Costume building blocks: the cloak

April M. as Lanfear at JordanCon2011

Right on top of him, Mat added "Was his cloak black?  Could you see his face?".

Ewin looked uncertainly from one of them to the other, then spoke quickly when Mat took a threatening step.  "Of course I could see his face.  And his cloak is green.  Or maybe gray.  It changes.  It seems to fade into wherever he's standing.  Sometimes you don't see him even when you look right at him, not unless he moves.  And hers is blue, like the sky, and ten times fancier than any feastday clothes I ever saw." 
- The Eye of the World, Chapter 2

Good for keeping you warm, keeping the dust off your fine clothes, doubling as a blanket, or proclaiming your status, nothing beats the humble cloak.  Warders wear a cloak made of (my eponymous) fancloth, a color-changing camouflaging fabric woven on a ter'angreal look from the Age of Legends.  Gleemen wear cloaks covered in fluttering patches.  Children of the Light wear white cloaks with sunbursts embroidered on the breast.  Nobles wear embroidered cloaks, lined in silk for warm days or fur for colder weather.  Commoners wear plain woolen cloaks, often ragged at the hem.  In general, the cloak is a long garment, draping from the shoulders to the ankles, with an attached hood.  Cloaks typically close at the neck, and may also have a series of button or frog closures down the front as well.  Cloaks in the Wheel of Time typically seem to have pockets, large enough to contain pipes, flutes, packets of herbs, provisions, and all sorts of other such things.

Kimberly G. as Asmodean

A basic cloak can be constructed in the course of an afternoon, if you have a sewing machine.  There are several commercial patterns for suitable cloaks available: for example, Simplicity 9887 makes a hooded unlined cloak in two lengths, Simplicity 5794 makes a lined hooded cloak that's a bit fancier, and Folkwear 207 makes a very full traveler's cloak with several different hood styles.

If you're feeling adventurous, however, you can also make a cloak from a pattern that you draft yourself.  There is an excellent tutorial for a simple half-round cloak here.  For WoT costuming, you'll probably want to leave out the capelet here, and you may want to deepen the hood, depending on what sort of character you are portraying.  While most mentions of hoods in the books indicate that a hood is deep enough to hide a face, noble Andoran cloaks seem to favor a very deep hood indeed, possibly a liripipe, although generally WoT clothing seems to hail from a somewhat later historical period.  Still, when Rand meets Elayne for the first time, he notices:
"A deep blue velvet cloak lined with pale fur rested on her shoulders, its hood hanging down behind to her waist with a cluster of silver bells at its peak.  They jingled when she moved."
- The Eye of the World, Chapter 40

Tip for cloak comfort: Cloaks can be quite heavy, especially those that are fuller, made of heavy material, lined, or covered with gleeman's patches.  This can mean that the cloak will pull its clasp into the neck of the wearer - quite uncomfortable and possibly dangerous.  You can minimize this by either closing the cloak with several clasps down the front of the garment (perhaps a cloth tie at the top of the neck, with a metal clasp or two below it), or by sewing metal washers or fishing weights into the hem of the front of the cloak.  If you're going to weight the cloak in the front, try taping the weights in first and walking around before you sew them in.  Too much weight in the front can be nearly as uncomfortable as too much weight in the back, and there's no need to cause a problem in the process of trying to solve a problem.

Not *the* beginning, but *a* beginning

As I'm writing here today, I have recently returned from JordanCon 2011 (a.k.a. Consaken, or, as designated by acclaim during the convention, ForsaCon).  At the convention, I was inspired to start a resource for would-be Wheel of Time costumers.

You see, a lot of us at JordanCon looked fabulous.  I've been attending Wheel of Time-related events at conventions since 2006, and I can tell you, the costumes I saw at JordanCon 2011 were leagues above the Wheel of Time costumes I saw at Dragon*Con in 2006 (mine included!).  But still, the folks in costume were a minority.  In a panel about building detailed costumes, people were asking things like "How long does it take to make a costume?" and "How do you know what it's supposed to look like?" and "What if I don't know how to sew?".

I want to help those people out, because I want to see them in costume at the next convention.  There are lots of road blocks to costuming: it can be expensive, time-consuming, or intimidating.  It can require skills that you don't have, or equipment you don't own.  But it can also be immensely rewarding, as you develop skills and confidence, connect with other costumers, conquer the challenges you set for yourself, and finally, show up looking fantastic.

On this blog, I'll be posting a number of different types of information: picture and text references for various characters and groups, tutorials on "costume building blocks", resources for finding the materials you'll need, historical information relating to the real-world cultures that the WoT cultures are adapted from, pictures of costuming endeavors, and project diaries for the pieces that my partner and I are currently working on.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll enjoy the blog to come!