What makes the best…? (Part 4)

Posted onMarch 1, 2013April 16, 2013
Blog

Costume Designer??? Lots of passion for fashion – that’s for sure. But a passion for fashion isn’t enough. You may enjoy dressing yourself, but do you enjoy dressing others? In different time periods – perhaps real or imagined? Do you love thrift shopping? And sewing? Because all of these desires and skills are a must for a great Costume Designer.

The best are creative and usually on ridiculously small budgets. Sure, Broadway and Stratford designers can buy the finest silks for their gowns, but for the regular theatre folk, scrounging, repurposing and borrowing is essential to costume a show on a simple budget.

The passion for fashion will allow the great Costume Designers the opportunity to find and sew amazing outfits for men, women, children and sometimes creatures that you could barely imagine. They’ll make them in a variety of sizes to match a large chorus of dancing boys and girls and they’ll find designer gowns abandoned in Value Village and scurry them home to their personal storage for some future use – because they are certain that they’ll be able to use them in the future… for something.

They’ll deal with Diva actresses and actors who don’t want to wear what has been chosen for them. They’ll deal with directors who know exactly what they want and others who have no idea what people should wear in 1950, Victorian times or even today. They’ll deal with deadlines and schedule changes, missing actors and torn or soiled items and do it all with a smile. And when the show is over… they’ll take all the costumes home and clean them, fix them, sort them and store them lovingly away for the next time they are called into use.

Then… they’ll start again – on the next show!

Why everyone needs a workshop… at least I do.

Posted onFebruary 7, 2013
Blog

What do you make? What is your creative outlet? Do you sew, knit, sculpt, paint, saw, hammer, garden, cook? Whatever you do, it takes tools, right? Probably lots of them and you need a place to store and sort those tools, don’t you? I know I do.

I make puppets. I sew. I try to draw and sketch. I’d like to paint and write more. But the space I need is a space for the puppet supplies and the tools and then a space to store the puppets when they are done.

My husband makes cannons. Yes, you read that right. He makes cannons. And yes, they work. They work for stage – they are safe cannons, they are light cannons, they are quite portable cannons, but nonetheless, they are cannons. He needs space and tools and storage for this.

Now, we are lucky. We have an almost century home with a partially finished basement. One entire room in this basement is dedicated to swords, guns and other weapons worthy of stage and screen because that is what my husband does. He trains others in how to stage convincing fights, battles, and death scenes. It’s great fun and the room is wonderful. It is almost always in a constant state of chaos due to the amount of projects he pursues but it is still a wonderful space. He has another room where he can repair these items and lots of tools for building things. All of his tools actually have a home in this space – although it seems to me that they rarely, if ever, are in these homes. They constantly live in other rooms in my house as he doesn’t have a space to build these creations.

I have a Muppet/Puppet room. The idea is for it to be my office space and one day another space in the house (when finished) will be wear all the sewing supplies will live and I will then create in that space. But for right now I have a room with books about puppets and theatre and dance and music and my computer and my sewing machine and my fabrics and foam and googly eyes and feathers all reside. There’s a daybed in this room – and when it’s clear, the cat likes to sleep there. So, it’s kinda the cat’s room too.

What I don’t have is a table to cut on, to pattern on, to design on, to lay out fabrics and imagine new creations. The closest I’ve got is my dining room table. And that’s often filled with bills, receipts and sometimes, dinner. And that’s why we recently constructed our collaborative creation in the dining/living room of our home. He needed to saw and screw and sculpt and I needed to draw and cut and sew and glue to create a giant puppet for an elementary school play. He’s wonderful and we are very proud of our creation – BUT… he’s taken over the main floor of our house. And all the tools and supplies necessary for his creation are in those rooms and not in their homes.

This is why, one day, I’d like to have a workshop. Large enough for the two of us to create together and to store all our supplies. Then maybe, we could eat regularly at the dining room table. I wonder what that’s like.