Project: Straw Hat Refurbishment, Oliver!

[labricoleuse]

My employer for most of the year, PlayMakers Repertory, is partnered this summer with the Carrboro ArtsCenter to produce the Summer Youth Conservatory, a performing arts program for children age 8-18. The two organizations brought in a director and musical director from LA, hired professional design team for costumes/sets/props, and held auditions--43 children and one adult actor were ultimately cast for a full production of Lionel Bart's classic musical Oliver!

I returned from Utah and leapt right into helping the costume designer get all those actors dressed in Dickensian London style.


Here's the poster. Cute!
But that's got nothing to do with costumes, of course...


Here's a little straw bonnet the designer and director liked for a schoolgirl character.
Note the placement of the straw braid to create the bonnet shape.


But wow, does it need some reinforcement!


Steam that hat! Note the large hole i need to repair.

Straw will splinter and disintegrate if you don't dampen it before stitching it. You can soak the straw, spritz it with a spray bottle, steam it with a hat steamer, or--as shown in the above picture--using a steam iron. I used the iron simply because it was the fastest choice--with 44 actors all having multiple looks and only two costume staff, time is definitely of the essence here. Any of the other methods would have worked just as well.

If you try this at home, remember that you need to keep the straw damp in order to keep it pliable, so keep steaming/spritzing it as you stitch! Soaked straw will obviously stay wet longer--were i building this straw bonnet from scratch using a length of straw braid, soaking would have been my first choice.


Can you see what's happening here?

It was very hard to get a picture of this step--the camera didn't want to focus on the repaired hole. Much like in my previous post on repairing straw hats, i used tulle to reinforce the area around the rip. In this case, i had to make an aesthetic concession to sturdiness--kids are very hard on costumes--so the reinforcement is done with a heavy buttonhole twist and you can see the stitches holding the net-straw-net "sandwich" patch together. Luckily i have front-row-distance and Dickensian-crumminess on my side--this kind of drastic damage would be far more difficult to repair for a streetwear hat or a smaller theatre.


Here's the finished hat with some shiny plaid ribbon attached.


Back view.

No, this isn't a glamorous hat, or a particularly difficult hat repair. However, this reflects the majority of the type of work that a crafts artisan does day-in and day-out. For every straw tricorne or reproduction 1830 coal-scuttle bonnet, there are a dozen or more little tiny damaged hats that need retrimming and refurbishment.

Comments

[pandorasfox.livejournal.com]

nifty trick on how to sew straw, thanks!