Sempstress

That’s right! I’m half of the costuming team for Chicago at Wheaton Drama. If you’re close to Chicago (the city) and want to be in Chicago (the musical), here’s the audition info… Read the rest of this entry »

The surviving pattern published in Juan de Alcega’s ‘Libro de Geometria, Practica y Traca’(1589) represents almost everything we know about the farthingale. Most articles on recreating the Alcega farthingale focus on faithfully reproducing the pattern based on fabric widths. Honestly, though, calling this a “pattern” is a bit of an overstatement: the book was more intended as a series of cutting diagrams to help tailors avoid waste. The problem is, Alcega included some rather sharp commentary on on what he considered the proper size for the bottom hoop of the farthingale, but no real information on the size of the intended wearer. Complicating things further, modern bodies aren’t build quite like the popular model of the 16th century. So what’s a costumer to do? How about some trigonometry!

Trust me, this won’t hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

The world is full of straw hats. They are almost never the size and shape you’d like them to be. (That’s a known effect of the Law of Universal Irony, along with how the thread already in the needle is never a color that will work for your current purposes.) Fortunately, reblocking a straw hat is pretty gosh darned simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you need a knicker, or some other relatively non-denominational short, slightly poofy pantlet with a cuff at the bottom, and you don’t have time to make it from scratch. (Perhaps, for example, you have a cast of 37, and 9 or 11 of them are kids in Fagin’s gang and most of them are too short for proper long pants… Hey, it can happen!) Here’s the cheater’s method: Read the rest of this entry »

File this one under “possibly useful to some one, at some time, somehow”: this is a series of pictures of corsets I’ve made over the last several years. Each one shows me standing in profile, next to my dress dummy. This makes the changes in my shape imposed by each corset fairly obvious, and the pictures all together give you a pretty good idea what different types of boning and styles of corset can do for a girl. Read the rest of this entry »

I did fittings for kids in Oliver! last night. I survived, and no one cried (not even me.) Oh, right, there are 17 children in the cast. And they each play at least two parts, which require costume changes. I’m not good with kids, for much the same reason that I have no future in particle physics: Read the rest of this entry »

…but only if you really like pink.

Mom and I were in Milwaukee a couple weeks ago, and we stopped in to a fab little yarn shop called Just 4 Ewe. The owner, Jan, enthusiastically shared enough fiber tips and tricks to send my brain into complete and happy overload (while her dog, just as enthusiastically, kept trying to lick my feet). If you’re in the area, I strongly recommend the shop – but think carefully about your choice of shoes. Anyway, one of the things Jan recommended was using Wilton’s Past Food Colors to dye fiber. She showed me roving in a series of joyful pinks.

Now, I have some sort of crafter’s disorder that causes me to believe in absolutely every trick I see, read, or hear. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m costuming Oliver! for Wheaton Drama. Yes, some one is letting me, the girl who believes that leash laws should apply to children, costume a show where half the cast isn’t old enough to drink. That’s remarkable, so I’m remarking upon it. The show has lots of fun arts&crafts projects: some knitting, some dying, some distressing (ideally of the costumes, rather than the costumer). The exciting thing, I think, is that there are a lot of very good-natured folks helping me knit up scads of scarves and maybe some hats and things to be used in the show. After the show, we’ll be donating all of these to Snug Hugs for Kids. I think that’s pretty cool. Anyone out there want to knit a scarf for the show? ;)

In other news, it’s just dawned on me that this is a blog, rather than my old geriatric set of static html pages, and I can write things without actually having a full article in mind. Le sigh….. I feel like a dinosaur sometimes. All this technology has gotten totally out of hand, I tell you!

This is one of my favorite Elizabethan era hats. It has style and panache, and it’s often completely over-the-top in stature. You can pull the wired brim into a lovely arc, which has always seemed to me to be the Millinery equivelent of a raised eyebrow. It’s a smart hat, extremely suited to the prosperous merchants and casual nobles. Women should be careful to make this hat a bit small, so it sits on the hair rather than the head and allows the caul to be seen. Read the rest of this entry »

The Floppy Pleated Hat, which I’ve heard called a ‘Muffin Cap’ is a hat comprised of a Soft Brim and a Pleated Crown. When made from a softer fabric, this hat has a very unstructured look apprpriate to lower class characters. From stiffer fabric, as above, it’s a rather charming style formiddle class characters trying to make their fortunes. Read the rest of this entry »