Sempstress

I know, I’ve said it before, and it probably sounds like I’m gloating a little bit. And I’m not gonna lie – I kinda am. Not only is it the coolest job ever, but my boss says I can use my exploits in the costume shop as blog fodder. Tee hee….  The downside is that I don’t really have any excuse to use a computer at work, so the actual physical reality of being at work sort takes me off the interwebs. That’s why missa hasn’t been around as much lately. But now I’m back, and I thought I’d share some more of the crazy things I actually get paid to do… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a huge fan of shoe roses (aka, “shoe hoo-ha-s”, “shoe hooters”, “shoe dec”, etc). Whatever you want to call the silly little things, I love them. Seriously, little hats for shoes? Tee! Put me in, coach! They just make me giggle… If you need to period-up a shoe with a strap across the foot (like a mary jane or t-strap style dance shoe), here’s a quick and dirty way to build a shoe rose that is relatively actor-proof… Read the rest of this entry »

This one won’t win you any points for historical accuracy or art. It’s more for those times when you need to put something decidedly ruff-like around a neck, and you need to do it in a big bad hurry. Say you’ve got a kid who needs a halloween costume, or, I dunno, a designer who needs 10 clown ruffs to put on a pack of galloping ballerinas doing a piece inspired by Pierrot and Columbine…. Ahem. Yes. Well. If you’ve hit the “Done is Beautiful” point, this is the ruff for you. If you’re looking to make a ruff The Right Way(tm), you maybe oughta take a pass…. ;) Read the rest of this entry »

Another fine theatrical production has been downgraded to a pile of stinky laundry.  Yes, Chicago is finally over (except for one or two more loads of laundry, the great put-away, and other glamorous parts of the job).  My design partner and I were incredibly pleased with the way the show looked, and the fact that it’s over.

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I’m just digging myself out of the black hole that was tech week (and, in fact, the weeks prior to) – too much sewing/arts and crafts work, not enough time, and no where near enough coffee in the universe.  The show is up though, and it looks pretty good.   Read the rest of this entry »

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 »