"Erulaitalë Gown" by Lyra

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Title: Erulaitalë Gown
Artist Name: Lyra
Prompt: Write a story or create art about the midsummer holiday (Lithe, Gates of Summer, or another midsummer holiday of your choosing).
Description: For the three major Númenorean holidays, it is said that the King and a great concourse of people ascended the holy mountain Meneltarma, "clad in white and garlanded, but silent". This is supposed to be a typical white gown for the purpose of attending the Erulaitalë (praise of Eru Ilúvatar in midsummer) ceremony. Well, technically speaking, my LARP character (for whom I made this thing, really) can't afford to have an extra dress for each of the three holidays, so for her, it's more of a "general Meneltarma gown". But it's got cornflowers on it, so it's clearly meant to be a summer gown.
Rating: General
Warnings: None apply, except perhaps for the bad quality of the pictures
Artist's Notes: I'll try to upload better pictures once I've got my paws on a taylor's dummy, but for now, this is the best I can offer!



You'll get a slightly larger version of the pics if you click on them.



So here's the entire thing. I don't have a taylor's dummy, so I had to improvise with a stick, a pillow and a blanket. I apologise for the scarily distorted "torso". The dress normally fits me (size M), but not in my current state, so I couldn't model it for the occasion.

This was totally inspired by movie!Éowyn's shieldmaiden dress, as you may have guessed. Actually, it originally started out as my attempt to create Éowyn's shieldmaiden dress, back when all we had from The Two Towers was promo shots and the skirt was still white. (In the movie, it's brown.) As there are about a thousand replicas of that dress by now, however, I decided at some point to turn it into something more individual. And as it was white anyway, why not use it as a Meneltarma dress for my Númenorean LARP character, who needed a holiday dress anyway?
So I took away the padded bodice, replaced the (off-)white cords with blue, and embroidered some cornflower-ish decoration onto the collar. Et voilà: Something completely different!



Collar embroidery detail.
The entire thing is handsewn because I can't handle a sewing machine to save my life (or fingertips, at least), and the cornflowers are hand-stitched, too. Embroidery is a good way of passing long boring car journeys!



Belt detail.
The buckle was taken from an old, threadbare belt from my mom's hippie days. I have no clue where it came from, but it was sure useful now! Yes, I'm aware that the flower looks more like a thistle or something. That's OK. Thistles flower in summer, too.
I'll probably stitch some more stylised cornflowers in off-white onto the blue, by and by. When my fingertips have recovered. (Pro tip: Thimbles are actually a good idea.)

The gown itself is made of off-white silk (very thin crinkled mulberry silk lined with firm tussah silk) which I got cheap some years ago. It's a pain to work with, but I love the way it looks and feels. The belt is partly silk (blue noil silk) and partly cotton because I had to use scrap fabric for it, and that's what I had left in the right colours. The yarn is ordinary cotton yarn. Hey, I'm sure the Númenorean climate allows growing cotton. And if it doesn't, they can import it from their colonies in Middle-earth, or something.

I don't have a Meneltarma-like mountain in the neighbourhood, so I used our backyard. Unfortunately, I couldn't convince it to look summer-like, but considering that it's only February, it's at least doing a decent spring impersonation!

Comments

[dreamflower]

Amazing! The embroidery is beautiful, and I love the belt. I also love the seaming detail between the bodice and skirt.

Until you mentioned the belt buckle was a thistle, I thought it was a sunburst!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I'm so thrilled you noticed the seaming detail, because I'm quite happy with that. It actually began as an emergency solution to keep the silk from fraying on the inside, but I love the way it turned out! So - thank you for picking up on that!

Heh, I assume it's supposed to be a thistle! Definitely some kind of flower, though, because it's got leaves, too.