kristine415
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i'm a "costumer!" - 2007/04/16 01:02
well...not techically, but i ended up helping a whole lot with Once Upon a Mattress, despite the fact i don't know how to sew.
ok...here we go, i'm going to give you some background info on how a person (me) that doesn't know how to sew gets thrown into helping with costumes.
so local community theatre is doing Once Upon a Mattress and they get this lady to do costumes. normal procedures: she takes our measurements and all that jazz and all is good....exept for one thing.
our costume lady DIDN'T DO THE COSTUMES...i'm serious. tech week, three rehersals before opening night and we all show up expecting to have our costumes ready for rehersal...nope, 3 of the principles had theirs and. that. was. it. no one else. turns out that the past 2 months the costume lady was just expecting to go rent some costumes from another costume shop the whole time...little did she know that it went out of business while she was sitting around not making the costumes like she was hired to do in the first place.
so the director asked one of the ladies in the chorus to help out with the costumes because she knew how to sew and stuff, but then it didn't end up that she was helping with the costumes, she actually ended up having to do all the costumes. the poor thing...she probably would have had a heart attack if she hadn't been able to get a bridal shop in town to donate all of their marked down prom and brides maids dresses that weren't selling to the theatre. so she at least had dresses as a starting point. but she had to make these very modern style all sleeveless dresses look the period
and thats where i come in. little did i know that i am a magician with a hot glue gun.
yes yes. i know that idealy, no one in their right mind would hot glue anything on a costume...but this was crunch time, gracie (the poor lady thrown into costumes at the last minute) needed help, i was the only one that offered, i don't know how to sew, and we only had 2 performances to worry about the hot glue staying together
so gracie was doing all the major stuff on her sewing machine, like sewing 2 piece ensembles together to make empire waisted style dreses. then she'd hand them off to me and i'd hot glue the hem or the sleeves or anything else that needed to be added to added to make it look good.
ok, now here's the reason i'm posting on the brag board. i wanted to show you guys my hot glue-ing work  i think it looks pretty good myself.since i've had some real problems with uploading pics onto topics here, im posting some of the more note-worthy products in my gallery. if you really want to look at what i did...here are the descriptions of the photos. if you're not going to check out the pics...i'll just warn you that it's pretty pointless to read on. i don't want to waste your time toooooo awful much 
i did the girl in green's sleeves. i noticed that one of the other dresses i had hemed for one of the shorter ladies (there was like 8 inches of fabric cut off the bottom of her dress) was the same color as the girl's dress. so i used the left over from the lady's dress to make her sleeves. you can't see it in this picture, but i also put a pink ribbon around her empire waist place..hot glued on of course 
the picture of the three ladies (the one on the left is me), i hot glued all 3 pairs of sleeves to the dresses. these actually were the only sleeves out of the whole bunch that i did that had problems with the glue coming un-done. gracie and i were quickly running out of fabirc to use so there was actually a hole in all 3 costumes on the under side of the sleeve, cuz we figured no one would notice it there, then that way we'd have enough of one fabric to use on all 3 costumes since the director wanted all 3 of us dressed exactly alike. becuase the small holes to begin with, by the end of the last show, they had turned into quite large holes....but the sleeves stayed on the dresses!!! i also did the pufft of blue in the neckline...all 3 of us noticed after the 1st rehersal we wore the dresses, they were waaaaay too low cut for the dances we were doing, with bending over and stuff. so i hot glued some fabric there too!
the pictures of the gal twirling her dress: ok 1st of all i want to say that i love her because she loved how her dress turned out, and she let me know...and my ego is always hungry. but anyway, hers was the last dress that gracie and i were to "period-ify." at first it was just the purple....and we had used up all but scraps of the fabric for all the other ladies' costumes. we basically had enough for one long sleeve, with a little left over. the reason this was a problem was that after the original costume lady saw that first girl's costume, the one with the green short sleeves, she said we weren't allowed to do anymore costumes with short sleeves like that. why she still had so much authority over how the costumes were made, i'll never know. but anyway, that's another rant. so that's when i had the idea to cut the one long sleeve into parts then have 3 of those parts trail down the front of the dress with another part making a kind of belt type thing across where the empire waist was supposed to be. then with the other little scraps we had left over i thought we could make her little arm pieces. we just didn't have enough fabirc to reach all the way around her dress's arm hole, and not have short sleeves...so arm pieces it was.
so anyway because of the fiasco with the costumes for Once Upon a Mattress, i've now decided to take sewing lessons and to also start learning to make costumes of as many style as is possible to learn....just in case this ever happens again.
ps. if you read this whole thing, you are now my best friend in the world...cuz this was reeeaaally long!
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