut out the lining and the actual fabric and found out ... I was like two inches too short with the damned fabric.  NOOOOO!  I don't know how that happened.  Oops.  Anyway, the sleeves of the jacket are now just a tad too short.  I may have to adjust the sleeves on the dress so that they're not too long.

I also added in the piping.

It's not puffy like that anymore, it's sewn down.  I do need to tack it in a few places so that the lining doesn't droop.  I am a bit disappointed at the weight of the sleeve.  I feel like it doesn't sit correctly due to all of the crazy embroidery, and it doesn't have the weight that I really wanted.  Oh well.

The other thing that I worked on this week was the front panel.  I couldn't find any trim that would work for the seams down the middle.  I tried to simple make seams, but you couldn't really see them.  I ended up buying gold organza ribbon from Hobby Lobby.  I think it works okay.

I then beaded the four rows of gold beads and the pattern down the middle.  I haven't done the embroidery yet, but that's not a priority.  If someone comes up and is like, "where's the silver embroidery?" I'll just smack them.  I am pretty pleased with how this came out.  I had a really hard time finding beads that I thought worked.  I ended up just grabbing a bunch of different stuff from Hobby Lobby.  It's not exactly what I wanted for the green beads, but it'll do.

Tomorrow I'll be placing the front panel on the jacket, attaching the sleeves to the jacket, and putting on the belts and finishing up with the zipper.

Here's a reference shot of the front panel detail for comparison:

Eowyn Victory Dress Part 3: Jacket Front Panel

I still don't know what to call this darn thing.  It must have an actual name.

So, the jacket has this really cool embroidered detailing over it.  I started drafting it the other night. I'm a bit annoyed that we don't know what the back looks like.  Is it just the front panel, or does this detailing go down over the back at all?  Oh well.

I made the jacket bodice mock-up out of white muslin, so I used scraps from Shadow Weaver to make the front piece and belts for contrast.

 I made some adjustments, then made another mock-up out of the original brocade I'd purchased for the costume.

It's just about right, so I made the patterns with seam allowances.  There will still be some adjustments to make with how the belts lay on the sides, but I think I'm about 95% done with the fitting for this.  I won't know for sure until I finish the base of the jacket, which won't be until I figure out what to do about the sleeves.   I also made the base of the jacket longer.  It can always be trimmed.

Patterns pre-seam allowance

The embroidery for this is going to be the trickiest part.  I won't be tackling that until the base of the panel is completed.

Here it is with the actual fabric I'm going to use and the jacket mock-up.  It still needs some adjustments, but overall, I'm pretty happy with where it is at the moment.

Eowyn Victory Dress Part 1: Fabrics

I've started working on Eowyn, and before I get too far along, I want to start posting about the build.  So, let's start at the very beginning ... fabrics.

I looked everywhere online and in stores to find something similar to the fabric used in the Victory Dress.  I'm pretty sure it's a dyed Indian fabric, as that seems to be what most of the dresses in LOTR were made from.  The costume is made out of two parts: a dress and waist-length jacket.  There are three different fabrics used, as there is a frontpiece to the jacket (I'm not sure what it would be called).

The Dress:  

As you can see from the picture below, it has a really nice texture to it.  I couldn't find anything in a uniform color (so that it would dye evenly).  Also, all of the embroidery on these types of fabrics (that I could see in the store, at least), was metallic, which just won't dye.

I did find this Bridal Inspirations white satin fabric at JoAnn Fabrics, then dyed it.  

I agonized over the color - I really did.  There are a few production stills of this dress, and it looks to be a different color in almost every single shot.  In some photos, it looks like a light grayish-blue (the same color as the accompanying robe that I made). 

In some photos, it looks like a much richer blue.  And in some photos (like the close-up of the sleeve), it has a much greener tint.  Part of me really wanted to do the much richer blue, but I decided to go with the light blue.  Using the Rit Color Formula Guide and several experiments, I finally settled on blue-green #208.  Unfortunately, the fabric didn't hold the color as well as I wanted, so I dyed it a few times.  I couldn't tell you what my ratio ended up being.  Luckily, I dyed all of the fabric all at the same time to make sure that the color would be even.  But still, my modern, digital-readout washing machine is NOT made for dyeing - it refuses to simply soak or agitate, it INSISTS on going through every cycle in order, and if you try to stop it and start the agitate cycle again, it first empties all of the gorram water.  There really is something to be said for my grandma's old machine with the dial.  Sigh.

I'm quite pleased with the final product, especially as this is my first time dyeing fabric on this scale.  I did end up with about two yards of the ten that didn't dye quite as deeply as the rest, and I'm not sure why (but I blame the machine).  Because there were a few dark spots from where the dye sank in too much and some of the fabric was unusable, I had to use those two yards to make the back part of a sleeve.  It's a little too white, but unless someone is looking really hard, I don't think they'll notice it.  Also, because the fabric is super duper shiny and almost completely negates the blue (it makes it look too silvery), I decided to use the wrong sides as the right side.

The Jacket:

This is another fabric that is just absolutely gorgeous.  It has gold embroidery, and I had a really hard time deciding what fabric to use.  After a LOT of deliberation and searching of online fabric stores, I settled on the very first swatch I had purchased: a Gold Metallic Paisley Brocade, also from JoAnn Fabrics.

The sleeves for the jacket are LOOONG, so I thought I'd better buy a bunch of fabric.  When I went back to the store to buy more, though, they were out!  When I checked online, it said that the fabric was out of stock, and the store in Naperville, about a half hour's drive from here, was the only one with any stock left.

As I was on my way to Naperville, I got a call from my husband that he had hurt his foot on his run, so I had to go pick him up (he claimed he could make it the three miles home, but I wasn't going to let him walk three miles on a foot with an unknown injury!)  By the time I'd dropped him off at home, I only had 45 minutes until closing.  I booked it over there and got my fabric (an entire bolt!) about 15 minutes before the store closed.  There were a ton of women buying loads of fabric.  (Who decides at 9:45pm that you need to buy one yard of 12 different fabrics?  Apparently half a dozen people.  Insanity.)  Anyway, after getting my fabric, I was standing in the l-o-n-g line at the checkout holding the bolt, and the women in front of me started tittering to each other.  Finally, one turned around and said to me in a haughty voice, "You know, you need to have that cut!"  A few others agreed with her: "Yes, you have to take that to the cutting counter!"  "You can't have that cut at the register!"  I gazed at them all, lifted an eyebrow, then coolly held up my yellow cutting ticket and said, "full bolt".  It was one of my cooler moments.  They all stumbled over themselves to apologize and one of them made a ridiculous remark about how people at Wal-Mart usually don't know that they have to go to the cutting counter.  The busy-bodies stood there quite uncomfortably until it was their turn at the register.  Take that, Napervile!

I haven't dyed this fabric yet, because when I did the test on the swatch, it was REALLY dark.  I'll have to start very light with this one and then gradually dye it.  (Oh, yeah, and the stupid fabric is back in stock - I didn't have to rush over to Naperville that evening.  But, you never know.  I've had more bad luck with fabrics going away and never coming back in the middle of projects.) 

The Frontpiece:

I originally purchased another brocade for the detailing of the jacket bodice, but I decided tonight that it had too much red in it.  I will now simply use the gold metallic brocade, and to just not dye it, or, if I do, to dye it a very light yellow (only because I think that the white may be WAY too glaring).


So, that's it for now.  I already have the main part of the dress finished (I don't want to put the sleeves on until I get the lining because I want to sew the lining to the sleeves at the bottom).  I just got my lining swatches, so I'll be purchasing the lining from Fabric.com tonight.  I've drafted the jacket bodice and frontpiece, and now I'm actually about to go work on the jacket sleeves, which are turning out to be a bigger pain than I thought they would.  So, stay tuned!  I'll be working on this costume pretty extensively this week, so I'll be (hopefully) updating the blog often.

Eowyn: Blargh

So, after a long time thinking about this, I've decided not to make the Eowyn Dernhelm costume.  At least, not this year.  I would like to concentrate on remaking my Susan corset with leather, and I'd like to wear it before I'm too old.  Therefore, Eowyn's armor will have to wait.  I know it is going to be extremely complicated, so Susan's corset will at least be practice.

However, I still want to make an Eowyn dress, so I'm thinking I may make the blue victory dress, since I've already made the robe.  And while I wouldn't wear the robe to a convention, I love the color.

Although, I'm also throwing around the idea of making the brown shieldmaiden dress, which she wears as she gets Merry suited up for battle.  I just don't know.  It will probably come down to how many people have made each dress.  I don't like to make costumes that a lot of people have made, or that have been made exceptionally well.  I think that those of you who have followed the blog for a while know that I like a challenge, and I like being unique.

As of now, my 2013 projects are as follows:

1)  Remake Susan.
2)  Remake Liesl.
3)  Make Eowyn Victory dress/Shieldmaiden dress.


Happy New Year!