Fellowship Cloak
I made the fellowship cloak according to the fantastic
instructions at
Alleycatscratch. We used an upholstery fabric that
Rogue (my fiance) 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.
The 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).
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 he doesn't want to distress it. The pants are just
an old pair of black pants. The boots are synthetic riding boots,
although in some pictures he's wearing borrowed Obi-Wan boots.
I bought the vambraces from Kropserkel,
which does absolutely amazing work. They were 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 hair in the pictures is his own, but he's cut it. He's working
on getting an appropriate wig made.