La Bricoleuse

Wow, i can tell it's been a busy season and semester--no posts since October! But, the semester's winding down and i found some time to blog. Today, a survey of some of my students' footwear projects for the class i'm teaching this semester! (If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have gotten a realtime peek at some of these already...)

This past couple weeks, i've been working with the undergraduates of the Kenan Theatre Company to produce a bearskin cape costume for their upcoming play, Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls. When the costume designer, Ashley Owen, expressed a desire for the cape to feature a hood which incorporated a bear head mask structure (kind of like a bearskin rug), i thought this would be a great opportunity for us to partner with the Research Hub on campus and 3D print the base structure for this piece.

Traditionally, we might carve or sculpt the rigid foundation support for such a mask, but in this case we had limited time, money, and labor--i knew that if we could print the base structure, we would save an enormous amount of time in terms of available labor to work on the piece, and because our campus has a grant which underwrites the cost of the filament for 3D printed objects through the end of the semester (within reason), we could in theory get this done for only the cost of the fur.

So i took a look around Thingiverse for a shareware animal head file which could be modified for our bear and i found this great file for a puppet or fursuit head, in this case a fox/wolf shape but i thought we could make it work for our bear hood with some minimal tweaks in ear/nose shape and the fur skin patterning itself. I spoke with the librarians at the Research Hub, placed a request for a print of the file, and in a few days, i had our base structure!

This past spring, we entered into a very exciting partnership with the in-development Museum of Science Fiction.

This article gives a pretty good overview of how we wound up getting involved, and you can watch a brief video about it at this link.

So, this post is a behind-the-scenes photoessay overview of what this first project entailed.

Lately I've been considering all the implications of 3D printing technology for costume craftwork, and have begun working with the Makerspace here on the UNC campus which is attached to our library system.

If you're not familiar with the process of 3D printing and some of the ways in which it's beginning to be incorporated in professional costume production, check out this excellent blog post by Joe Kucharski of Tyrrany of Style, which is essentially a postification of a panel he chaired at the USITT national conference this year. It's a great overview of how the process works, the materials one might use to 3D-print objects, and culminates with several different types of applications currently in use (like 3D-printed "filigree" masks worn by Disney parade performers) or in development (like scanning and reproducing renaissance lace using a 3D printer).

So, here's only a small contribution to the information one might take into consideration when evaluating the possibilities of 3D printing in creating props and costumes for theatre: dyeability. The filaments one can use to 3D print do come in colors, but those colors are fairly limited at present and (if i may make an aesthetic value judgement) somewhat unsophisticated in range. The printed objects can be painted as well, but in the spirit of experimentation, i did wonder about the dyeability of the completed object. Could a printed piece be dyed faster than it could be painted, for example, since time is often a factor in our field? Paint needs time to dry, but if you could dye an object, you could just rinse and dry it off and hand it back to an actor within the hour.

In looking at the composition of the various kinds of plastic filament that one can feed through a 3D printer, i noticed that PLA plastic's composition seemed to indicate a fairly high proportion of cellulose-derived elements. That would make it potentially dyeable, would it not?

So, i requested some sample filament in both clear and white from our Makerspace librarian and conducted some preliminary tests using Rit dye. I chose Rit for several reasons. It's the most common dyestuff in theatre dye facilities, and easily purchased in most grocery stores, even. It's easily used in solution by even a novice dyer. And it's a union dye, which means it has components which dye both cellulose-based and protein-based fibers, so if the PLA plastic is of a blended composition, it would potentially affect more of its components than a fiber-specific dyestuff like an acid dye or a direct dye.

Check out my findings!