Arizona Renaissance Festival 2013 Tennative Costume

I’ve been attending the Arizona Renaissance Festival every year since 2010 and every year, I made a costume to wear there. The first costume I made and wore in 2010 was based off Eowyn’s “green” dress from the movie Lord of the Rings, Two Towers.

Back then I wasn’t very experienced in sewing without help with my mom and my mom thought I needed to try to make something myself with very little help from her, so when I made the costume it didn’t turn out just like Eowyn’s dress. It was similar, but not the way I imagined it.

After I wore it, I put it away so I could one day use the costume for scrap fabric or fix it so it would look the way I wanted it to. A few weeks ago, I took out the costume from storage and began to fix it up. I adjusted the skirt so it would be open in the front like Eowyn’s and I took in the sides as well. Since I made this costume back in 2010, I grew taller so the dress now hits my leg mid calf instead of at the top of my feet. Because it’s not as long as Eowyn’s dress, I decided to pros pone my goal of making an accurate dress until a later date and use the 2010 dress for a new, original costume for myself.

I’m planning on making the costume inspired by the clothes female characters wore in the movie Thor, such as Sif and Frigga.

Because they’re not on screen very much, I had to make do with costume concepts and my own imagination. My master plan is to make a costume that looks like something Sigyn (Loki’s wife in Nordic mythology) or a Valkyrie would wear. This includes making a circlet crown inspired by The Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Ring Cycle with Deborah Voigt as Brunhilde…

So, that’s the plan. Making the circlet scares me pretty badly because I’m more of a seamstress than a jewelry maker and working with metal isn’t my favorite thing to do. In spite of that, I still plan on making and wearing this costume to the festival in 2013. I’m optimistic I can finish at least the fabric parts of the costume by the end of this year, but my life has become more and more hectic over the past year so my time for sewing has been rapidly decreasing so the costumes and clothes I planned on wearing to an event don’t really get finished by that time. Still, I designed this costume to use sewing patterns I already own/worked with and used fabric I own/are currently on sale so I the only thing I have to study how to make is the circlet. 🙂