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 Research
My research began on the AlleyCatScratch Lord of the Rings costuming research site and persisted through several versions of that sites Chase Dress page. I also found helpful the notes and skethes by Michaela deBruce from the Te Papa exhibit in New Zealand and, towards the end, photos on the Chase Dress page at Costumer's Guide.
I also had the real thing to refer to when I saw the traveling exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Science. I made sketches of the sleeves (front, side and back views of each), which lead to some major confusion about how the darn things went together, and, eventually, a crusade to replicate the shape as precisely as possible. My mother and I took careful note of proportionate sizes and locations of features on the dress at the exhibit. My sketches and most of my notes have been incorporated into the ACS description, so I won’t repeat myself by reposting everything here
Pattern
Before I'd seen the exhibit, I made a blue denim version of this costume complete with denim jacket detailing and made it into a sort of western Arwen costume with leather sashes and white cotton gauze under layers. It was in making this denim version that most of the pattern drafting for the suede dress was accomplished. Drafting the newest version of the sleeves and refining the collar were the last changes to be made to the pattern, and were done with new muslins after the denim dress was already finished.
The pattern began as the now-discontinued McCall's NY/NY #9626 - a long, fitted jacket with princess seams in the front, darts in the back, and a mandarin collar. This had to be heavily modified, first to fit me properly, then to get the right riding dress shape. It took quite a few muslin trial runs to do this. Major modifications included: turning back darts into princess seams and joining the resulting two center back pieces into one, moving princess seams in both the front and back from the middle of the shoulder to the armscye, cutting the center front (originally full-length) short to create the pointed waist, and modifying the center front to create a rolled collar. The sleeves (except for the sleeve cap) and entirely new skirt sections had to be drafted from scratch.
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Pattern Tips
When looking for a pattern to alter, I found it useful to pick one that already had princess seams, set in sleeves, and a waistline at the waist. More the better if it already fits you. You can always paste in a rolled collar from other patterns and the skirt panels are easy.
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Drafting the collar was a long process. I began by drafting my own pattern, using newspaper to make the earliest mockups. I was having problems with the way it sat on the bodice neckline, but I finally solved this by using the rolled collar for Simplicity 4940 to give me a better angle between the shoulder seam and the lower edge of the collar back. There’s still a bit of a disturbance in the lay of the collar where it attaches to the back of the bodice near the shoulder, though, and I think the collar pieces aren’t long enough in the back to properly span the full width of the neckline. The shape of the collar in the front was eyeballed and didn’t look right for the longest time. Specifically, it looked too wide. After making a final bodice mockup with the collar/center front made of felt to give it the right body, my mother suggested chopping an inch of the top edge of the collar and suddenly it looked perfect.
My old sleeve pattern incorporated an overlap in the front of the lower sleeve and wasn't too bad as a rough approximation, although I felt the lower sleeves ought to have been fuller. It was far enough off what I saw at the exhibit, however, that I wanted to completely re-draft the pattern. The issue was getting the little extension off the back of the sleeve that wraps around to the front underneath where the lower sleeve overlaps itself (see the ACS page for a better description of this). After many attempts to get the right shape by drafting, I eventually got things right by draping. I made a mockup of a plain fitted sleeve from the original jacket pattern and marked on it where key points on the upper sleeve ought to go. I cut the mockup apart so the little extension off the back edge of the underarm seam was in place and traced a pattern off of it, adding in new seam allowances.
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| | Left: my costume, Right: exhibit sketches |
The lower sleeve pattern was developed through draping muslins. I started with a guess as to the shape of the seam line at the elbow and made the rest of it very large and circular. I basted this to my upper sleeve mockup, which was sewn to my final bodice muslin and hung from a padded hanger. I futzed with the elbow seam, taking things up and down where possible and visualizing the changes I needed to make where not. Once I had the seam on track, I could trim the rest of the piece to shape so it looked more like my sketches. I ended hacking quite a bit off and the final pattern is not at all circular. I traced a pattern off the final mockup, adding a seam allowance along the bottom so I could bag line it.
I got a little crazy with the bodice lining and put a pleat down the center back like in a nice jacket. All the other lining pieces are the same as the dress pattern pieces, except in the upper sleeve. I wanted to make the undersleeves removable and I decided to do this with snaps. I made an upper sleeve lining pattern with a straight ~1.5-2” hem. This would attach to the bodice lining at the armscye and have snaps around the hem. I drafted a second lining piece (henceforth the “elbow lining”) based on the lower part of the upper sleeve that would attach to the lower sleeve bag lining a the low point of the elbow seam and cover the gap between the elbow seam and the hem of the upper sleeve lining. With these two lining pieces intersecting, I could tack the upper sleeve lining by hand, invisibly, to the upper sleeve below the raw edge of the turned up hem and the raw top edge of the elbow lining. This would cover all the sleeve seams on the inside and leave the chunk of the upper sleeve lining with the snaps exposed for attaching the undersleeve.
My undersleeve ended up being shaped roughly like a truncated cone, with an uneven lower hem. I measured the distance from where the lower sleeve would attach to my upper sleeve lining to the point where I wanted the hem to be. Based on this measurement, I drafted a one piece pattern for a wide conical sleeve. The hem on the original appears to slope downward towards the body, so, envisioning the seam line as being next to the body, I lowered the hem a bit at either side of the seam and raised it a bit in the middle. Then I moved the seam to the back so it would be less likely to show.
For the underskirt, I decided to do a full-length slip based on view B of Butterick 3263, which has a darted high waist. This was ultimately not a very good move. On the plus side, it minimized bulk around the waist. On the down side, since the skirt wasn’t gathered or gored to make it full but flared at the side seams, with the open front and back all the fullness of the skirt tends to bunch around the sides. A gathered or circular skirt fit into a yoke would have distributed the fullness more evenly, and it always could have been extended up into a bodice to make a full-length slip. I may go back someday and re-make the skirt part of the slip, with the upper part of the existing skirt forming a yoke.
The leggings were simply the longest variation of Butterick 6022. This appears to be the only stretch-knit leggings pattern on the market and I only knew of it because of this costumer. I drafted out the little slits at the ankles.
Materials
Dress:Corduroy, in lieu of suede, with a full lining in a lightweight, charcoal gray woven. (Both of these were on clearance for no more than $2/yd.)
Rigiline for either side of the front opening (and, later, the back of the collar).
Snap placket made of rigiline, interfacing, and lining fabric.
Sash loops made of the lining fabric over a core of braided crochet thread.
Collar lace made of black pearl cotton, Sulky thread in “medium steel gray”, and gray all-purpose thread on Ultra Solvy. I chose Sulky thread because it was somewhat lustrous as observed on the swatch on exhibit, and the medium steel gray color had a vaguely purple cast, also like the swatch.
The design on the upper sleeve was painted on in silver acrylic fabric paint using a fine-tipped brush. I used pattern transfer paper and a large needle to roughly mark the design on the corduyroy.
I embroidered the baseball stitches on the princess seams with gray pearl cotton.
Undersleeves:
White crinkled drapery fabric from Hobby Lobby - probably polyester/nylon - that vaguely resembles the original material, but whiter. The lower edges were finished with fraycheck.
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Dye Recipies
Underskirt silk = 1 package Rit pearl gray. (Could add a smidge of purple.)
Sash silk = 1 package Rit pearl gray + 1 tablespoon Rit purple.
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Underskirt and sashes:China silk dyed in the washing machine with Rit powder. Skirt and sash silk dyed seperately. All edging done with Sulky thread.
The bodice of the underskirt slip was lined in gray cotton broadcloth and closes with a hook and thread loop.
Leggings:dark red poly/cotton knit with elastic at the waist and invisible back zipper.
Construction - In which there are lots of words and few pictures
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Note:
Adventure = putting this costume together in a teeny, weeny apartment with a small table, no dress form, and a sewing machine that's older than I am.
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The dress bodice was the most complicated part, as there were a lot of steps that had to be performed in a particular order. I had to make the front sash loops and edge the back sashes before sewing the outer layer of the bodice together so I could insert them into the princess seams. I also did the baseball stitching before attaching the corduroy to the bodice lining since it was easier to handle that way and would maintain a smooth finish on the inside. The bodice layers
actually remained unattached until near the end of the construction process, since I had to have the collar lace finished first so it would be sewn into the seam along the outer edge of the collar. I decided to keep the collar facing separate from the lining until after I’d basted the finished lace on since I figured it would be easier with the facing flat.
I made the lace as one piece first by creating a lace outline pattern off of my center front pattern piece and tracing it onto my Ultra Solvy in permanent marker. I got fed up trying to freehand a lace design that replicated the angular, but non-grid-like look of the original, so I printed out the design by Alwyn available here on ACS, roughly sized to each half of my pattern, and traced it in on each side. In retrospect, I think the scale of the design turned out larger than the original and I should have printed it out a bit smaller than I needed and extrapolated for the areas that weren't covered (which is what I had to do anyway at the back of the neck and inside the roll of the collar).
I took some pearl cotton left over from another project and couched it down with a zig-zag stitch onto the Solvy, trimming the cotton to length after completing each segment. It was necessary to create a base like this because otherwise the zig-zag stitches I used would stretch out into the chain stitches they are once the stabilizer is removed. I began with the longest continuous segments and worked my way to the shorter ones. I put one long continuous line of pearl cotton along the bottom edge of the lace, but left the top edge ragged so I could clip the seam allowances when I sewed the facing to the collar without compromising the lace. When I was done with the cotton, I went over every line with Sulky thread, zig-zagging with an extremely short stitch width (satin stitch - although my machine has no specific setting for this and must be fiddled with). I used regular gray all purpose thread in the bobbin to save on the more expensive Sulky thread, but this turned out not to be a problem, as I bought two spools but ended up not even using all of one. When I had everything covered in thread, I knotted off all the loose threads and trimmed the tails, then dissolved everything in the shower.
The first time I wore this costume, the lace turned out to chafe something horribly at the sides of my neck and when I wore this dress for a whole day I eventually had to wrap a scarf around my neck to stop the chafing. I don’t know if it was stabilizer residue, pokey thread ends, or what. The second time I wore it, however, from mid-afternoon to late at night and then again for the better part of the following day, there was no chafing at all.
Sleeve construction began with painting the design onto the upper sleeve. I determined how far down the upper sleeve I wanted the design to extend based off of photos and my sketches (the bottom point is a little bit below midway between the sleeve cap and the elbow seam at the side) and then scaled the design available on ACS to that size and printed it out. I layered the design over a piece of pattern transfer paper and pinned to in place on my sleeve piece. I had a hard time getting the transfer paper to give me any detail on the pile of the corduroy. I found that poking a series of holes with a large needle worked better than tracing the design with a stylus. In the end, I had to do a lot of the more detailed aspects of the design freehand, referring continuously to the printed pattern, with the transfer markings only giving me major reference points. After I let the paint thoroughly dry, I gave it a quick hand-wash in the sink.
To put the sleeves together, first I bag-lined the lower sleeve, then sewed the elbow lining to the bag lining. I sewed the two sleeve pieces together along the elbow seam (through the corduroy only, as appropriate), then sewed the underarm seam, and, finally, sewed the overlap along the elbow seam. At the armscye, corduroy and lining layers were kept separate, with the corduroy sleeve sewn to the corduroy bodice (with the shoulder flanges already sewn in) and the upper sleeve lining sewn to the bodice lining.
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Fun Fact!
All the fabric for this costume cost no more than $35 (part of that was because I mooched the silk instead of buying it, but that stuff isn't pricy anyway) but still looks great, if I may say so. Corduroy reads surprisingly well as suede. The other expenses added up to more, however.
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Before sewing the bodice to the skirts, I made a snap placket to fasten the front opening. I had tested possible arrangements for an invisible zipper by pinning the bodice mock-up together where the closed end of the zipper would go. Whether I put it at the top or bottom of the opening, the dress was a real struggle to get on. Therefore, I went with a snap placket technique I’d used on the denim version. I made the placket by sewing 1 inch strips of ridgeling horizontally about 1/2 inch apart onto a 1 x 10 inch rectangle of layered interfacing. Then I enclosed the piece in some of my lining fabric. I sewed one half of the placket to the bodice through all but the outer corduroy layer, and sewed snaps to the other side. The corresponding halves of the snaps were sewn to the other side of the bodice opening. The placket spans the opening across the inside and holds the edges flush without gapping (a problem I had when I tried using just hooks and eyes). A hook and eye is needed at the top and bottom of the placket to prevent the snaps from accidentally popping open when I bend.
I sewed the skirt panels to the bodice through all layers. I covered the seam on the inside with some gray bias tape.
At the exhibit, I saw that the undersleeves were not hemmed or even the selvege but simply finished with fraycheck. (I’m very sure about this - I got down on my hands and knees and looked up through the undersleeve fabric from the inside and saw the uneven band of clear goop along the edge.) I did the same with my sleeves, laying them out on the table so the hems fell off the edge and hung free in the air. With the upper end of each sleeve weighted down so everything would stay put, I applied a generous line of fraycheck along each hem. When they were dry, it stitched up the seams French. I have designs for finishing off the top by gathering it into a piece of bias tape or something and adding snaps to attach them to the upper sleeve lining. For now, they are only safety-pinned to the lining. (Remarkably, the fabric is not prone to fraying, despite being very slippery and unruly.)
To make the slip that served as my underskirt, I first put in the darts in the skirt panels and both layers of the bodice. Then I sewed the cotton and silk layers of the bodice together and finished the shoulder seams by hand. After sewing together each skirt front to its corresponding back and then sewing the center back seam, I set about hemming the skirt. I did this by simply folding the edge over narrowly to the inside and zig-zagging over it with some Sulky thread in a color very similar to the gray silk. I initially used tissue paper as a tear-away stabilizer, but I found that the technique worked just as well with no stabilizer at all. If you do it well, the result looks like a rolled hem on the outside. I was in too much of a hurry to do a very careful job all the way around, however. It took a lot of playing with tension on a scrap of silk, and it was important to hold the fabric taunt both in front of and behind the presser foot. I was also sure to use a fresh, fine tipped needle.
I needed a way to attach the cotton lining that would hide the waist seam on the inside of the slip. I had originally planned to turn under the seam allowance of the cotton, press it, and sew it by hand to the waist seam. I was looking for a faster way to do this and since I was itching to try out one of the new cams my mother found on ebay (my machine is old – it uses cams) I decided to sew the layers together with a decorative stitch that would run both above and below the waist seam, securing the turned-under cotton to the silk. Now I have a purdy wave design along the waist seam. Maybe someday I’ll add some beads or something.
I used different methods to finish the edges of the front and back sashes. At the exhibit, I observed that the edges of the back sashes were turned over twice and secured with straight stitches, whereas the front sash had a rolled hem. I used the same technique on the front sashes as I did on the underskirt. I left all three sashes really long until the very end, when I could try the dress on and, with help, trim them to the proper length (floor in back, roughly knee in front).
I whipped the leggings together at the last minute simply following the pattern.
Alterations - June ‘05
I wanted to take in the bodice at the sides because it looked too bunchy at the waist and do something about the bulky underlining I'd originally used. I took off the bias tape covering the waist seam and ripped open the stitches holding the bodice lining and underlining at the waist (I’d sewed the skirts to the outer bodice layer in a separate, outside line of stitching) and completely removed these two layers from the bodice, removing stitches all along the front opening (which forced me to remove the snap placket and all it’s corresponding snaps in the process). I decided to give it a go without any kind of underlining and to limit the boning to the center front, but I still needed to keep the collar standing. I encased a short piece of ridgeline in grosgrain ribbon and tacked it by hand to the collar facing along the seam at the back of the neck. The boding extends from the collar/facing seam down the neck to just below the seam where the collar attaches to the back of the bodice. In addition, I tacked a scrap of sew-in interfacing to the collar facing around the back of the collar, extending down around the shoulders.
I took in the bodice sides seams at the waist and also raised the waist at the sides by about 1/4-1/2 of an inch. I left the now larger seam allowances unclipped in case I ever had to let it out again. I also brought up the front skirt panels at the center front a tad in hopes they’d hang straighter (it helped, but only a bit). I took the bodice lining side seams in to match the bodice.
While the lining was still separate, I took out and re-attached the upper sleeve lining since I’d sewed it in inside out the first time, only to find that I’d also sewn the snaps to the wrong side compared to my original plan. I gave up on that part for the moment.
I sewed the bodice and its lining/facing back together, replaced the center front boning, and put the snap placket and the corresponding snaps back on (this time more securely attached.) While replacing the placket, I added a large dress hook and bar at the waist, with the bar sewn to the placket and the hook sewn to the inside of the bodice on the other side of the opening, to keep the closure secure. I added a small hook and eye just above the placket and I plan to add another dress hook just below the placket (but ran out of time before wearing the costume again and had to use a safety pin instead).
Finally, I sewed the waist seam closed and re-covered it with the bias tape. The back of the collar stands up just fine, although I would like a little more body along the roll line, but oh well. The bodice fits much better now and the entire costume looks a lot better on me. Although the dress wasn’t uncomfortable before, it feels even better without the extra bulk and boning and I had no trouble playing Dance Dance Revolution (badly) in this costume... until I got too warm.
Update - August ‘05
Tired of the way the raw edges on the "wrong" side of the front sash were fraying (visible in some of the July ’05 photos), I trimmed the raw edges down to the zig-zag stitches and then turned them over a second time and zig-zagged again. After pressing, the finish looks much neater and there are no more exposed raw edges. I also lightly fray-checked the ends.
I found that the underskirt is noticeably too long at the sides and keeps getting underfoot when going up stairs. I don’t know if I made it too long or it just stretched out on the bias a lot more than expected. I hacked off a crescent-shaped piece (about 1 ½" at the side seam) from each side. After re-hemming the trimmed sections, I repeated the trim-and-turn process I’d done on the front sash to make a cleaner edge. It looks a lot better now, since I wasn’t in a hurry and could take time to be careful and neat, and yet doesn’t make the edges too heavy or stiff. Note: this is not meant to be a movie-accurate hemming technique here, just what’s possible on my machine with the garment that I’ve already made.
While I was working on the slip, I ripped out the zipper in preparation to replace it with another type of closure - something that fully separates. The zipper just made it too hard to get on and off over my head. I’m planning on using loops and small buttons. Before I can add those, I need to finish off the edges where the zipper used to attach. I think I’ll cut bias strips out of my extra silk and bind the whole neckline/front edge and the armholes.
Update - June ‘06
Before CostumeCon this year, added a dress hook at the bottom of the snap placket, took in the shoulders a tad, and then decided there really wasn't anything else that I cared to change. ...Except now I don't like the color of the leggings, so I'm re-making them with a less vibrantly-red fabric.
Update - July ‘06
Before attending another con, I put horizontal darts in either side of the front and back opening of the slip up around the hip/waist area to alter how the skirts hang. The effect is much more like what I wanted with the fabric distributed a bit more evenly rather than all hanging at the sides. The darts are still only basted in. I need to get around to sewing them properly now that I know I'm happy with the result. I also created a new front closure for the slip, making thread chain button loops down one side and sewing crystal beads as buttons down the other, and put thread chains with snap fastenings in the shoulders to anchor the garment to my bra so the shoulder straps don't keep slipping down.
Update - August ‘06
New leggings are finished. Not only is the color better, but I took the time to get them to fit more snugly like proper leggings should.
Pictures
- CostumeCon 24, May 2006
- July 2005
Future Work
I'd like to re-cover some old boots someday with leftover corduroy, but who knows if I'll get around to that. The buckle can go jump in a lake.
Links
Costuming Main 
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