And so it begins...

...tech week!

There are not very many last minute fixes, but they are all on me. I am in charge of costumes from now until the last weekend of the show, because the other lady who was doing costumes with me is leaving to go on vacation. Command has shifted, and I am the boss. It's a little terrifying.

The things I have to do are:
1. Put elastic in the cuffs of Mercutio's shirt, which are way too wide.
2. Put a new button on Tybalt's doublet. Somehow his button snapped at the shank, so I have to find a new one and sew it on.
3. Fix the hem on Lady Capulet's slip. It was falling apart and shredding. I'll probably just serge it. No big deal.

The End Is In Sight

Yes, the photo is terrible, and I am sorry about that. My camera seems to have gone the way of the ivory billed woodpecker. That is to say, there is a slim chance that it may exist still, but if it does, no one knows where it is or what shape it's in, and for all practical purposes everyone acts as though it does not exist.

Anyway, this is the final costume for the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. You're seeing a shirt, a bodice, a wimple, a veil over the wimple, a bumroll, a petticoat, and a skirt. The shoes don't show, which is good, because she doesn't have them yet. I made the bumroll, the wimple, and the veil. Everything else was pulled from the theater's costumes that they already had.

Romeo and Juliet opens in a week and a half. Then all my sewing for it will be over, and I can go back to doing my own sewing. Or start studying my tail off, as my Greek course starts on Monday. We shall see.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day, everyone! If you are a father, you are a hero. Thank you. (Or you at least have the potential to be a hero. If you're a father and not a hero, step it up!)

If you are not a father, you have a father, or are married to a father, or friends with a father, or some combination of the above. Say thank you to them. They do good work, and their jobs are incredibly important.

Have a great day!

Dearth of posts

So, sorry for the lack of posts lately. I didn't want to announce this on the internet in advance, but I spent the last week on vacation, camping in Western Maryland. We had a great time, but (obviously) I got no sewing done. The Romeo and Juliet costumes are supposed to be due this Sunday, so today I'll call the costume lady and see where we are. Let the madcap sewing begin!

Riddle me this

What do you get when you cross a bumroll, a wimple and an ill-fitting bodice?

 

The nurse's costume from Romeo and Juliet! The wimple was a lot of fun to make. I'll post a tutorial over the next few weeks of how to make a bumroll, but it will take a little while because I didn't take pictures while making this one, so I'll have to make another one.

Tip for little actresses out there....

...assess how tired and cranky the costume designer is before you loudly announce that you hate every part of your costume and aren't going to wear that hat!

Juryrigged Cone Stand

So, today I started to sew a wimple for H. (Don't ask me why a whorish nurse is wearing a wimple.) I realized that I had no white thread. How on earth does a seamstress run out of white thread? *sigh* I had some white cones of thread...but no cone stand.

Well, you know what? I needed to get that white thread to work on my sewing machine! So I made it work. I put my serger to the right of my sewing machine and used the serger itself as a cone stand.

 

Apologies for the terrible picture. I need to find a non-cellphone camera! Anyway, there's a white cone of thread to the right of the black one you can see in the picture, and you can just barely see the white thread coming along to the top of the machine.

I was very surprised at how well this worked! I don't think cone stands are necessary at all, although they are certainly useful. Note to self...when I get a real sewing room, put the serger to the right of the sewing machine...

Eric Carle fabric

Did you know that Eric Carle fabric exists? I didn't. Now I need to buy some and sew something out of it. Why don't I know more babies who are lacking in clothing?

Give me your honest opinion, people. This and this are way too not-grown-up for a junior in college. I will have to wait until I have a child of my own. Or find a naked one (hey...wait...). But could I possibly pull off this? I'm torn. I'm seeing it in a princess seamed dress with a gathered skirt, and thinking maybe it could work. What do you think?

May wrap up

I didn't get a whole lot done in May! I basically worked on play costumes, with a side step into ancient Roman garb. So my list of finished projects is pretty short:

1. A sewing pattern/fabric purge (not something I sewed per se, but it's a project related to sewing, hence a sewing project. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)
2. A tabard for Romeo and Juliet (quite easy, rather boring)
3. Juliet's dress and overdress (a fun challenge since I had to draft sleeves and the entire overdress)
4. K's tunics and toga (and ok, honestly, he did most of the work on that one!)

That's pretty much it! I have done some small repairs and alterations on other costumes here and there, but nothing worth blogging about.

However, I did do a lot of reading this month!
I read:
-The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (re-reads--these are such awesome books!)
-Of Sacraments and Sacrifice (a very good pre-VII introduction to the subject!)
-The books of Tobit, Jonah, and Micah twenty times each and the Gospel of Mark ten times (I have started a project to read each book of the Bible twenty times to gain more familiarity with it)
-The Hunger Games trilogy. (I have to say, I wasn't expecting a lot from the Hunger Games, so I was very nicely surprised! Although I do think she dropped the ball a bit in the third one...there wasn't really much in there that I haven't read before.)
I know there were a few other books, but they're not coming to mind. I wrote down my list, but then I lost it moving home from college. Oops.

Tunics and Togas

I spent the Memorial Day weekend on Long Island visiting K. We had two major goals for the weekend: sew him two tunics and a toga, and run in a 5k together. We used K's mother's sewing machine, a moderately old Singer. Here is K sewing the first tunic.

 Here is K looking senatorial in one of the tunics and the toga.

We used this website to figure out what exactly we were shooting for. Of course, we weren't as interested in perfect historical accuracy as they are--so our tunics and toga are just cotton. I did a fair amount of the pinning and ironing, since that takes more practice to do well and quickly and we were in a bit of a hurry, but I didn't do all of it by any means, and K did all of the sewing.

As far as the 5k goes, there really weren't any on Long Island on Memorial Day weekend. So we ran a 4 mile race instead. We finished in 38:50, which, although certainly not likely to break any records, is a time I can be happy with--especially for a first race!