Two more straw hats from Amadeus!
Apr. 1st, 2008 01:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labricoleuseI've got more Amadeus hats to share, this time two straws for Constanza Mozart, including a downloadable "Care of Straw Hats" document you can take and modify for your own use!
"Ice Cream Bonnet":
First, let's take a look at Constanza's sweet straw bonnet, which she wears when the Mozarts have fallen on hard times, fondly referred to in my head as the Ice Cream Bonnet. She wears this with a lovely but plain pink silk gown (shot with shades of rose and brown)--they're supposed to still be mixing in court society, just clearly not as ostentatiously dressed as others might be.
"poor look" bonnet, side view
"poor look" bonnet, oblique front view
This bonnet is made from a coarsely-woven thick straw cartwheel which had a bit of a dome shape from the outset (not a flat pancake, but not a capeline-style shape with a sharply-defined crown/brim configuration). It has a little pleated ornament at the back from the lovely cross-woven wide striped ribbon, which curves down to function as a tie as well, and is bound in a grosgrain I dyed to match the pink in her gown. The color combination reminds me of neapolitan ice cream! (Hence the nickname.) Initially she wore a separate mobcap beneath it, but the designer didn't like the way it looked with the actress' wig, so instead we decided to line the bonnet with a white cotton "doily-like" eyelet-ruffled insert, tacked in several places to the base bonnet but left to flop free as well, to sort of mimic the look of an interior mobcap.
These two images were taken in the dressing room, and in the background you can see a copy of a form I fill out and attach to the headform for each straw hat that goes into a show. Straw hats aren't something the average person is terribly familiar with these days, I've found, outside of the cheap raffia sunhats people pick up at the beach and such, and though they aren't hard to care for, they're particular, in a way. So, i like to give the actors and wardrobe crew a little bit of info about straw hats in the interest of hopefully preventing folks from damaging the hats for lack of knowledge. I put this file up so you can download it and adapt it for use in your own theatre or shop, if you like.
Download Care of Straw Hats.doc
The "Flying Potato Chip":
This next hat is one i liked to think of as the Flying Potato Chip, for obvious reasons--it's a big assymetrical oval-brimmed fancy straw hat shaped kind of like a Pringle with frippery involved. It's got three large hand-curled ostrich plumes and a few silk flowers for garniture, as well as a swirly band of wide cross-woven copper and black ribbon. It's been sized within an inch of its life, and the wired edge is bound in a bias strip of the same embroidered blue silk taffeta as the dress it's worn with.
oblique front view
top-down view
Flying Potato Chip, back oblique view showing lift and horsehair insert
You can tell how it's worn best in that last shot, canted up and forward at an assymetrical angle atop a fairly largish wig (though admittedly the wigs in this show are far more comprehensibly-scaled than is often the case for wigs of this period--no sailing ships lodged in the sides of pompadours or flocks of birds bursting out of 2' hair-nests). You can also see in that last shot some sections of horsehair dyed to match the wig, through which the dressers can pin to attach the hat to the head.
We have our photo call for this show tonight, so hopefully soon i'll be able to make a comprehensive post about the show itself using stage shots; i like to get these backstage detail images though, since sometimes stage shots wind up oddly lit and at strange angles and such. It'll be cool though (i hope) for seeing them on the actresses with their wigs and dresses and the like.
In non-work news, I'm doing well in my road to recovery from periodontal surgery, thank you to everyone who inquired after me. Surgery during tech is a new experience for me, and one i'm not eager to undergo again. I'm starting to eat stuff that pushes the bounds of "squishy granny food" now, so that's a relief--there is truly only so much soup and pudding one can handle. Today's lunch included these hilarious potato products, which are quite a mood-lifter to look at on your plate. Well, ok, when you plop them into some ketchup, it's a little unsettling when the ketchup squishes out the eyeholes...
In other news, my students have their parasol projects coming up soon, which i'm pretty excited about--they'll be the first class working from my textbook on the subject, so it'll be cool to see how that goes. I'll be sure to share photographs of their finished work!
"Ice Cream Bonnet":
First, let's take a look at Constanza's sweet straw bonnet, which she wears when the Mozarts have fallen on hard times, fondly referred to in my head as the Ice Cream Bonnet. She wears this with a lovely but plain pink silk gown (shot with shades of rose and brown)--they're supposed to still be mixing in court society, just clearly not as ostentatiously dressed as others might be.
"poor look" bonnet, side view
"poor look" bonnet, oblique front view
This bonnet is made from a coarsely-woven thick straw cartwheel which had a bit of a dome shape from the outset (not a flat pancake, but not a capeline-style shape with a sharply-defined crown/brim configuration). It has a little pleated ornament at the back from the lovely cross-woven wide striped ribbon, which curves down to function as a tie as well, and is bound in a grosgrain I dyed to match the pink in her gown. The color combination reminds me of neapolitan ice cream! (Hence the nickname.) Initially she wore a separate mobcap beneath it, but the designer didn't like the way it looked with the actress' wig, so instead we decided to line the bonnet with a white cotton "doily-like" eyelet-ruffled insert, tacked in several places to the base bonnet but left to flop free as well, to sort of mimic the look of an interior mobcap.
These two images were taken in the dressing room, and in the background you can see a copy of a form I fill out and attach to the headform for each straw hat that goes into a show. Straw hats aren't something the average person is terribly familiar with these days, I've found, outside of the cheap raffia sunhats people pick up at the beach and such, and though they aren't hard to care for, they're particular, in a way. So, i like to give the actors and wardrobe crew a little bit of info about straw hats in the interest of hopefully preventing folks from damaging the hats for lack of knowledge. I put this file up so you can download it and adapt it for use in your own theatre or shop, if you like.
Download Care of Straw Hats.doc
The "Flying Potato Chip":
This next hat is one i liked to think of as the Flying Potato Chip, for obvious reasons--it's a big assymetrical oval-brimmed fancy straw hat shaped kind of like a Pringle with frippery involved. It's got three large hand-curled ostrich plumes and a few silk flowers for garniture, as well as a swirly band of wide cross-woven copper and black ribbon. It's been sized within an inch of its life, and the wired edge is bound in a bias strip of the same embroidered blue silk taffeta as the dress it's worn with.
oblique front view
top-down view
Flying Potato Chip, back oblique view showing lift and horsehair insert
You can tell how it's worn best in that last shot, canted up and forward at an assymetrical angle atop a fairly largish wig (though admittedly the wigs in this show are far more comprehensibly-scaled than is often the case for wigs of this period--no sailing ships lodged in the sides of pompadours or flocks of birds bursting out of 2' hair-nests). You can also see in that last shot some sections of horsehair dyed to match the wig, through which the dressers can pin to attach the hat to the head.
We have our photo call for this show tonight, so hopefully soon i'll be able to make a comprehensive post about the show itself using stage shots; i like to get these backstage detail images though, since sometimes stage shots wind up oddly lit and at strange angles and such. It'll be cool though (i hope) for seeing them on the actresses with their wigs and dresses and the like.
In non-work news, I'm doing well in my road to recovery from periodontal surgery, thank you to everyone who inquired after me. Surgery during tech is a new experience for me, and one i'm not eager to undergo again. I'm starting to eat stuff that pushes the bounds of "squishy granny food" now, so that's a relief--there is truly only so much soup and pudding one can handle. Today's lunch included these hilarious potato products, which are quite a mood-lifter to look at on your plate. Well, ok, when you plop them into some ketchup, it's a little unsettling when the ketchup squishes out the eyeholes...
In other news, my students have their parasol projects coming up soon, which i'm pretty excited about--they'll be the first class working from my textbook on the subject, so it'll be cool to see how that goes. I'll be sure to share photographs of their finished work!
