Thursday 27 June 2013

Patched circle skirt

This is one of the rare projects I feel almost completely happy with. The design is a lot more fiddly than it needed to be, but I think it was worth it. The flowery fabric was from Liberty's, and was fiendishly expensive, so I only bought half a metre, which meant I needed a bit of creativity to get a nice full skirt out of it. I cut it into segment shapes, then added strips of plain fabric in between them so the skirt made a full circle, then gathered it into an elastic waistband. I used gold metallic thread to decorate the waistband and hem, and then sewed sequins into the centre of the flowers. The colours are actually incredibly bright but my camera didn't do them any favours - definitely time for a new one.

Sunday 23 June 2013

Triangular performance with choir





Bus jumper


My four year old nephew is obsessed with anything with wheels, so hopefully this jumper will make him happy on some level - it definitely has a lot of vehicles on it. I did a mixture of hand and machine embroidery on it, and used a bit of paint on the clouds, then had loads of fun finding buttons to sew on. The crystal buttons for headlamps are maybe my favourite bit, and I improvised a Volkswagen badge in an optimistic stab at authenticity. 




There's something deeply weird about the whole scenario which only really hit me when it was done. Why are a frog and a tiger driving a bus with no passengers? What precipitated their dramatic turn off the motorway into scrubland? Why are cars floating in the lilac sky? Maybe we should call it a conversation piece.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

The blog's been quiet but I've been busy! Last month's first excitement was Ghosthunter at the Old Red Lion. The brief was to create a pared down, very naturalistic set on a very low budget.


The carpet was a complete stroke of luck - I found it on the street, covered in dust in a pile of rubbish. Manhandling it into a bin bag and lugging it home on the bus was maybe not my most glamorous design-related moment, but it was worth it to have an authentic pub carpet, complete with cigarette burns and stains.

The costume needed a bit of ingenuity - the individual items are really expensive to buy, and since the show's going on tour hiring didn't make sense. The coat I thought should be an Inverness coat - text specified full Victorian dress, so a full-on cape wouldn't be right, but Inverness coats were popular throughout the Victorian era, and had a half-length cape attached front and back.

You can see an example top right - there's a wrist-length cape over the coat designed to add an extra layer of warmth, which is maybe why they were favoured by coach and cab drivers well into Edwardian times, as familiar from costume dramas. My version was a charity shop coat, supplemented with a cape made from bought wool fabric, with black braid and silver buttons sewn on.

The waistcoat needed a bit of trickery too - its surprisingly hard to come by vintage examples in dark red brocade, and I wanted it to tone with the carpet. I picked up this waistcoat for cheap, dyed it red, and replaced the buttons with silver ones to match the coat.

You can also see the toilet door signs I put on the doors onto doors to the dressing rooms, for a bit of pubby realism. Then finally, this was a lot of fun; I got to go wild copying the flyer art with chalk pens for the corridor on the way in.