Here’s how I put together the costume pictured.  Some slight changes will be made to future versions – it was a good learning experience!

This costume has many layers.  Underneath it all, he wears what I believe is the same red linen shirt from Two Towers (or something very similar), and presumably, the same pants.  His boots are more rigid than his ranger boots, with a slight heel.

Over the red shirt (which I padded significantly at the shoulders with several layers of batting), he wears a chain mail shirt and skirt.  We had not seen the Weapons and Warfare book when we commissioned the chain mail, and so we used, instead, a hauberk with ¾ length sleeves, that goes to mid shin.  HEAVY….

Over the chain mail, he wears a ruby red velvet surcoat with gold trim on the collar and down the front edges.  I used heavy acetate velvet from JoAnn’s Fabrics for this surcoat. The pile was so heavy, it almost locked together as I stitched, making it the most worry-free velvet sewing I have ever done.  I would gladly pay the $19 a yard again to repeat that experience!  For a pattern, I used a simple square shirt pattern, heavily modified.  I did not use the sleeves, made the armholes bigger and the whole thing longer.  All of this was done FIRST with a muslin, and fitted over the chainmaille.  I faked the mandarin collar with muslin until I got a shape I liked.  I could not find an exact match for the buttons, so I used some round silver ones with a geometric pattern in the middle that I had on hand.  I trimmed the front edges with gold soutache:  I used clear (sometimes called “invisible”) thread to zigzag over the trim to secure it to the garment.  The design on the collar I stitched first in red thread to match the fabric, then used the clear thread again to zigzag over the trim, following the stitching lines.   I did this part BEFORE attaching it to the coat.   After everything was together, I lined the surcoat with navy blue cotton, to hide the seams and give it more finished look.

Over the red velvet, he wears a leather surcoat.  It looks black in some lights and blue on the action figure – so I ordered a dark navy blue leather (halfhide) from www.hidehouse.com  in California.  This piece was BARELY big enough, so I recommend if your Aragorn is more than 5’7” and 140lbs, you get a full hide!  Again, I made a muslin first (based on the same pattern as I modified for the velvet).  I made sure it fit correctly, AND made sure the white tree pattern I had drawn was the right scale.  We used the few pictures we could find, plus the action figure, to adjust the scale.  The bottom of the tree is right about waist level and the outermost stars are still on the flat front part of the chest, not bent around the sides.  The top of the tree is just under the collar opening.  Once the muslin was approved, I took it apart and laid out all the pieces on my leather.  As luck would have it, there was a hole in a very inconvenient spot and the only way I could work around it was to put it exactly in the middle of the upper back.  I covered it up with a leather patch that I embroidered with the same feather motif as on his rerebraces.  Before assembling the surcoat, I drew one half of the white tree to scale on stabilizer paper, traced its mirror image on another piece of stablilizer and taped these to the wrong side of the front leather pieces where appropriate.   IMPORTANT:  Be sure to leave several inches of unembroidered space along the center front.  You will need to turn under the edges and create a placket for snaps for the front closure!  One side will have to overlap the other – they do not meet exactly at center front. 

I then used a very dense machine zigzag stitch all along the drawing lines.  It took a long time, but I needed to go slowly so that the leather didn’t stretch and the stitches stayed evenly thick.   After the embroidery was done, I sewed the fronts to the back at the shoulders and at the side seams, from underarm to waist.  From waist to hem, I folded under ½” or so on each side, and stitched it down to finish the edges.  I used an antique gold metallic grosgrain ribbon (3/8” wide) to trim the armholes and front edges/collar.  I straight-stitched along both edges of the ribbon to hold it down firmly, using the same clear thread as I used on the red velvet trim.

The cloak was just a rectangle of dark blue upholstery velvet  *slightly* narrower at the top than at the bottom, lined with dark red cotton.

Now starts the really tricky part, and you’ll have to refer to my photos to really understand….

1. Attaching the cloak to the leather surcoat was the hardest part of the whole deal.  I scrunched up the two upper corners and sort of wadded those corners into triangle shapes that I hand stitched together on the wrong side (the red side).  To this “wad”, I hand stitched the ring of a clip like one would find on the end of a dog leash (well, a small dog leash – mine I cannibalized from an old purse).  I also firmly stitched part of the hook mechanism to the underside of the wad, but not so tightly that I couldn’t still use it to attach to something.  On the leather surcoat, I attached D-ring on a loop at midshoulder, a few inches down on to the chest.   Then I could hook the cloak’s wadded corners to that ring on the leather.  Additionally, I had to use a giant safety pin on each shoulder seam to support the weight of the cloak.  Over this mess, I glued a “cloak clasp” made of craft foam which mostly hid the attachment. 
2. The cloak clasps were two layers of craft foam, hotglued together and coated with ScupltOrCoat (www.rosebrand.com) so that they would take paint.  For all the “metal” parts I used the American Accent Antique Pewter paint kit.  The clasps had a line of gold around the edge and I just handpainted the lines with Plaid antique gold paint from JoAnn’s.
3. The clasps up the front of the leather surcoat I made from Craft Foam.  I cut out a bottom layer and carefully cut a thin outline from a second layer the same size and shape, THEN cut out a star shape and glued these three layers together.  The foam was coated with SculptOrCoat before painting. Now, these weren’t tough enough to actually bear any weight, that’s why  I used snaps up the front as a true closure.  To the clasps, I glued a strip of bias tape that had snaps sewn on it.  The bias tape was also sewn to the right front of the coat. Another piece of bias tape with the other half of the snaps was sewn to the left front of the coat.  [Click here and here for more photos.]  These overlapped and snapped together to give the illusion that the clasps were holding the front closed.
4. I made greaves and boot plates from cardboard covered with a layer of Gapoxio.  I secured metal rings at key places (sides of greaves and sides of boot plates, up near the ankle) so I could tie them on with cording.  Good idea that didn’t work so well in practice.  The boot plates, in particular, slid around a lot because we couldn’t get them tight enough to stay.  More work to be done on that…  The greaves went over a “leather” layer that buckled around the boot.  My sewing machine can’t handle leather much thicker than 2 oz, so I covered thick craft foam with a layer of garment weight leather and stitched around the edges, about ¼” away from the edge, to simulate heavier grade leather.
5. We used Boromir’s bracers (from www.Kropserkel.com ) because I had no time to make new ones and hardly anyone would notice the difference (especially at the Line Party, where most of them hadn’t seen any detailed pics yet…).  A side note:  Kropserkel rocks!  Do business with them!!
6. The shoulder armor (sorry I don’t know the right technical terms) was made in two pieces.  The upper piece I call a pauldron.  The lower piece I just call the lower piece for lack of armor vocabulary.  The lower piece is two layers of leather and one layer of metal.  The leather layers were made just like the shin guard pieces:  craft foam covered in garment weight leather.  The bottom layer is shaped kind of like a coat of arms shield, the second layer is the same shape, only slightly smaller, and has two “branches” that go around the arm and presumably buckle there.  I just used a leather punch to make a hole in each end and used a ziptie to secure the ends together.  The uppermost layer is “metal” (cardboard covered with a thin layer of Gapoxio) and painted as described above.  These three layers were glued together with hotglue and later (mid Line party) were reinforced with duct tape, which held together much more strongly…Zipties were inserted through holes in the leather layers along the top edge and looped through the chain mail to hold this part in place.
7. The “pauldrons” were made from cardboard, craft foam and a thin layer of Gapoxio.   The pictures of the individual pieces were taken on a one-inch grid so you can get an idea of scale.  There are three squarish layers of “metal” and two “shield” sort of shapes that intercalate between the first /second, and second/third metal layers. The “shield” shapes were made of craft foam, so I could bend them up out of the way as I coated the cardboard with Gapoxio.  The craft foam had to be treated with ScupltOrCoat before painting.  The cardboard pieces are all held together from underneath with duct tape.  The hardest part is the uppermost “square” as it has to contour to the shoulder.  I did it by trial and error, and hope to have pictures of the individual pieces up soon.  Just experiment with the tape and folding bits together.  The whole thing looks really ugly until you get the Gapoxio layer on there!  The upper edges of the pauldrons had D-rings attached on the underside, and I again used zipties to attach the pauldrons to the chainmail.  The red surcoat and the leather surcoat cover up the zipties quite nicely.

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