Costumes: Queen Esther

Originating Series

Construction Notes

The Dress Esther wears is highly based off of an image of Queen Elizabeth and the whole thing is Elizabethan styling so I did a lot of research on how Elizabethan clothing was made for this dress. I studied up on the techniques they used to make their garments and what they wore under them to make them look the way they did. I tried to make the garments as historical as possible because I wanted them to look like the authentic period pieces that the artwork was based on.

For this gown I'm going to break it down piece by piece.

Undergarments

The look of a period gown starts with the correct undergarments. For this gown I made a tabbed Elizabethan corset with 20 steal bones (I made my own boning), a Petticoat with over 30 yards of fabric and a Bum-roll.  I did wear a bought hoop-skirt with this dress but it was not big enough on it's own and need the extra petticoat to fill out to the correct shape.  

Main Dress

This gown has over 8 yards of hand embossed velvet and over 800 red rhinestones attached to the dress with metal settings  throughout the main body of the dress.  Over 2,000 pearls where individually hand sewn to the dress according to the artwork.  80 red ribbon roses line the over sleeves and machine embroidered roses, fleur de leurs and leaf wreaths decorate areas of the bodices, skirt and sleeves.  The sleeves also have silk ribbon laces threaded through the fleur de leurs to resemble the artwork.

Neck Piece

This really wasn't historical because they didn't wear a garment that looked like what thores drew. The base of this is foamie with a wire frame, silk and lace where attached to the base, mini pearls where all hand sewn on to match the art work. The Rose where again machine embroidered to match the roses on the rest of the dress.

Necklaces

The Choker is a strip of elastic, coated in latex and then painted silver, it then had 5 layers of pearls added and a red resin gem. The gems where first molded in sculpy, I made a silicone mold and then cast them in clear red resin. They where then painted and had additional rhinestones attached to them.   All the pearl necklaces where hand strung to get the right bead order (large-small-large)   The rosary piece was sculpted in sculpy, a silicone mold was made as well, and then they where cast in Liquid plastic.

Crown

The Crown is mostly Foamie, sealed and painted to look like silver, pearl and gems where added to give it the right "rich" look.  The ball at the top was a bouncy ball. 

Scepter

This was a lucky walmart find, $10 for a death/skull scepter.  I cut off the top skull, covered the others with roses, made the skull men look like angels, filled in all the holes/screw marks  and I did it all with model magic, I also repainted the entire thing and made a foamie cross for the top.   

Photo Credits

• Lionel
• Mab