Gandalf the.......black?

Last week I was given a great excuse to make more fancy dress costumes, i.e. the announcement that they are organising a Halloween Fun Day up at the stables this weekend :-)

So off I toddled to Mondial Tissus, the (not very) local (and very expensive) fabric shop in Bergerac and spent ages looking for something black I could buy lots of without spending a fortune. Which still turned out to involve spending more money than I would have if I'd  invested in a ready made costume on eBay. But where's the fun in that?

Mucho fabric was required due to Ali's desire to go as one of the Nine, or the Ulairi, the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths, Black Riders, servants of the Dark Lord - otherwise known as them big, black-clad scary buggers that chase the Hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.

So armed with many metres of fabric, I set about constructing a costume. This mainly involved making a basic long tunic, adding dangly sleeves and a hood, and then trashing the whole thing to make it look knackered. Easy! Sorted the hood bit by sticking one of Mike's leather hoods from a LARPing costume under it, pilfered a latex sword from the aforementioned LARPing goodies and the job was a good 'un.......

Although there was one teeny problem - the Black Riders (and the clue is in the name) all rode dark coloured horses and as you know, I've got mainly white ones. I did ask Carole up at the stables if we could use her dark bay Trotter but she didn't think he'd be able to cope with the costume......

So I had to draft in good old Gandalf. He was prepared to go over to the dark side for one photoshoot anyway. We did a dress rehearsal a few days ago and got these shots:

I put that last one on Twitter and the nice people at The One Ring.net retweeted it, so now it's had more retweets than anything else I've ever posted. Someone suggested that Shadowfax had changed sides ;-) Maybe I should get some black paint for the party on Saturday.......