Rushes in at Lissla’s call…
I’m here! What’d I miss?
I’m certainly not a professional costume designer, but I did the costumes for a version of Cinderella a few years ago for a local theatre company. The worst part of the job was the dozen or so mice costumes. Luckily, the local ballet company had decent childrens mice costumes from their production of The Nutcracker. But alas, to make the mice look like soldiers, the ballet costumer had machine sewn ribbons across the chest and back (forming a large “X” in front and back). When I say “machine sewn,” I mean they had sewn all the way down the length of the ribbon on both edges. I had to pick all the ribbons off for our show and then put them all back on before returning them. It seems like it would be easy, but sometimes the ribbons wouldn’t fit right when I tried to put them back (possibly because when I took them off, I didn’t keep track of which ribbons went with which costume, and afterwards I realized that the costumes weren’t the same size). :smack: Eventually, I got it figured out, but it taught me a valuable lesson about keeping track of that sort of thing. Ugh.
I was a theatre major my freshman year of college and I took the basic costume tech. class for one semester. For part of our grade, we each had to crew one of the department’s productions that semester. The show I did used a lot of long underwear for costumes. I and a classmate were assigned to take care of the wardrobe for the first matinee performance of that show. (This is important to know.) Anyway, we had to go in to the costume shop late that Saturday morning and pick up all the costumes (which had been laundered by other classmates after the previous night’s performance). So we get there, and we pull all the underwear out of the dryer and imagine our dismay when we realize it’s still damp. Very damp. Not sopping, you understand, but definitely damp and cold. We look at the clock. The show is in a few hours. We throw the stuff back in the dryer and run it another cycle. There was no discernable difference when we pulled it out again. The dryer appears to be blowing cold air. We look at the clock. We have to get everything to the theater because it’s getting to be that time. So we reason that it is more important to get the costumes to the theater instead of risking the delay of the show to dry the stupid things (we didn’t think it was our place to make such a decision), and figure that the actors, dedicated professionals that they are, will take it all in stride and wear damp long underwear. (The show must go on and all that, right?)
Wrong. The men were very unhappy about the state of their underwear. I’d hoped they might actually like the chill - it would keep them cool under the lights, and combining that with their body heat would dry them in no time. The costumes didn’t look wet and they didn’t sag or anything. Anyway, my classmate and I felt we’d done everything we could and were feeling a little bitter about the whole deal when someone coughed up some money and ran the whole load down to a local laundromat and dried them in time for the show.
It turns out that the costume shop dryer was known for being a piece of crap and the crew usually had to run the clothes through a few cycles to get things dry. No one in the know had bothered to tell us this and our problems were further compounded by the fact that the afternoon matinee had considerably shortened our window for taking care of the laundry. Anyway, we didn’t get in trouble, though I always felt like some people in the department thought we were idiots for showing up with damp costumes.
I’d like to do more, but I’m not the most accomplished seamstress yet - and I’m getting another degree and don’t have vast wads of time to work on things at the moment.
Once I get to be an accomplished seamstress though…
[covet] I would LOVE to make something like the red bustle dress Winona Ryder wore in Dracula. [/covet]
I took a design class in college and one of our projects was to design a costume for eight characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I set mine in the Scottish highlands. The costumes were never made, of course, but I was quite pleased with the way things turned out (although my classmates felt I made Nick Bottom waaaaayyyyy too hairy).
Guin: I knew a kid whose mom would make him Luke Skywalker costumes for Holloween and her attention to detail was very good. One year she made the tan jumpsuit he wore in Empire and another year she made the black outfit he wore in Jedi.
