Update/News: Lost Colony Costume Shop now accepting donations of STUFF.

The folks over at The Lost Colony are of course still reeling from the fire that consumed their costume shop, storage, and maintenance facility in September.

They first set up an online donation form for monetary donations, presumably because that was the easiest thing to deal with immediately after the fire. They've now progressed to soliciting donations of items, having posted the lost inventories of both the costume shop and maintenence shop:

http://thelostcolony.org/wanted.html

Check it out and see if there's something you can help with!

(Incidentally, this is a good illustration of why keeping a current inventory is a good idea, and also an opportunity to see what the inventory of the shop of an outdoor drama looks like, should you wish to compare and contrast it with inventories of other shop facilities.)

Projects: Complex masks

I've mentioned in previous posts that this semester's graduate crafts course is on masks and armor. As we roll up into Fall Break, they're finishing up the section on masks, which culminates in a project i call "Complex Masks." The mask they chose for this project had to have some engineering issue involved in its construction. For example, one student chose to make a dragon whose eyes light up, another made a leather commedia mask using traditional Italian leather maskmaking techniques (for which she made all the traditional tools as well, like a hammer made from a bull's horn), another made a Medusa mask that had actual recoiling snakes, etc etc etc.

Two of the students gave me permission to photograph and share images of their projects here.

( Click for pix! )