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| Requiem Dress from Lord of the Rings Return of the King |
| One of my favortie movies , or rather trilogy of movies, as you may have guessed, is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Part of the reason I think these movies are so fantastic is the attention to detail throughout the entire series. The costume designs are absolutely wonderful, and I have begun attempting to either duplicate them, or at least make costumes with the same feel. As always, though, I am limited by 1) lack of a very large budget 2) lack of time!! So, when I began thinking of my Halloween costume for 2005, I decided to try and make for myself one of my favorite of Arwen's dresses from Return of the King, known as the "Requiem Dress". We actually only see it for a few scenes, but as with all of the costumes that Ngila Dickson made so beautifully, it adds so much realism to the whole thing. Now, I couldn't get the lovely silks and velvets, so I actually started with a navy blue printed chiffon from a hand-me-down dress. I used that for the sleeve detail with silvered bugle and round glass beads, and only beading the solid printed flowers. While I was working on that, I made several trips to my local fabric store, where I found a medium dusty blue knit to substitute for the velvet of the overdress, a lighter dusty blue woven poly-cotton blend for the underdress, and a silvery lining fabric for the lower sleeves. The sleeves were beaded with the darker blue underneath for a stabilizer. After I worked on it more, I realized that I really should have used the underdress fabric, but being impatient to get going, I went ahead and beaded, because I hadn't found the lighter underdress fabric as yet. So anyway, when the sleeves were done, I cut out the rest of the underdress with the lighter blue. I used a McCall's pattern for this part of the dress, adapting it a bit to fit my shape, and used a zipper in the back instead of the lacing . I also put panels of what chiffon I had left at the top of this dress just in case any of it peaked out from underneath, then visually, it would look like the entire dress was of the flowered print. For the overdress, I tried my hand a draping. Kinda hard all by yourself, but luckily, I had an old sewing dummy that was my Grandmothers, so I did the best I could! Keep in mind here that I am more Hobbit-shaped that elf-like! For the trim, again, I went to the bargain bin and bought several silvery trims, I put them together to look similar to the original dress. The underdress has a band of the silver sleeve fabric, with less trim, and the overdress a narrower band with two strips of the wider trim.. The overall effect was pretty good, I thought. When Mandy's friend EJ modeled it later, it looked much more elven, but it was a lot of fun to make and wear! |
| E.J.Models |
| Detail of the sleeve beading |
| Detail of shoulder |
| More Hobbit-like...but oh well, it was fun! |
| Showing the trims at the neckline |
Our more elf-like E.J.! |
