Maid's hat!

Wow, sorry about the formatting screwup!
(Note to self: mobile publishing = bad idea!)



Anyway, I worked on this maid's hat in the costume shop last week.
It wasn't clear if it was a muslin or not. Haha.

Costume shop sewing

So, I have been pretty busy lately, and I haven't been posting much. Sorry about that! I've been sewing both in and out of the costume shop. The show that we're preparing for now is Tartuffe by Moliere. Most of the costumes are bought or rented, which means we're doing a lot of alterations, but not a lot of "building," or making a costume from scratch.

I spent many hours tagging rented or borrowed costumes. This involved sewing thread labels onto the tags or into the back of the neck, like so:

Unsurprisingly, this got old fast, but whatever. It's pretty important--every place we rented costumes from got a unique thread color associated with it, and now it's easy to tell them apart.

I don't have a picture of them, but I also made a decent amount of progress on a muslin of a pair of pants. I gathered the waistband and attached it. I also worked on a maid's cap, which I do have a picture of. I'll upload that later.

I love this job!

What a great story!

Check out this NYTimes article about a former prostitute who now supports herself and her children by sewing!

First day of work

Yesterday was my first day working in the costume shop, my new work-study job. I arrived at 2:00 to discover that the shop was in minor tumult due to the fact that it had flooded earlier in the day. I don't know the details of what happened, but it apparently cause quite a mess. The custodian was leaving with his bucket as I was arriving. Since my boss arrived to find her shop full of water, she was a little behind schedule and disorganized. As a result, there really wasn't much for me to do. I was given a tour of the shop, picked out a pair of scissors to be "mine," sorted out a bunch of buttons, and looked at my instructional packet.

The packet is a bunch of pages of photocopies from sewing instruction books. The goal is to get everyone up to speed on techniques they need and to make sure that everyone is using the same terminology. For example, I would say that slip stitch is the stitch you use to create a blind hem. According to the packet, slip stitch is one stitch and blind hem stitch is something different. I don't know if that's costume shop terminology or if the rest of the world differentiates as well, but at least now I know! When there's downtime in the shop, we workers will go through our packets and practice the skills included in it.

I'll post a description of the shop soon, hopefully with a few photos, but in the meantime let me just say that I covet this room so much! The props I can take or leave, and the fabric is kind of costumey (duh, it's a costume shop!), but I want that many machines and drawers and that much space!

One month later....

...I haven't really sewed anything. However, I do have some exciting sewing related news. As part of my financial aid package this year, I got federal work-study. (For non-Americans or people who don't know anything about US financial aid, this means that the government gives the school money to pay students to work.)

My job is working in the costume shop. This means I get to help sew the costumes for the show and keep them repaired. I'll be working there five hours a week, which is less than I had hoped to work, but not the end of the world. At least I have a job (work-study jobs can be hard to find) and at least it's not miserable, and in fact rather enjoyable.

So, even if I continue to not get much sewing done on my own, I'll have work sewing to report on. I also helped a friend sew a cover for his Kindle yesterday evening, and if people are interested I can track him down to take a photo of it to show everyone.