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Sleeve Detail: Galadriel's Prolog Dress

• FIDM exhibit
  • http://www.fidm.com/features/gallery/academy_2002/images/lord_bg9.jpg
    • med, small
    • from side, can see a bit of the cowl neck
    • note how plain the top of the sleeve is.  just silk chiffon

Basic Description

Fabric

• The sleeves are cream silk chiffon.
• They have been embroidered with chain stitch,  white floss for satin stitching, tiny iridescent sequins and tiny beads.

Sleeve Pattern description

• They are standard set-in sleeves.
• The edges are serged.
• They are narrow in the upper arm and then quickly widen at the elbow.  The sweep is soft.
  • If you have the National Geo DVD you can see this dress and the sleeve shape as she slowing spins against a dark background.  It's near the end, in the final elf section.
• They extend about 8" beyond her fingers
• They are one piece, contact to most other elf sleeves, but in keeping with the style of Galadriel's dresses.

Decoration

• Their embroidery pattern is quite different than the geometrics of the dress body.  The sleeves are very "organic" in their design --  Growing images of firm leaves and fanciful plants.
• The pattern is very heavy on the edges of the sleeves.  The design thins as it extends up the sleeves, leaving plain chiffon at the top.
• The outline of the embroidery is machine chain snitched.  It is fairly intricate, but precise , to the point that the outline looks computer generated.  Afterwards, someone has gone over and added satin stitching and beads.
  • Note: the embroidery machines in India are able to chain stitch about any pattern that can be scanned in now-a-days.
• Miniscule iridescent sequins are secured with seed beads to the points of the ferns, daisy petal flowers and inverted heart shaped leaves.

Please note, these drawing are just rough sketches taken from my notebook... but they were languishing unposted for far too long... so here they are, until I have more time to clean them up.

	Picture of the sleeve fabric from FIDM, 2004.  Can see some of the embroidery work here and mini French knots.
	Flowers like this are heavy on the lower sleeve.  They slightly resemble roses but not quite.  The dark lines are heavy white satin stitching.  The light lines are filled in with less stitching. The dots are tiny, tiny iridescent seed beads Where there is just a single bead, this is almost always paired with a tiny, flat, clear, iridescent sequin.
	The edge of the sleeve that shows here is
	Further up the sleeve there are more shooting sleeves like this with the little sequin seed bead on the end. Higher up the sleeve, there is no satin stitching, just chain stitch. The little heart shaped mini flowers are quite common shooting out all over The flower center is just filled with chain stitching as a bowed-in square.
	(or high rez here)
Upper sleeve detail	lower sleeve detail
	Sleeve detail from photo Note how softly the chiffon folds.  This is a very different micro pleated chiffon The edges are zigged to finish Note that the wide leafy pattern sketched above is fairly noticeable when the picture is enlarged.

-- pattern and notes by Cat, from a number of hours spent with this dress when it was shown at FIDM in 2001

Exhibit pictures throughout this section thanks to Secrete Elf, Garfeimao, Kelldar,  and Silvara

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