La Bricoleuse

This quick entry concerns the process of making an elaborate lace dress for the character of Sally Bowles. Costume designer Jen Caprio has worked with draper and second-year grad student Leah Pelz (under the guidance of Costume Director Judy Adamson of course) on exactly how this garment is to be made, and these three images illustrate the path so far from page to stage.
( Read more... )

As I was putting together my packing list for Scotland, I began to consider the problem of hats. I am a diehard hat wearer, because as a milliner, I believe that the best way to bring hats back into style (in addition to, say, events like the royal wedding) is to wear them stylishly yourself. I wear a hat almost every day, and definitely to all parties and formal events. But, the problem of traveling with a stylish hat is age-old: many hats crush easily, and can take up quite a bit of room. What I need are cute hats that pack flat.

Of course, I do have the spiral-stitched travel cloche I posted about by Abigail Aldridge, but I'm not a one-hat type of gal. While looking over my travel wardrobe, I remembered a blog post by Barcelona milliner Cristina dePrada on making a cute 1952 hat pattern originally by Ruby Carnahan, the “Hat for Ship and Shore.” At the time, I loved the look and versatility of this style, a simple fabric machine-stitched hat which could be made reversible and, through the use of brooches and other pinned-on ornaments, either formal or casual.

In the blog post, Cristina had a link to the entire pattern scanned and posted on Flickr. I took a screen-grab of that pattern, scaled it up to the proper size in Photoshop, and printed it out. ( Read more... )

I've had this one art exhibit review on my list of things to write about for quite awhile, but i keep finding that it makes me so angry, i don't know that i can write an objective, considered post about it without sneaking up on it from the side. So, i think i'm going to make a related post this morning about a related topic, hopefully less contentious, because it's just some groundwork discussion rather than conjecture and artistic interpretation. And, if i can swing it right, it'll flow into a forthcoming sane response to the review, followed by more discussion of related issues in one or two future posts. (Ha, vague enough?)

Today, i want to talk about the levels of artistry in costume production, because it's one of the most misunderstood topics for those outside of the field, and even sometimes for those coming into the field. It's also a favored old saw for professional grousing, which, fine, airing frustrations is healthier than stifling them, but how can we expect people to know what we do on different levels unless we lay it out there and explain it? That's what i'm hoping to do with this post, with analogies and terminology that aren't industry-specific. I hope.

My students say this is the most common exchange when they tell someone they are in graduate school for costuming:

Friend/Family: What are you studying?
Student: Costume Production.
F/F: Is that like, design?
Student: No, it's production. Like making the costume from the design.
F/F: Why do you need an MFA to learn how to sew?

Somehow, with fiber art, it sure feels like people have a harder time than with other media making the leap from the concept of the skill to the art. I would love to know whether anyone has ever said something like, "Dang, Chihuly, why did you need an MFA to learn to blow glass?" (Who knows, they probably have.)

Here's what i wish i had a dollar for every time i've heard it said at a symposium, convention, or even in workplaces (usually after a particularly challenging production or design meeting):

They think we're just picking out clothes.

Which, we do a certain amount of "picking out clothes," so that statement is true in the same way that it is (reductive, but) true to say that a woodworker is "manufacturing sawdust," or an electrician is "flipping switches," or a muralist is "slapping paint on a wall." Even at the most elementary level, the clothes which are "picked out" still have to be steamed ("revived") and pressed and altered to fit the performers.

At a basic level of production, that's where most people start in this field: pulling costumes from a stock, or buying/renting them and making them fit the actors. That's what i like to think of as pret-a-porter costuming, and it's probably where almost all of us began. It's the type of costuming at which some companies and designers operate as a matter of course, particularly in the areas of community theatre, highschool and undergraduate drama productions, and small regional and summer theatres.

I'm borrowing the term pret-a-porter from the fashion industry, because it's something we all are familiar with in our own wardrobes. You go to the Gap (or Macy's, or the Diesel store, or wherever), you buy a pair of jeans, and you pick the pair that comes closest to fitting you--maybe they're a bit big in the waist, or maybe they're a tad too long in the leg, but if you fold up the cuff or cut them off at the hem or wear a belt they don't fall off your body or give you a killer wedge so they're "your size," they're the ones you pick. Maybe you even make the poor fit into a feature, strut around in them like you are just ROCKING those turned-up cuffs or baggy crotch seam or gaping waist that shows cute, carefully chosen pretty underpants. Most people on earth wear mass-produced clothes that were not originally made to fit their body--we all understand this kind of costuming because it IS how we clothe ourselves.

And, lest this seem like i'm stigmatizing it as something limited to "amateur" productions or bagging on the skills of pret-a-porter costumers, "find it out there somewhere and make it fit" costuming is also a big business in professional ballet and opera--the companies whose costume shops do custom-made fully-produced new operas are making a great investment, because they often generate revenue over the next decade-plus by renting the entire opera or ballet to other companies around the world. Often, big opera and ballet companies' costume shops will build that into the budget and the production calendar: devote the greater part of the materials and labor to spending six months making a whole new Rosenkavalier, while planning to use the Falstaff and Orphee costumes from eight seasons ago and renting Tosca from [Other Opera Company].

(Incidentally, opera and ballet almost always rent as a complete package; when you have a big-framed actor in a theatre production and it's a pret-a-porter costume process, don't expect to get his stuff from an opera company "since they have a lot of larger performers" because they don't split shows.)

The pret-a-porter school of costuming operates as a component of productions up the ladder of regional theatre and performance--you might have a large show at a LORT theatre where the supporting roles are all rented or pulled and altered costumes, but the main characters are newly-made. From a production standpoint, alterations of rented or pulled costumes are going to be an ongoing component of most professional costumers' workflow. You can, with luck and connections and a stylist's eye, assemble creatively complex, cohesively-conceptualized shows' costumes from bought, borrowed, and rented stock, and sometimes that might be the most effective use of available budget and labor.

However, it's not the sole mode of operation. I mentioned that many companies will choose to custom-make the lead roles' costumes, and this is where the differentiation comes in that can be hard to explain and hard to grasp, and from what i gather, the same holds true in the fashion industry as well: the difference between a garment which has been made-to-measure and a garment which is couture/bespoke. (Again, i'm yanking the jargon from the fashion folk. Even within the costume industry people will say made-to-measure for both of these processes. So, i might be pushing an envelope with adopting bespoke, but so be it.)

So, a costumer is working for a theatre company where they want to make the main characters' clothes in a production of Romeo and Juliet. The designer draws a sketch of Juliet's costume, picks out some fabric and trim, and gives it to the costume shop folks. Makes sense so far, from what most people know about sewing, right?

In a shop that operates within a made-to-measure paradigm, the costumer then goes to the pattern files and looks for a commercial pattern that is as close as possible to the style lines in the Juliet sketch. It might be a McCall's "medieval lady" Halloween pattern, or a Folkwear historical-garment reproduction pattern, or a pattern from one of the many companies who cater to historical and fantasy costumers. The made-to-measure costumer consults the measurements of the actress playing Juliet and chooses which pattern size is best for her. Perhaps the costumer even does some Frankensteining--the bodice of this pattern with the sleeve of that one, with a few adjustments and changing up the shape of the neckline will work great! Or, in order to fit a particularly petite but busty actress, she'll need to cut the bodice as a size 14, the sleeves and skirt as a size 10, and shorten the skirt six inches...

Someone who works in this way will quickly develop an excellent mental reference chart for her/his pattern library--this company's patterns tend to be very longwaisted, while that one always cuts their sleeves a bit short. S/he will also be (ideally) very adept at pattern alteration, and will know where to raise a shoulderseam to add some pads to pump up sloping shoulders, or how to draft in a gusset so Juliet can vigorously stab herself without tearing her sleeve out of the armscye every night. The key here is, in this kind of production process, the patterns largely already exist, or are adaptations of extant patterns.

Made-to-measure costumers find the Great Pattern Review (a feedback archive, often with photos of finished garments, for all commercial pattern companies that offer historical styles, hosted by the Greater Bay Area Costumer's Guild) to be an invaluable reference. They are also often active subscribers to the Vintage Pattern Lending Library and/or the Commercial Pattern Archive. In most cases, made-to-measure shops aren't just "sewing together clothes from patterns," but rather *are* doing quite a bit of pattern adjustment and fitting as well. They can be highly skilled artists who produce lovely costumes which fit their stars beautifully. Cool, yes? I think so. It's a great and effective way to work.

It's not how our shop or program operates though. Bespoke costuming is what we do, and is what they do in shops that produce costumes for Broadway and Cirque de Soleil and Disney on Ice and big-big-budget regional theatre/opera/ballet. Bespoke costuming is what we teach in our graduate program at UNC. Bespoke differs from made-to-measure in that there is no pattern for a costume until the production artist creates it by drafting or draping. The draper or tailor or craftsperson has the costume design sketch and a sheet of measurements, the knowledge in her or his head and a library of historical and modern reference sources, and generates the pattern (and, the costume) by drawing upon that knowledge and set of measurements to interpret the designer's vision and turn the sketch into reality. The costume created is specific to that design for that production for that actor's body, much in the way that genuine haute couture (in the original Charles Worth sense of the phrase) is a unique design made expressly for a single customer, exact to her or his measurements.

In addition to a bespoke costumer's general knowledge of textiles and surface design and garment construction methods, s/he also draws from a background of study in art history, psychology and sociology of dress, design and technical collaboration, historical clothing construction systems (example: Menswear students learn 19th-century tailoring systems), and couture technique. This is (IMO) what makes our program a Master of Fine Arts, that kind of focus within a structured academic course of study, layered in with high-quality skilled output and aesthetically artistic costume interpretation.

So, lest that sound priggish and snobby in the textual toneless mode of text-on-the-net, i'm not saying that these kinds of things don't also inform the decisions and production processes of made-to-measure costumers, or costumers who don't have production-concentration MFAs, nor am i saying that there aren't folks who swing between the two methods, sometimes working from extant patterns and other times drafting or draping their own. I'm saying, there is a difference between the two modes of production, and bespoke is what we teach in our program, in addition to practical production topics.

Incidentally, PlayMakers is fairly unusual for its level of regional theatre, that we operate on basically a bespoke paradigm. (Obviously for a show as big as, say, Nicholas Nickleby, we'll have bespoke costumes produced in-house up on stage next to pret-a-porter ones we've begged/borrowed/bought, simply because five drapers, a tailor, three first hands, and two crafts artisans cannot produce over 600 bespoke costume pieces in two months.) We're not a "big" LORT theatre but because of our grad program and its alliance with PRC, we CAN make unusual and stylized things in-house at a high level of interpretive accuracy; designers are often thrilled to find that they have the kind of creative freedom and constructive collaboration that bespoke production processes allow.

The head of our program has spoken on numerous occasions about the terminological handicaps she feels that American professional costumers work under--i'm paraphrasing, but she doesn't care for "costume technology" or "costume production" as descriptors, because those terms in the common parlance aren't allied with practitioners of fine art. She prefers the British tradition of describing the field as "costume interpretation;" i can certainly appreciate that differentiation, and i don't think it's something to be dismissed as pedantry or splitting semantic hairs. Sometimes to engender understanding, you have to choose the right words, and perhaps we as costumers need to adopt and utilize more evocative terms when discussing what we do.

Pret-a-porter costumers aren't "just picking out outfits and doing alterations," they're interpreting dramatic themes. They're illustrating the characters with the costume equivalent of a big set of colored pencils. You can do inspired and beautiful work that way.

Made-to-measure costumers aren't "just sewing clothes," they're creating actualized designs utilizing a broad skill set. If the pret-a-porter folks have colored pencils, the made-to-measure folks are using watercolors and acrylics and blending several tubes together to get just the right colors.

And, to push my analogy to extremes, bespoke costumers often choose to go to grad school to learn things like which boars have the best bristles for making your own brushes, how to find and harvest and grind your own pigments to mix with which types of oils, ways to look at color and light and anatomy and composition so that, by the time you graduate, you'll know what you need if you want to paint like Vermeer. It's not everybody's bag, bespoke costuming, and that's cool. There's room for everybody. But no, nobody goes to grad school so they can "learn how to sew."

Aight, that's it for me today. I've got a bus to catch and then about a dozen rented Nickleby hats to drop linings into. Seriously, it is off the hook how many places don't finish the interiors of hats. And i get that sometimes there's not enough time--i've sent a hat onstage with no lining because it HAD to go on RIGHT THEN...but i digress. Let's just say that, our Nickleby rentals, since they come on and off onstage in a millinery shop, NEED nice linings, so they will be going back to their owners in far better condition than they arrived! So rent to us, i'll line all your hats! :D

On that topic, i've heard that this week is going to be Costume Designer week over at nicknickleby, which will hopefully feature some of the beautiful renderings we've been perusing and planning from...

Oh! And, whichever-few of you reader-folk were lusting after that bustle ensemble in our CoStar archive that's depicted in the icon on this post, you'll be thrilled to know that one of our 3rd year grads has chosen it for the historical repro thesis segment, so there will be an analysis, pattern, and repro images for that one at some point in the soon-ish (i.e., year or so) future.

One last note--if i get to the rest of this discussion soon, great, but i'll be blogging the USITT Southeast Conference this weekend. Our program director and i and several of our students will be attending, so if you're going, see you there! I'm entering some millinery in the Design/Tech Expo, and hopefully checking out a couple of the master classes, so i'll be reporting on that. If you've never been to a regional USITT conference, it'll give you an idea of what they're like, and why you might choose to attending regional in addition to or instead of national.

In this blog, I've often mentioned the CoStar collection, an archive of antique and vintage clothing housed here at UNC-Chapel Hill (hosted by our graduate program, curated by program head Judy Adamson, and jointly utilized as a research tool by the Department of Dramatic Art and PlayMakers). CoStar has a continually-expanding online presence in the form of a searchable web archive of the collection of largely 19th and 20th century women's couture, which can be accessed by anyone with a browser. If you've used the site in the past, you'll notice that CoStar has undergone a design overhaul, to a more user-friendly browsable structure than its previous layout.

Each garment in the collection depicted online is accompanied by specific information about its construction, history and provenance if known, and some even have scalable patterns, images of graduate thesis reproductions, and attached research papers, such as this striped silk taffeta bodice worn by Mrs. Edgar Grout for her wedding on June 30, 1897, featuring a scaled pattern and analysis by Emily VanDervort (MFA '08), or this bodice also in striped silk taffeta from the same era (of unknown providence) which includes an analysis and photos of a reproduction by Jade Bettin (MFA '06). The online archive will only continue to grow as present and future research assistants slowly make their way through the documentation process--what's currently shown is perhaps 10-15% of the entire collection, which itself is continually expanding through the generosity of donors.

But, the real point of this post is not to focus on CoStar, which is probably a familiar topic to long-time readers. It's to announce something exciting and new!

In addition to the CoStar resource (which is primarily Western women's clothing of the past couple centuries), an entirely new archive site has gone live, NowesArk, an online catalogue of our non-Western clothing collection! NowesArk is curated by Professor Bobbi Owen, whose collection forms the bulk of its pieces.

The site is super-brand-new (to the point where the "about" section isn't up yet, and the splash page has a couple of typos), but already features 74 items to look through--primarily Japanese and Chinese garments and accessories, though also a few Vietnamese, Tibetan, and Middle Eastern pieces. Graduate research assistant Amanda Phillips (MFA '09) spent her final semester of graduate school supervising a team of several undergrad work-study students on this project, all of whom devoted many hours to documenting these pieces and getting this web resource up and running. Bravo, y'all!

With both of these archives, in the course of researching you can assemble a collection of "favorites" in a scrollable sidebar window (titled "My Stars"), by clicking on the little star/plus graphic next to a garment's title on its description page. So, suppose you are looking at the CoStar collection for bodices in the 1895-1900 window--you could add the two bodices linked above to your My Stars section, keep looking for more bodices that fit your specs and then later go back to read through the particulars or print out the extra info for all the bodices you find. If you are perusing the NowesArk collection for furisode examples, again, the star/plus graphic allows you to quickly weed through the garments and collect up specific furisode links to easily navigate between later. "My Stars" spans both archives, so if you add a bustle dress from CoStar and a haori from NowesArk, you'll see both no matter which archive you are perusing.

You can read detailed info on browsing and searching the collections here, and learn more about the consolidated archive project in general here.

Because we are clearly totally committed to creatively-relevant acronymous naming conventions, both of these archives are collectively known as the Cloaks Archives, accessible by a central clearinghouse page linking to both archives' sites. I'm looking forward to seeing how these collections continue to grow and develop in the future! (For example, i cannot wait til the archivists get to this one box i've seen in the storage area marked "1920 beaded gowns.")

Happy researching!

BTW, please do drop a comment and let us know how the sites are useful to your research or could be improved, and definitely share your experience should you use one of the scalable patterns to make your own reproduction, or as a starting place for your own "take" on one of our pieces!

ETA: I'd love to see someone make up this 1893 day dress, or this 1886 riding habit, or this intricate 1902 velvet bolero from the provided patterns. Also, i'm feeling a little bit of regret i didn't title or subtitle this post "ZOMG FREE PRD PATTERNS BBQ," since i know a common complaint is that there are really only so many period patterns out there commercially available or scalable in references like Janet Arnold's books.

If your university or institute has its own online archive of a similar or related collection, please comment with a link. And, if you have pieces you wish to donate to either collection, email me at < costume -at- unc -dot- edu > and i'll put you in touch with our Acquisitions Coordinator.

Looking over the past few posts, i seem to be on a real kick of "crazycraft" interspersed with "computers and costuming"! After all those symposium creature posts, here's another computer-related one.

Remember that i spent part of my summer taking a CAD class at the NCSU College of Textiles? I discussed a bit about some of the topics covered in a previous post on vector-based drawing software like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW.

In this post, I have a few screencaps of some of the other programs that we used in the class, including the pattern- and marker-making software produced by Gerber Technology, which i'd like to share and discuss!

( Click for computer screencaps and photos of the cutter robot! )

Probably the most popular (in terms of hits/comments) post of all time on this blog was my overview of what i called the Lady Artisan Apron, a work apron with a fitted bodice-bib section. Since posting about it over a year ago, dozens of people have emailed, commented, PM'd or otherwise contacted me about it, often sending pictures of their own renditions, asking questions, adding features or modifications. Some have been used for crafts artisans and dyers like myself, but people have also made them for countless other purposes--bakers and chefs, artists, housecleaners, costumers, role-players, photographers, child-care professionals, you name it! It's been awesome to see how everyone's made it their own.

And, here i am over a year later, having finally finished one of the two i had planned to make way back when i bought some denim for my dream-style work aprons and put together that first mockup ("beta" version)! It's funny how little time you have to sew for yourself when you spend all your days making stuff for a living, but that's okay; i've had the mockup to wear in the interim... Not that it was nearly as nice as this new one is.

( mirror photo on the fly )

I've got two hats in progress that hopefully i'll be finishing and writing up soon (two that y'all voted on, in fact), but in the interim, speaking of hats...i have links to a couple of hat contests!

HatLife.com sponsors the Hatty Awards, for which one either nominates onesself or is nominated by colleagues. Know anyone you really admire in their contributions to the field of hatmaking? Nominate away, and may the maddest hatters win! Nominations close September 30th.

And, it's that time of year again for the Hats & Hearts millinery contest, sponsored by the NC Women's Health Center and the UNC Oncology department. Hats entered will be given to cancer patients in the treatment program, so make sure if you enter that you don't enter a hat you want returned. Two of my students and i entered last year and one of them won in the men's division! The prizes are some pretty good gift certificates to restaurants and businesses, and it's a great cause. Registration deadline is August 29th, with all hats received by September 3rd.

Well, though i can't talk about exactly what i'm doing for Shrek or show photographs, it's probably okay for me to speak in vague terms. (For example, I'll say that i'm on the Dragon team, but not how the Dragon is created.)

One of the things i've been doing the past couple days has been generating large-scale stencils for the cutting of pattern pieces. One piece needs to be cut 720 times--it is more efficient to figure out the most advantageous layout once (i.e., that maintains any requisite pattern or grain orientation while conserving the most fabric), make a large stencil the width of the fabric, then trace it off as needed, than to mark and cut 720 pieces individually. In this way, too, anyone can trace and cut the pieces quickly and easily if need be. Using simple algebraic equations, you can gauge by the length of the stencil how much fabric it takes to cut, say, one gross.

For example, my stencil cuts 36 pieces in one layout and is 47" long. So, it takes four repetitions of the stencil to generate 144 pieces, and 4 * 47 = 188", or just under 5 and a quarter yards.

Practical math application, that's key. I swear, if i could go back to my 9th grade math class and every time some kid said something like, "When are we ever going to need to know how to do these stupid word problems?" about one of those tests where you have to figure out how many apples Jane can buy for $3 or whatever, i'd tell them examples like this. Screw apples, how many random dragon parts can you make with 21 yards? (Four gross and a few extras, right?)

Geometry is also important for a project like this--I used a basic understanding of tessellations to figure out my stencil layout. If you know what shapes tessellate (page through this DIY tutorial if you are unsure about what shapes will do it), you can figure out which one your piece(s) vaguely resemble. My 36-piece stencil is based on a rhombus, and i did two more today based on triangles.

Another exciting thing--today after work i swung by Manny's Millinery Supply and picked up a puzzle block! I had been wanting to check out what blocks they had available, and i particularly hoped to find a puzzle block in a shape i could use for my class this fall. I think i've found a woodworking artisan who is going to make me a couple of blocks in shapes that don't need puzzle cuts, but explaining a puzzle block to anyone who hasn't seen one, much less worked with one, is next to impossible.

( Want to see photographs? )

Even before my Lady Artisan's Apron was featured in Steampunk Magazine (but moreso since that came out!), i've been getting a lot of great feedback from folks making their own version of this project.

jadecat9 has a wonderful writeup on her own process, here. She made the apron in a heavy pinstriped denim and wore it at the Westercon convention as part of a costume. The post features lots of pictures, so check it out!

ETA: Complete dress diary here--http://www.wyldfires.com/costumes/apron.html

trystbat also has a dress-diary of her own costume version of the apron here, done up in a heavy burgundy twill!

I know a few other readers are making versions of this, so if you are one of them, please post pictures, or put a link in the comments if you're writing a dress-diary on it or similar! I love to see what others have done with these things!

Our program director returned from the recent USITT Conference with a whole pile of great information, including a lot of literature on various computer programs. I thought i'd write up some brief overviews of them here for y'all.


The Costume Bible

The Costume Bible is a software package that contains a suite of cross-linked databases and form-generators designed to streamline the work of costume shop management. It's a FilemakerPro program that was developed by the folks at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA. Barter runs year-round, producing an average of 20 shows a year, several of which run in repertory.

I'm no manager, but i did download the demo and poke around through it to see what i thought. It looked like it might be a bit hard to initially get your head around, but that once you had used it for a show or two, it'd be a great tool, particularly for managing multiple shows across the scope of a season or repertory run. I particularly liked the one-click budget reports and work lists and such, all consolidated within the same program.

TCB (ha!) isn't cheap at $300 for the software package, but it seems like if you are adept with computers, the time it'd save you once you get the hang of it might be well worth the investment.



PatternMaker

PatternMaker is one of those software companies i've heard about for years. It's a 2D CAD program designed to generate flat-pattern sewing patterns. It operates off of the Scandinavian fitting system, and you can read all about the measurements required here. You have to purchase the initial software, then suites of basic pattern shapes depending on what kinds of garments you want to make. This page shows some garments for a production of Twelfth Night made from patterns generated by PatternMaker software.

They offer a free 30-day trial version of the software that you can use to make a pair of pants and a bodice, to try it out and see how it works for you. After the 30 days are up, you have several options, depending on how much you want to spend for added features and new pattern sets. The minimum cost involved then is $99, the cost of the basic Deluxe Editor version.



Wild Ginger Software

Wild Ginger produces a number of programs that generate custom-sized patterns based on entered measurements. They're probably best-known for their garment software, Cameo and PatternMaster, and their digital range of basic patterns, Click-n-Sew.

Because it's targeted to my field, I downloaded their free "Wild Things!" accessories program and found it to be easy to use, quite intuitive in its setup for adjusting scale of various elements of the patterns. It generates what look to be CAD-drafted patterns for basic hat, bag, wrap, and simple shoe shapes. I'm not going to be doing any elaborate fancy millinery with it, but the next time i need to bang out a fast newsboy cap, this program's going to make my pattern for me, just to see how it goes!

They offer a more complex version with a wider range of vintage/20th century styles of hats/gloves/etc called Wild Things Vintage for only $40. I might invest in it, just as a speedy way to crank out custom glove and cloth-cloche patterns and the like.

Another of their programs that might be of use in a costume shop (and certainly for home-sewers) is Stitch-n-Stash, a database set up for inventorying and cataloguing your fabric stash, patterns, sewing-related publications, notions, etc. You can scan swatches of the fabrics and notions, and print out suites of project information from the database. Stitch-n-Stash is only $30 for the download.



Got any other recommendations? Favorite computer software you like to use? Do you use one of these and love/hate it? Tell me about it! I'd love to hear your feedback.