Costume: Strider
From: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Made: 2002, with many additions and improvements over the years
"He's one of them rangers..."
Ah yes, Aragorn, the manliest of manly men. After I decided to make Arwen's chase dress for myself, Rogue declared that he wanted to be Aragorn. Though I really liked Aragorn's Council of Elrond velvet outfit, he far preferred the grittier Strider costume. My involvement's been limited to the shirt and the Fellowship cloak; he came up with the rest himself. Oh, and I bought him his vambraces. But I didn't make them. That level of leatherworking is still a bit beyond me!
King Richard's Faire, September 2003
Fellowship Cloak
I made the fellowship cloak according to the fantastic instructions at Alleycatscratch. We used an upholstery fabric that Rogue found on the bargain rack at Joann. It's a rather heavy, somewhat stretchy synthetic fabric, but the color was fantastic. Unfortunately, it was printed with little flowers on one side, but the fabric is so thick that the print doesn't show through, so I just self-lined the whole cloak. As a result, it's quite heavy, but it flows very nicely. The hood is a bit too small, but since you never see any of the characters with their hood up, it doesn't matter all that much.
Black (Blue) Shirt
The shirt...yeah, the shirt has some issues. We had a tough time telling what color the shirt actually was, since this was before the documentary where Ngila explained Aragorn's Strider outfit. So we made it out of an old dark blue bedsheet, since it looked fairly close to the color of the shirt in some pictures. We've since found out that the actual shirt was made of black linen, heavily aged.
As for the pattern, I based it loosely on a Simplicity men's renaissance pattern-- basically a square shirt with a slit at the neck. I drafted my own sleeves, since they were gathered at the shoulders. I just ran lines of gathers near the shoulders and stitched over them, but the actual costume has very intricate smocking (again, something we found out after the fact).
Two Towers Red Shirt & Chain Mail
Aragorn gets a new red shirt and a chain shirt in The Two Towers. Correspondingly, I made Rogue a new shirt from some mystery red fabric in my stash (still not sure about the fiber content!). I pretty much copied the pattern from the original blue shirt. Rogue learned to make chain mail in order to make his own chain shirt. I think it looks stupendous.
All the other stuff I didn't make
Rogue bought the leather jerkin at a clothing shop at King Richard's Faire, since I wasn't quite ready to tackle leather yet. It's really much too clean and pretty to be Aragorn's jerkin, but we're okay with that. I modified it slightly by seam-ripping the sides and punching holes to lace them up with leather strips. The pants are just an old pair of black pants. He wears his Obi-Wan boots with the costume. I bought the vambraces from Kropserkel; they do stunning work. Worth every penny. The glove is a lonely old leather glove with the fingertips cut off, scrounged from theater costume stock, and the Elven leaf brooch is from the Noble Collection. The sword came from the Noble Collection as well. The hair is his own!
No comments:
Post a Comment