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... )

Last week, i had the good fortune to attend the book release party for The Spoonflower Handbook: A DIY Guide to Designing Fabric, Wallpaper, and Gift Wrap, by Stephen Fraser, Judi Ketteler, and Becka Rain.


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My graduate students presented the next round of projects in dye class today, the focus of which is use of resist to create surface design on fabric. They decide upon a method, a fabric, and a dye to use, and must create a substantial length of fabric (the minimum requirement is 4 square feet, but most choose to do more surface area than that ( Read more... )

My current gig is to serve as the costume shop manager for the Summer Youth Conservatory at Playmakers Repertory (the company for which i serve as the crafts artisan throughout the regular theatre season). The conservatory is our summer program for middle school and high school students, a five-week program during which we rehearse, open, and run a ( Read more... )

There's a second part to the surface design adventures of Jen Caprio's costume design for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: hand-painted appliques! (The first part of the process, the digital textile design of the collection of twelve background fabrics, was described in this prior post hereRecall if you will Jen's design for the coat, ( Read more... )

So, i've been working on a pretty exciting extracurricular project lately, for my friend and colleague, costume designer Jennifer Caprio. I've worked on several shows for Playmakers with Jen, including the currently-running Private Lives, for which we painted that fantastic Schiaparelli-inspired silk crepeBut, clearly as a successful and nationally ( 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... )

In Part One of this series on some hand-painted silk we are making, i got as far as the sample process, in which my assistant and i created a whole range of surface design swatches to show our designer, Jennifer Caprio, how we might create the fabric. Once Jen chose the sample, our next task was to get the image onto the fabric, a rich 4-ply silk ( Read more... )

We've begun a really exciting surface design project for our next show at Playmakers, Noel Coward's Private Lives, in which we are making some fabric yardage inspired by this 1935 Schiaparelli dress in the collection of the Museum at FIT.

For the character of Amanda, costume designer Jennifer Caprio dreamed up a glamorous dress clearly influenced ( Read more... )

I mentioned in my last post that we're now working on the final show of the season at Playmakers Repertory Company, Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. Today's post is the second in a series about the surface-design projects being headed up by my co-crafts artisan, second-year graduate student Candy McClernan. Candy has a particular interest in computer- ( Read more... )