Drama Costumes I: The Process (Working #4)

Well, technically not "working," as I didn't get paid - but definitely work in that it took pretty well three months of steady and sometimes close to full-time effort!

So here's the story:

Last fall, on my first day of substitute teaching at St. Patrick's High School (just across the street) I met the amazing Emma Smith, drama teacher. Actually, the assistant principal introduced us pretty well immediately after he heard I could sew. Emma, in turn, put considerable faith in me by inviting me to take on a leading role in costume design and production for their February staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Most of us have heard of it - Broadway musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1970s, and a perennial favorite with student groups. Well - I said yes. What fabric lover could resist a chance to design the actual "dreamcoat" for this production? certainly not I. Not that I had any clear idea of what I was getting into... for I worked on many of the other costumes as well, and it is certainly a very large cast! But I guess I'm a bit of a "go big or go home" kinda person, and don't necessarily shrink from a challenge.

Work began pretty well immediately on October 1. For my plan was not only to acquire fabric and design and sew costumes, but to dye most of the fabric as well - and that's where my fibre-friend and dye-master Donna MacDonald came in. Emma, bless her heart, agreed to our experiment. We put in an order to Dharma Trading Company for three bolts of fabric, and for much of October and all of November my dining room looked like this:

Some of the costumes were made with old drapes, piled on the chair below (before dyeing):

In late November and into December Donna and I spent four sessions dyeing the fabric out at the Guild of Arts and Crafts, with stunning results. In one of the courses Donna had taken in Ohio, she came away with a swatch book that allows her to achieve intended color with great accuracy. Still, the fun is always that different fabrics take the same dye very - and unpredictably - differently. The picture below shows her dye book, as well as rayon/linen fabric (large pieces for the wives caftans) each dyed together with silk chiffon (small pieces) and straight rayon (smallest pieces) - with sometimes startling results. For example, the green and orange (first pieces lower right) come from the same dye bath!

Dyeing is equal parts science and alchemy. Three pictures show a typical session at the Guild: 1) Donna the Dye Magician measuring and weighing; 2) the white board with the steps and the timing (when to stir and mix, when to add soda ash etc.); 3) the whole set up, with fabric pieces and buckets and charts etc. all organized:

Our dyeing proceeded from basic to tricky, i.e. the (cotton) drapes that made up the brothers' tunics through the (rayon/linen) caftans for their wives to the (rayon/silk) pieces that went into The Dreamcoat itself. I also sewed more blue, gold, and bronze lamée (known in the serious quilting world as "shiny sh**") than I ever want to see in my life again, the Egyptian scenes needing that kind of ostentatious pizazz. For much of January, therefore, my dining room table looked like this:

The show is currently on - Wednesday through Saturday evening, with an afternoon matinee on Saturday, and I've seen it twice already. I went on opening night for solidarity, and will go on closing night just to enjoy the achievement. Don't want to jinx things by showing the costumes themselves - that'll be the next posting, also because I'd like to be able to include a few pictures of the cast in their costumes. Suffice it at the moment to say that the kids did the costumes proud - I felt like a proud mother (more accurately: grandmother) and had tears in my eyes at their tremendous effort. Quite amazing, considering I hadn't set eyes on any of them three months ago.