La Bricoleuse

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, one half of the skirt would have had to be cut inverted, which creates a visual anomaly in textiles with satin weaves.

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 show with the full support of the theatre's resources--costume stock, Equity stage managers, the scene shop, etc.

This summer we're doing Hairspray with a cast of 30 kids, and I'm running the costume shop with a staff of four students in the Theatre Tech section of the conservatory (these students staff our shops and run the show itself as their conservatory experience). In the first week of the production process, one of the things we did was to take a tour of the locally-based, internationally-known custom fabric printing company, Spoonflower--they generously donated some fabric that we're using for some of our costumes and classes. I've taken our graduate students on tours there in the past, but not since they've moved to their new, expanded location, and i've got some great photos to share from our tour!

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One of the capstone projects of the third year in our graduate program is the historical reproductions. Students choose a garment from our historical clothing archive, CoStar, which they meticulously examine, research its provenance, and reproduce as accurately as possible. They write a paper on their findings, digitize the pattern, and make it available on the archive.

Third-year Candy McClernan had her reproduction and the original garment displayed on dress forms in the shop this afternoon, and i took this opportunity to take a photo:

My dye class has presented another project, and the topic this time around is print repeat techniques--creating multiple iterations of an image on fabric or on garments. We talk about all the different ways in which this can happen, from stenciling to block printing to screen printing to heat transfers to digital textile design. We discuss the pros and cons of all these methods, and what types of supplies and media you need to deploy them. Then the students choose two methods and create projects with them.

Today i've got a block print and several screen print examples to share.


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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-aided design and the application of digital technologies to costume production, and this show has provided her with quite a few projects in that area.

This post concerns the creation of a custom Deutschmark-print fabric for the Kit Kat Klub's show costumes for the "Money" number.

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If you follow what's going on in the technical theatre industry at conferences such as USITT, and via blogs like this one and other media, you've seen a growing number of examples of the use of digital fabric printing. From Disney's sublimation printing department, to fabric yardage pre-printed with age for regional theatre, to reproducing historical folding fans by digitally printing the designs onto silk, i've covered ever more of this type of work of late.

It's clear that theatrical costume designers and crafts artisans need to develop a familiarity with the processes of digital textile design and printing [1]. I've begun to encourage my students to take on projects that involve elements of digital textile print design, like this fan leaf design by first year grad student Leah Pelz

But it does beg the question: how does one learn how to go about such things? Obviously digital fabric design classes are out there, offered through a college of textiles, but that's not an option for most of us working in the field.

I received two books for Christmas which might be of help, if you're hoping to get some grounding in textile design to actualize the kinds of projects that present themselves in the course of costume production. Neither are ideal for theatre artists, but then again, we're not exactly a huge demographic. Both are useful in different ways, and laid out in such a way that you can pick and choose what you need from them to get done what you need doing.

The first is A Field Guide to Fabric Design by Kimberly Kight. Kim is the author of the blog TrueUp, which also hosts a fabric design forum for discussion of relevant topics. The book purports to deal with designing fabric "for quilting, home dec, & apparel," and it's a pretty succinct overview.

I will admit an aesthetic bias, before i even get to the content: I love the way this book is laid out, organized, and graphically designed. The images are great, the paper quality is nice, the font families are easy to read, and it's full of all kinds of useful info for the novice who wants to learn all about textile print design, from basic nomenclature to various method tutorials (both digital and analog). She also addresses things like copyright and licensing issues, which are of more pressing relevance to those designing fabrics for sale, but are useful to know from a costume design perspective as well.

In terms of digital design, Kight's book has a few tutorials on working with both Photoshop and Illustrator (versions CS3 or later), and she has some excellent insights into how to create stuff like a cohesive color palette for a design, or making a decent-looking scatter-print using spot-repeat grids.

The other book is Digital Textile Design, by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac. Let me start by saying, if i had an aesthetic bias in favor of Kight's, i've the opposite with this text. Plainly put, i found this book hard to look at. From the font choices to the non-intuitive layout, to the (IMO) hideous and already-dated-looking images/designs, it was not easy on the eyes for me. Even the size and paper used kind of turned me off, because it felt like a low-rent workbook. Then again, it does seem to be aimed at a fashion-school textbook-buyer's market in some ways, so maybe that's to be expected. It's got some of the same basic information to be found in Kight's book, but is less comprehensive in terms of related chapters on things like color theory and fabric types and even some of the terminology.

The good thing about the book is that it's got a ton of actual step-by-step digital fabric design tutorials. Mind you, they aren't very clearly written, and i wound up using them more as vague signposts on a road of progress--a couple of them resulted in some cool exercises that helped me understand new ways of working with images and design programs, and some of them were essentially useless without liberal use of the Adobe Help site. Again, if the text is taken as a workbook meant to be used in tandem with an in-class instructor, maybe its vagueness in places is not a problem in that context? I'd think you'd want it as "idiot-proof" as possible, myself. Figuring it out on your own, it's hit or miss.

I think though, after reading both of them and working through their respective tutorials and guidelines, if i had to recommend a course of action for the average theatre craftsperson or costume designer who wanted to begin working with digital textile designs, i'd recommend buying the Kight text. If you suck at Photoshop and Illustrator, her book will get you going conceptually, and Adobe's support pages have so many really good instructional videos that you can hunt through them for the specifics on how to do something like "select just this part of the image" or "paste this but mirrored" or whatever.

After reading both these books and doing some tutorials, i put my learning to the test, and spent a day off futzing around with Photoshop and Illustrator to see what i could come up with in the realm of random textile design (meaning, not with some specific stage need like the Parchman Hour prison stripes.

A while back I had scanned all these funny old 19th century ads and cartoons that have to do with historical millinery/hatmaking, and decided to see what sorts of fabric prints i could make with them as jumping-off points. I've begun grouping them on Spoonflower in a collection called Vive les Chapeaux!. So far i've got two hatters' ad prints for making hat linings and such, and a hilarious border print that i'm thinking about using for cafe curtains in my millinery studio. Fun!


[1] No, i don't believe that digital printing and design will ever entirely supplant the artistry of surface design techniques, from batik to screenprinting. This post is not about that debate. This post is about the rise of digital design and printing as one more tool in the toolbox, as it were.

The first workshop we attended at USITT-Southeast (held the past weekend on the campus of the University of Georgia at Athens) concerned fabric painting techniques using a special type of transparent paint mixed and sold by Gene Mignola for costume painters like Margaret Peot (the workshop leader).

Mignola's fabric paint (or perhaps "fabric paint" is a better notation) is actually a sort of dye paste--dye suspended in a gum arabic base, which results in a transparent color medium that thins with water and can be used to paint silk, wool, and nylon substrates, including nylon/spandex stretch fabrics. Margaret told us that this type of fabric colorant was devised in part by legendary costume designer Willa Kim for doing painterly techniques on her dancewear designs. Mignola only sells it in bulk quantities (gallons and up) though, so for most folks working on a small scale in regional or academic theatre, you'd probably be better off blending your own in the smaller quantities you need on a project-by-project basis.

In this first workshop, we used the dye/gum paint to paint on woven silk and stretchy nylon/spandex swatches. Margaret illustrated how she achieves several unique paint effects in her work, from scales to warty blobs to feathers to wood-grain. Here are some images i snapped of a couple of processes.

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I'm currently designing costumes for a very exciting project, the professional world premiere of The Parchman Hour, a new play written and directed by Mike Wiley.

The play chronicles the stories and songs of the Freedom Riders, a group composed mostly of college students who, during the summer of 1961, challenged segregation in the southern US by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses into the Deep South and refusing to observe segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, terminal lunch counter seating, and bus seating.

They met with violent resistance--one bus was firebombed and several of the Riders were beaten so badly they had to be hospitalized. They were not deterred, however, and more busloads of them kept coming--eventually over 300 people in all. Ultimately the state of Mississippi began incarcerating them in the notorious Parchman Farm Penitentiary, where they endured cruel abuse but kept their spirits up with songs and a nightly "vaudeville show," in which they would trade off reciting poetry, delivering speeches and sermons, telling jokes, calling out their contributions to everyone down the row on their cellblock.

In our production, there are several performers (one actor and four musicians) who are costumed as long-term Parchman inmates--men who are not part of the Freedom Riders group, but who instead are part of the Parchman gen-pop, hardened criminals and chain-gang workers who toil in Parchman's fields day in and day out. The uniforms worn by those prisoner characters are the subject of this post.

In researching what the uniforms looked like, I was specifically looking for photographs of prisoners making music, since the majority of our performers costumed in this way will be prominently featured onstage providing the music for the show.( Read more... )

ETA: If you also need yardage of pre-aged prison striped fabric, you can buy this design from Spoonflower at this link right here!

In my windows of "hurry up and wait" this tech weekend, i've been working on further explorations of custom printed fabric fan leaves by Spoonflower. Recall my earlier post on reproducing a fan design from 1885, which was my first foray; today's post addresses my second experiment: cotton voile.

The first fan i did was in silk crepe de chine, a fairly common fabric for a fan leaf, which needs to be something thin enough to fold up between the sticks of a fan frame but substantial enough to create a good breeze when the fan is used. I wanted to test some of Spoonflower's other fabrics for this purpose, so my second shot was their beautifully light cotton voile.

For this project, i also wanted to experiment with generating fan art from scratch, rather than working from an existing historical fan leaf painting. (Wow, proofreading this just now I realized this is a COMPLETELY different meaning of the phrase "fan art" than it usually connotes.)

The fan leaf is a fascinating conundrum from a design perspective, as the artwork needs to be something that works in a weirdly compromised semicircular shape. I spent a few days looking at all kinds of round things--mandalas, rose windows, radial patterns--until i finally decided upon a clock face as a design motif. This fan design is an aged and cropped photo i took of the clock on my fireplace mantelpiece at home! The final thing wound up looking kind of Steampunk to me, hence the design name on Spoonflower of Steampunk Clock Fan.

In the course of manipulating the image in Photoshop, I also realized that I could rotate my art and get TWO fans onto a fat quarter, which is so much more efficient use of fabric. I decided to treat these like a cut-and-sew textile panel design so i included some useful instructional text right on the leaf design as well. I ordered the test print in cotton voile, and began to assemble my fan.

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First up, i want to quickly mention that today, August 18th, beginning at noon EST, is Spoonflower's Free Swatch Day! You can get one free 8" swatch in any of their fabrics for the following 24 hours, so it's a perfect time to test a print you like or check out a fabric you want to feel the hand of in a larger piece than their small swatch booklet.

If you're a graphic or textile designer, it can be fun to keep an eye on their weekly design contests, as well. You can win $100 in free fabric, plus commissions from your own sales.

Consider this foreshadowing, too, for a forthcoming post during the first half of this theatre season about how we're using Spoonflower to create a costume effect for one of our shows...


Today is the last day to vote in the Stephen Jones millinery contest on Talenthouse. As this contest closes, i noticed a couple more coming up that might be of interest to the La Bricoleuse readership, and which exemplify why it may be professionally sound to maintain a presence on Talenthouse.

There's currently two months' lead time to work on a submission for a textile print design for Issa London. Wouldn't it be a kick to see your design as part of their collection?

And, in a completely different realm (literally), there's just under a month to work up an armor design for a character in the video game Deep Realms by Playdom! How timely, since i'm teaching Masks and Armor in the spring...

Thanks for your support of millinery in general this week, as the Jones contest has been running. It's been a great week for hats!