costume and sculpture 3

Ok, here's the last of this little trip down memory lane.

One thing that needs to be worked out for all costumes is how the actors put them on and take them off- usually, but not always, that is a straightforward issue. These were a bit different. In the costume above, we made a back opening using hammer-in dome fasteners. The rigilene overlapped onto itself and each piece snapped together with two domes for rigidity. The straps came from the shoulders and criss-crossed to the back for stability. The collar pictured here, was attached to the body by means of a dome on a short strap like a bra-keeper, and the wings attached with short pieces of elastic for movement.

The costume below, pictured earlier here, was put on and fastened by means of corset like lacing on the sides. Every so often we like to try things on so we can see how it looks.

After this stage, the costumes went to decoration and they were covered with colourful bits of fabric "feathers" as you can see below.

So another work season has come to a conclusion. It was a year of ups and downs, challenges and pleasures. I'm not sure what's up yet for the fall, I know that I will be doing a month of teaching and training so I am looking forward to that. I have to update a lot of my teaching notes and to be honest I learn just as much from teaching as my students do. I hope to be able to talk about some of that process and show you some of the fittings we do.

I am also going to be on the other end of the fitting process as I have volunteered to be a model for a corset show coming up this October in Toronto. My former apprentice, Jennie will be creating a "tailored" corset design for me to model- I've seen the sketch which is wonderful and my first fitting is next week. I'm looking forward to it- not sure about the modeling part but hey- I figure if something makes me feel nervous, I probably should push myself to do it. What's the worst that could happen?

Don't answer that! I'd rather stay in the dark a while longer.

Enjoy the remains of the summer, more to come,

Cheers!