La Bricoleuse

I see I have quite a bit of catching up to do, as I have a bunch of half-baked posts I need to finish up and share. I will endeavor to get that done over the next couple of days.

First off, I want to extend a hearty congratulations to our newest MFA graduate, Shanna I. Parks. Shanna is off to work as a draper at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. I have some great photographs of two of her final projects that compose the third-year thesis: creative draping, and historical reproduction.

For Shanna's historical reproduction, she chose a garment from our antique clothing collection, a polkadotted Charmeuse gown from the turn-of-the-century. Eventually her pattern and accompanying research paper will be downloadable and accessible on the online archive, but for now my amateur photography will have to suffice. ( Read more... )

In my previous post, i wrote about the ombre dye processes for the tunics and loose pants worn by the Angels of the Principalities in our forthcoming repertory of Angels in America: Parts 1 & 2 (the Principalities appear only in Part 2). And, ombre is nice and all, and a lovely effect, but not really anything super challenging when it comes to surface design on fabrics. Executing specific imagery is when things get really interesting, i find.

Now for the really cool part: their kimono over-robes!

If you had a chance to page through Costume Designer Jan Chambers' photoset for the Angel Robes, you saw a lot of cool influences, but the standout of which was likely the ornate "Symphony of Light" landscape kimonos of textile artist Itchiku Kubota. In our conferences with her, Jan was particularly interested in the idea of the robes of the angels evoking Kubota's work, but utilizing collaged imagery evocative of each Principality--Oceania, Africanii, Europa, Antarctica, Australia, America, and Asiatica.

Jan collected a folder of landscape images from which to create the artwork for the robes, then worked them into watercolorey collages using image editing software--Photoshop and Illustrator. She then made another set of images to discuss with Director Brendan Fox, to show what the finished kimono would look like: Angel Robe Tests.

But, how to get these images onto the fabric for the robes themselves?

Obviously in an ideal world, as the crafts artisan and dyer, I and a team of talented assistants would hand-paint the robes in the yuzen technique, creating masterful works of art. Of course, that would be extremely time-consuming and difficult; you can read about Kubota's process here--each kimono took him a year, and he was a master of the art! Obviously we needed another solution to realize Jan's inspiration, so we turned to the local textile technology and research organization [TC]2 (TC-squared) and their InkDrop printing department.

Technically, this took the project out of my realm entirely and it became a matter of coordination between design, research, development, and management, worked out collaboratively with Jan, Costume Director Judy Adamson, and Adam M. Dill, Judy's assistant and PRC's costume shop manager. It's been an amazing process so far, and fascinating to witness.

InkDrop custom-prints small batches of fabrics with digital image files, much like the services of a company like Spoonflower. Adam explained the project to InkDrop consultant Lujuanna Pagan and hashed out a projected calendar and budget--when the art needed to be finished in order for the silk to be printed and delivered in time for Judy's team to cut and stitch it together in time to have the garments ready for tech of that scene. Judy worked out the size of the pattern pieces needed for each kimono and gave the dimensions to Jan, who split up her artwork into sections of the proper size.

( images and more info )

I'm designing costumes for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming production of Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment. This play affords a huge range of design challenges, not just within specific departments but collaboratively among all the elements of production.

One project we've already begun work on, is the generation of some batik fabric yardage for the characters of Yamba, Gunda, and Bobo, a family of aborigines who are shipwrecked on the same island as the play's protagonist, Louis de Rougemont. These characters will be wearing lengths of fabric as wrapped/tied costume items (Yamba with a sarong-style wrap, her old father Gunda with a shawl-style wrap), which they later remove to create sails for a ship they build onstage.

So, the look of these fabrics is extremely important, not only to myself as the costume designer, but to the set designer (Robin Vest), who'll be incorporating them as "ship sails", and obviously to the director, Tom Quaintance, who'll be seeing them and using them in multiple contexts.

I began the process by researching what indigenous Australian aborigine fabrics look like. If you Google "aboriginal fabrics," you'll get a good idea what the common graphical theme is: pattern creation using dots! Very pointillist, yet abstract. I discovered that a company called M&S Textiles issues a line of cotton fabrics with aboriginal art prints, and this online vendor has .jpgs of the whole line. I then found a local fabric store, Thimble Pleasures, which carried the M&S line, so i dropped by to check out the scale of the prints.

It was immediately clear that the scale was far too small for theatre--the dots in the commercially-available prints are around 1/8" to 1/4" in diameter--onstage, those would blend together in the eye of the audience, and create a very different visual than the scale I had initially envisioned, with the dots being more like the size of an adult fingerprint. I realized that we were likely going to need to create this fabric ourselves. Still, I shared the links of the M&S thumbnails with the production team so we could talk about pattern and color with concrete visuals. This is the print to which we all felt most drawn.

So, my next step was to investigate the possibilities for digitally-printed fabric. I consulted some colleagues at the NC State College of Textiles as to the current leaders in print-on-demand fabric. The cool thing about the companies utilizing this technology is, you can create a print design and choose from a whole range of fabrics on which it might be printed--everything from canvas to charmeuse, and a whole range of fibers. (One of our graduate students is having some charmeuse custom printed for her historical reproduction thesis project, which i can't wait to see the results of!)

I knew i needed a cotton with a fairly soft hand. I looked at some custom digitally printed samples from KarmaKraft, First2Print, and Spoonflower, and decided to give Spoonflower's cotton lawn a shot.

Spoonflower does their printing locally, right up the road in Mebane, NC, and they got me their sample fabrics quicker than any other company i contacted. This is not at all a criticism of the speed or competency of the other companies--it's simply an example of how speed is often the primary factor in theatrical production, the fast turnaround of orders and processes, and because Spoonflower in this case had speed on their side, they became the option i chose. KarmaKraft is based in Raleigh, also quite close, but they conduct a lot of their printing in China, and were out of their sample swatch sets when i inquired; they did send them and have a lot of great options so it's likely that, should we need digitally printed fabrics for some future production, they will remain a good contender.

I then created two print designs using Photoshop:

• Yamba One, in which the pattern is made from crisp-edged "polkadot" style dots
  
• Yamba Two, in which the dots have more brushy, irregular edges

I suspected though, that there would be issues with these digitally-printed fabrics that would make them less than optimal for our stage purposes--namely, the "flatness" of the printed colors under stage lights, the opacity of the fabric (so, the front and back would be starkly different when the fabrics are "flown" onstage as flags and sails), and the gridlike regularity that tiling of a print design would create. As i was working on the digital designs, i realized that if we had the ability to spend more time on the creation of the art, and the money to utilize a printing service that would afford a larger repeat for the design, perhaps digital printing would still be a great option. In this case though, i decided to see whether my crafts artisan, second year graduate student Samantha Coles Greaves, could generate a couple batik samples as well.

I bought two types of fabric for potential in-house batiking at the local JoAnn Fabrics: a bolt of Egyptian cotton and a bolt of dyer's muslin. (I figured, even if we didn't use either of them at all on this show, those are great stock fabrics to have around a costume shop for mockups and other uses.) Samantha then created two samples of batik, inspired by our chosen aboriginal print.

( Read more... )