Costuming Course: First Three Days

Goodness gracious - I had anticipated working hard, and I was right! I'm loving it and learning lots.

The College itself is on the 2nd (CDN 3rd) floor of an old building on Market Street in the city (CDN downtown) of York. The interior space is well-lit and genteely shabby, a sort of old-world version of the space we Yellowknifer fibre-folk occupy in the Guild building. There are essentially two rooms - one for "the main work" and the other for sitting/ironing/serging/changing, with a little bathroom to one side.

The little sign behind which lurk great things

The drafting and cutting tables

More dressmakers dummies and the library

The wonderful Pauline Chambers in our seating area

The essential sewing machine is a Bernina 1008 - not exactly new but a powerful little workhorse that seems to be able to take the procession of users and hours of sewing it's been subjected to over the years. I suspect that it's mostly metal, judging by the way it sounds when operated at high speeds - and this is good!

My work station with the Bernina 1008. Note the great windows!

There's also an industrial overlocker (CDN serger), which sounds like a jack-hammer when operated at full speed (probably the table lights rattling), but whizzes fabric through like a hot knife through butter:

The serger - it's a five-spool Singer
operated with on/off buttons under the table,
not unlike a table saw.

There are seven of us in the course (the eighth withdrew the week before the course), the other six all young women in their 20s, is my best guess. One is from Sweden, two of us from Canada, the other four from England. So far it seems that the variety of backgrounds we bring to the work has us working at pretty well even pace - more details about that work in a later post. I'll just add a picture of Emily, who was the first finished with a toile (calico or unbleached cotton mock-up) of the Tudor men's smock we completed on day 2:

Emily in her smock

So judging by the first three days my basic day is going to look like this: morning routine at home, walk a half hour 'to the city' to arrive shortly after 9:00, work until well after 6:00 with a few breaks, walk home again, cook a meal and relax a bit, sleep. I'm loving it so far!

More on nuts and bolts of the actual costume work in later posts.