Current mood:	high
Current music:	Jessica Butler- "Aerlinn in evellyn o Thol Gannel"

MY COSTUME!

The reason I want to be a costume designer:
Oscar Winner, Ngilla Dickson (to the fans): I'd just like to say I'm the one who got to see all these actors with their clothes off!

Wood-Elven Queen Armour – Outfit Inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring movie soundtrack (all rights reserved © N. S. Tulkas, 2002)

For this, my final project in my High school studies, I was ordered to conduct a research and design and produce a whole haute-couture outfit based on it. Under the class theme of “movie soundtracks” I chose the soundtrack to the movie The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and designed a series of Wood-Elves’ armour suits. The outfit shown in the photo was the one design chosen for production.

In the details given below, you will see my utter perfectionism and insistence on everything being as close to my image of them as can be. In all my designs I invest a lot in details, considering them to be what makes a design complete.

The Elves are elegant and eternal, divine figures, which do not belong to the worldly earth and are subjugated to its changes, but rather float through it. They share an intimate bond with nature, and so their clothes reflect that bond and ethereally blend with the surroundings through the costume design, silhouette, décor, fabrics’ textures and coloring, and the richness of the dress. 

Since the outfit is a battle costume, the clothes must express not only beauty and gentleness, but might and practicality: a defense from injury—armour. All of this data was taken into account for the outfit’s design, structure and materials.

The set is comprised out of five items: top, long under-skirt, short over-skirt, scarf-belt, shoulder pads.

The colorfulness is woodsy—green on all its shades. The fabrics are synthetic Taft, which gives a shine and shimmery quality to the wearer, like the natural aura which encompass the Elves. The fabrics’ texture is wrinkly and soft to the touch, like the autumn and spring leaves. The fabrics are light and gentle, and together with the lengthy and narrow silhouette gives an allusion of height and lightness which characterize the Elves. But since the outfit is an armour, the fabrics were toughened and structured in layers, to give the illusion of strong armour, which doesn’t break the feeling of softness and lightness obtained by the fabrics, silhouette and structure of the costume.

Since the costume is a Wood-elf’s, there was a desire to emphasize the most common wood product—the leaf. The collar, neckline, and an exposed opening were fashioned into the top, and the over-skirt and shoulder pads were structured in leaf form layers. These layered items create a breadth to the silhouette and strength to the total look that stress the warrior aspect of the costume, the armour.

The light fabric belt wrapped around the waist that falls nearly to floor-level, and the length of the under-skirt hiding the feet and giving the illusion the wearer is floating rather than walking—give height and lightness to the wearer.

The top, its lengthy and narrow silhouette—emphasizes the length of the figure and contributes to the illusion of an elongated and narrow, elegant silhouette. Its’ flat and stiff front contribues to the tough armour look. In contrast, it has deep leaf-shaped back and front openings, which give frailty to the garment. On the top is an art-nouvea embroidery and metallic decoration that desplay the richness of the Elvish culture, and seemingly stiffen the top’s front. The décor, in art-nouvea style, is dynamic, soft and symmetrical, and symbolizes a connection with the nature-bound Elven race. All the closing mechanisms are covered and hidden from view, which strengthens the armour description where there are no openings. 

How did I make it?

The easiest was the Under-Skirt- A bell-shaped skirt, fitted with rubber string to cling to the waist. I only needed to make it long enough to reach the ground and hide the feet. So there really wasn’t any pattern calculation here.

The Top was harder to make. Because I wanted it to be stiff (though it probably doesn’t give that impression in the pictures), I double-layered it (on the inside and outside you see the right side of the fabric) and ironed in between the layers tough Fliselin. (The Fliselin also made the fabric much easier to work with, because it stopped the slippery material from shifting under the machine’s needle.)

The Top needed to be very close-fitted to the skin, so there was a lot of measuring and several muslin-tops made until it fitted perfectly. The openings I drew while Meirav, the model, wore the muslin top. They were challenging to saw at the end, because of the double-layering, but I enjoyed it greatly.

The fastening mechanism is hidden small hooks located at the bottom of the top (hidden under the Fabric Belt) and at the back of the collar.

I admit that the embroidery pattern I copied off of Elrond’s Council outfit. The metallic painting was with special fabric paints made of metal powders acquired from a local artist.

Of course, the hardest was the Upper-Skirt, or Armour Skirt as I would call it. I had no idea how to go about making the pattern and how to make the fastening mechanism or where it should be. I toyed with a few ideas at first, and came up with the idea of making the skirt of separate leaf-shaped, double layered (Fliselin strengthened) pieces, 5 in total, which were all sewn together, one on top of the other, to give the layered look. Each piece is a bit smaller than the one before, and each piece is sewed on the middle of the piece that came before her. It was very important that the sizes were accurate, or the skirt would have come out off-centered. The fastening mechanism was, again, of small hidden hooks, now located at the front of the skirt.

It took me roughly 3 months to make the skirt and the Shoulder Pads, and I loved every minute of it. I even sewed on the inside of the skirt a piece of the fabric to conceal all the work I made so no one will be able to tell how I did it.

(3) Additional pictures

1. The Technical presentation, showing all the items seperately, their location on the body, in front and back. 

2. And here is my TREE. It is my Inspiration page, and Eru help me, only after I finished painting and assembling this monster did someone ask me ‘oh, why didn’t you just take a real branch and hang the pictures from it?’ Ahh, I could have killed that woman, except she was right. I don’t know how come I didn’t think of it myself and saved me months of slavery, but all I can say is that artist’s mind works…strangely, so it seems. It came out brilliant at the end, though…

3. Below you can see my presentation stage. I made everything on there, from flag to drawings. You can’t really see it but the tree branch was decorated with crystal beads.