SHANNON'Sdresses

GOLDBERRY'Sdress

2004

I don't have the greatest pictures for this dress, as they were taken before I had a digital camera, but I hope they're good enough to get the message across. It is a creation inspired from a character described in the Lord of the Rings books, but who did not feature in the movies - Tom Bombadill's wife, Goldberry. It was an interesting and satisfying challenge making a costume from the mere description in a book. It's pretty much how I imagined it as I read the book, but when I finished it I wished I had done the neckline a bit differently.

Again, this one is made from a curtain I found at an op-shop. As soon as I saw it I knew it was destined to be Goldberry. The shape of the sleeves were pretty funky and difficult to construct, but the rest of it was pretty straightforward. Instead of having the seam at the back of the sleeve like normal, to get the desired design I had to have the seam at the front. Although, because of fabric restrictions, and having to cut out patterns on top of already existing seams, there does appear to be another seam at the back. However, this turned out to be advantageous, as when finished, the sleeves kind of look like huge leaves, and this ties in with the nature-loving character of Goldberry anyway. So I was quite happy about that.

Her belt is described as '...of gold, shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots'. You'll never believe how hard it was to find a decent picture of a flag lily on the internet. All I could really decipher was that they had three petals and they had a kind of pointed oval shape. The best I could do at the time to recreate this was to get a huge long strip of wide gold ribbon, and have lots of time and patience to fold and stitch sections of it into flower shapes. I then stitched a small blue glass bead into the centre of each one. Not as impressive as the girdle on Eowyn's white wool, but it turned out pretty well I reckon.