In Bill Brewer's designs for Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, her second look has a very specific stripe to it. He'd found a swatch of fabric at a New York vendor which he loved, but there were two problems: the vendor sold out of the fabric before the swatches were approved, and in order to match the fabric up the center front in this inverse chevron ( Read more... )

We're working on Sweeney Todd at PlayMakers right now, which is largely why i haven't posted anything in a while. Busy! But here's a quick look at just one of the many cool costume projects we've had in-house: the animal.masks for the masquerade scene.

Our costume designer, Bill Brewer, and our director, Jen Wineman, were really drawn to the mask ( Read more... )

My grad students in Masks and Armor this semester have just presented their first round of projects. At this point, we've covered a range of different maskmaking media, and the students have proposed basic mask projects for which they may choose which type of media to use. These masks are meant to be fairly simple, in that they don't require a life ( Read more... )

For our current production of Three Sisters at PlayMakers Repertory Company, we had to make the Order of St. Stanislaus medal for the character of Kulyegin.

Our costume designer, Tracy Christiansen, provided me with this great research image of what the medal looks like:

( Read more... )

We're working on a production of Ibsen's Enemy of the People right now at Playmakers Repertory Company, and i've had the occasion to do a distressing/aging project that some of y'all might enjoy ( Read more... )

For the second of the Witch's costumes in our production of Into the Woods at Playmakers Repertory Company, designer Bill Brewer had a truly fantastic vision for a sort of wizardy robe made of ornately-dyed and embossed velvet.

Draper Denise Chukhina came up with the process for how this fabric would be created, from which she would then make the ( Read more... )

Today i'm talking about vegetation, part two! Recall from my last post that we're working on Into the Woods, and that our Witch's first look is quite vegetable-covered, which has meant a lot of fascinating craft projects for me and my two colleagues on Team Witch, Denise Chukhina and Sam Kate Toney.

( Read more... )

We're currently in production on our repertory shows this year, Into the Woods and Midsummer Night's Dream. Today, I've got a behind-the-scene peek into one of the many cool special effects we're doing in the costume crafts world to create these two huge, magical shows.

Our costume designer for Into the Woods is Bill Brewer, of UNC-School of the ( Read more... )

For the current show, Assassins, painter/dyer Denise Dietrich and I wound up lending a hand to our props department and creating a "dead dog ( Read more... )

Recall if you will the super-exciting project we have in the works, the creation of custom silk crepe for our upcoming production of Private Lives at Playmakers Repertory Company.

I wrote the first post a while back, about the sample-creation process in which we determined techniques and media to use to get the results our designer, Jennifer ( Read more... )