La Bricoleuse

June is here, which means it's officially the 10th Anniverary Month for the blog!

I'm still running the Best of La Bricoleuse flashbacks over on Facebook, featuring a daily repost of some of the highlights of the past decade, but I also want to recognize that one of the great things which came about in tandem with writing this blog was the publication of my textbook, Sticks in Petticoats: Parasol Manufacture for the Modern Costumer.

I wrote the book because in my professional experience as a costume crafts artisan (though in some theatres this winds up being the responsibiity of the props artisan), i was asked to recover and repair numerous parasols, both antique and modern, according to the specifications of costume designers, but could find NO written information on how others might have done so in the past. I decided that, when i was finished, i would begin work on documenting the various things i'd learned, and Sticks in Petticoats became the result.

It remains to my knowledge the only extant book on the subject.

So, for the entire month of June, I've put Sticks in Petticoats on sale for 30% off, as one more thank-you for reading and supporting this blog! If you've been on the fence about whether you wanted to buy the book or not, maybe this is the month to do it.

Download the eBook for $9.99 (formerly $14.99)
(This is actually 33% off because i like easy numbers, and Lulu doesn't precalculate discounts on digital downloads.)

Purchase a print copy in full color for $24.19 (formerly $34.56)

Purchase a print copy in black-and-white for $18.43 (formerly $26.33)

I promise i have some exciting new posts coming up soon, including ones about a batik project, more 3D printing adventures, and making costume display replicas for the Museum of Science Fiction!

And again, thank you ALL for reading this blog. :D

I completely spaced sharing photos of my students' parasol projects, earlier in the semester. Things got pretty hectic with the repertory shows and it just fell through the cracks! So, here they are, late but nonetheless fun and fantastic.

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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... )

So, first order of business: labricoleuse will ostensibly be on hiatus for the month of July. I'm spending July in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and though there might be a couple things topical that come up, i don't expect to have a lot of time or fodder for the type of things i typically post here. I might have a link or two to share, so don't forget to like La Bricoleuse on Facebook. If you like, you can follow my sporadic travelogue on Blogspot, and i'll catch you all in August!

At some point, i'll write up the exhibit properly, but for now, here are some photos from the exhibit American High Style at the Brooklyn Museum.

( shoes, hats, a parasol )

Wow, it's been a while since i updated here. Needless to say, things are extremely busy right now with Nicholas Nickleby in-house!

I did grab a scrap of time last week to blog over at Nickleby Page 2 Stage about the dyeshop calendar, but beyond that, i've been in nonstop fittings for what feels like a dog's age. I'm probably going to have another post going up soon over there, too--the conclusion to the hat construction chronicled in "Bespoke Millinery, Part One"--so look for that.

Just to give you an idea of the scope of this production, check out this photo: ( click for more (hats & parasols) )

Today, i'm not the source, i'm just the conduit. Links on a variety of topics of potential interest to follow.


Topical Links for Decorative Arts Class

I'll have images of glove projects to share on Tuesday, but for now, OutsaPop.com illustrates for us in this post some answers to the question, "When is a glove more than a glove?"

And, because we can't get our respirator fit-testing dates scheduled until the end of the month, I'm postponing our shoe unit and we're moving on to parasols next. In that spirit, check out Elena Corchero's solar parasol, which turns into a chandelier after dark. I may have to experiment with this idea myself! Corchero also does a lovely folding fan/flashlight design in the same vein, and some cool reflective lace for trimming delicately frilly sportswear.

Speaking of shoes, here's a cool how-to on Instructables.com for bricolaging a power-generating shoe modification!


Health and Safety

Many of us who make a career out of costume production develop a repetitive stress injury (RSI) at some point. Vigilance and care of your muscles and joints is the key to maintaining a long, successful career without damaging your body beyond repair. I'm big on learning about a range of ways to minimize or avoid RSIs, from technological advances in ergonomics (simple example: spring-action scissors, compression gloves) to physical therapy exercises. On that tip, i was thrilled to run across GreenOptions.com's "Yoga for Crafters" series. So far they've got targeted posts aimed at jewelers, stitchers (they say "seamstresses," but in my industry, i've worked with my fair share of male stitchers, too), & interloopers ("knitters & crocheters", but i think the post applies to all yarn artists, including tatters, nalebinders, macrameurs--wow, i just got really pedantic, there, sorry).


Blogs of Note

FashioningTech.com is a great wearable-art/couture/technology blog exploring the intersection of science, technology, fashion, and attire. I set up a LiveJournal feed for it at fashioningtech, if you're an LJ blogger and want to follow it on your flist. Some of these links above (parasol, shoes) are swiped from there.

Fashion Creation Without Fabric Waste Creation is a patterning-centric blog written by Australian PhD candidate Timo Rissanen, whose passion is garment design utilizing patterns with zero fabric waste (with occasional birdwatching). He's got some great open-source info on his own pattern creations, such as this no-waste hoodie pattern and these no-waste codpieced leggings. I love this concept, not only for its ecological implications, but also because it holds the same appeal as creative writing within a rigid structure, like writing poetry in sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, etc. but in a clothing design paradigm. I also made him a feed on LJ, at 0wastefashion.

On a similar note, if you want a fascinating pattern-theory read (and really, who doesn't?), check out the Julian and Sophie School of Pattern Cutting site, which is the result of a residency at the Royal College of Art. It's mindbending, the way they completely freaktastically puree everything you know about pattern-drafting into these crazily draped garments. One caveat: the photographs of the garments produced are really poor and unilluminating. You can tell from the text that they probably produce visually-intriguing garments, but it's probably something that's going to require practical experimentation to visualize it from a "page to stage" perspective.

Aight, that's me, then. I'm going to wind this up so i can go run around in this lovely autumn sunshine a bit. Have a great weekend, folks!

This fall, the graduate course i teach is called "Decorative Arts," which basically indicates that it covers crafts-related topics which don't neatly fall into the other three course topics of Millinery/Wigs, Masks/Armor, and Dyeing/Surface Design. We start out with gloves, then progress to shoes. We cover jewelry, then parasols, and lastly discuss body padding and other projects in a unit called "reshaping the actor."

And, the students also do a hypothetical project in which they propose and solve a crafts-related engineering project (usually something involving macropuppetry, like a four-person elephant, but sometimes something like "inflatable Lysistrata phalluses" or "the growing bird tail in Seussical"). For this project, once their general concept is proposed and accepted, i give them a venue size and budget range, and they do all the research and development--materials sourcing, drafting construction plans, creating a half-scale model or a miniature mechanism, and labor projections. Basically, they get to the point where they'd start making the real deal, but due to time and budget restraints, we don't actually build them.

One of the things i totally love about the cycle of teaching these courses is, it allows me to regularly revisit specific crafts-related topics on a biennial basis, even if it's something that hasn't come up in a stage context in the interim. Before i began teaching, my work was tied to the programming of the company for which i worked (i.e., if we weren't doing any shows with masks in them, i wasn't making them). Each time a course topic comes around, i have the opportunity to comb the library stacks for related books. It keeps me on my game, as it were.

There are a couple of "general overview" books i've not mentioned in this blog before which i'm going to be using as potential project references for students, Fashion Accessories since 1500 by Geoffrey Warren, and the eponymous Fashion Accessories: The Complete 20th Century Sourcebook by John Peacock. Warren's book, published in 1987, is very similar to the hand-illustrated The Mode in... historical references produced by R. Turner Wilcox. (We use her book, The Mode in Footwear, as another class resource this semester.) He divides it into chapters by century beginning with the 16th, each one a general sort of collage of detailed drawings of shoes, gloves, hats, handbags, canes, and so forth, interspersed with little blurbs of text. It's not thorough or comprehensive, but it's a decent enough resource for a very broad overview. Peacock's volume, published in 2000, is much the same, except its drawings are rendered in color, and its blurbs are less detailed--Peacock's text would feature a drawing with a caption that said simply "Lace jabot," while Warren's might say something like, "collarette of lace, net, and silk ribbon."

I mentioned a few glove books in this prior post, but another resource i picked up for potential project images is Valerie Cummings' Gloves, part of the costume accessories series edited by Dr Aileen Ribeiro. These are slim volumes (under 100 pages usually) on specific fashion accessories, discussing history, trends, applicable vocabulary terms, and full of both color and B&W photographs of several examples both period and modern.

Another great book in that series is Jeremy Farrell's Umbrellas and Parasols. Since the course is about making these things, i require my students to buy my parasol construction text, but it doesn't have a lot of historical research images on which to base their projects, so Farrell's text is a good supplement.

I led an independent study in footwear alteration and construction some years back, and at that time posted an extensive list of shoe book reviews. I've got three more to add this time around, as well.

If you have perused a lot of shoe books, you do wind up seeing the same historical examples depicted in them, volume to volume. Lucy Pratt and Linda Woolley's Shoes does contain a fair number of color photos, but many of the shoes are familiar from the Shoe a Day calendar and Mary Trasko's Heavenly Soles. Unlike the calendar and Trasko's book (which is essentially a coffeetable flip-book), it's got a lot of well-researched text augmenting the images, historical info and trend analysis of previous eras and construction commentary.

Joy of joys, am i glad to have found Norma Shephard's In Step with Fashion: 200 Years of Shoe Styles! This book is to shoes what Susan Langley's Vintage Hats and Bonnets is to hats--not only is it full of nicely color-photographed period and vintage shoes (and not ones you've seen in five other books on the topic), but the footwear photos are augmented by period advertisements, daguerreotype portraits with prominently featured footwear, images and info on related topics like hosiery, socks, and even shoeboxes! This book only just came out in 2008, so it's fairly new.

Stepping Out: Three Centuries of Shoes is a full size glossy 95-page exhibit catalogue that was published to accompany the exhibit of the same name at Australia's Powerhouse Museum. Much like the Shephard book, it also contains reproductions of period advertisements, photos, and paintings related to the shoes (which are also shown in full color photos), and is peppered with great historical information. This is another 2008 publication as well. Guess it was a good year for shoe books!

To peruse some past projects for this class and read book reviews from previous posts on related topics, you can check out the "class: decorative arts" tag in the sidebar. And, i've got a full class of six students (with a potential overenrollment of a seventh, depending on paperwork coming through for her) so there will be lots of cool projects to look forward to this time around! I'm wondering whether anyone will rise to the pattern-matching challenge of handyhatter's parasol... :D

Perhaps one of the most popular parasol canopy shapes is the pagoda or onion-dome, with its striking peaked center point.

The simplest way to do a parasol with this shape is to purchase a frame specifically made for it, with a piece of spike hardware called the pagoda spring attached. However, in this post, i'll explain how to do it without a specialized pagoda frame.

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We're hard at work on our first round of fittings for the final production of the season, Pride & Prejudice. Now that our costume designer, Camille Assaf-Doshi, has seen my mockups, i can share some pictures from behind the scenes!

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I guess i'd be remiss in self-promotion or something if i didn't mention that, should you be interested in learning to create your own parasol canopies, i've written what is to my knowledge the only resource in print on the topic, available from Lulu Publications in paperback or as a downloadable file. I can't wait to get the "real" canopy onto that other frame; the striped silk the designer's chosen is downright jawdropping gorgeous! (Photos forthcoming when i do, of course.)

And, I'd also like to wave hello at spikywheel, who's serving as our overhire tailor on this production, creating the military uniforms for a couple of the gentlemen! It looks like she's possibly going to be blogging about the creation of those under a "p&p" tag in her own journal!

Hope you enjoyed this quick look backstage! I'll have more detailed info on some of these projects later on, and of course the usual stage-shot roundup when we open in April.

Enough people have asked about it that I've been giving some serious thought to offering some short single-style hat classes for the community.

These would be more basic, straightforward classes than the advanced level of instruction in my graduate class, and would probably be aimed more toward those wishing to make hats to wear in their everyday lives, rather than historical or stagewear millinery. They would be classes for students who already had basic sewing skills (hand and machine), and though advanced stitchers would produce couture results, beginners would also be welcome and would be able to produce nice, wearable hats.

Today, i spoke with some folks at a local venue who are interested in hosting such a thing, so i'm beginning to turn some wheels on this. I hope to start out by offering 2 or 3 classes in partnership with this local venue (TBA, nothing's set yet), and if they are successful, run them as long as there is demand, with a potential to add additional classes if there is interest. These would be short evening or weekend classes, offered perhaps quarterly or twice yearly. Nothing huge, i'm certainly not planning to make bank on it or anything. Really, my goal is to get more people in my community interested in hat-making and hat-wearing.

Please indulge me and help me out with my little "market research" poll. If you have friends-lists comprised of folks who might be my target student-base--DIY fashion enthusiasts, skilled home-sewing practitioners, wearable-artists, etc.--i would very much appreciate if you could send them to this poll. I want to make sure if i do this that i offer the classes that people out there want to take, not the classes i think they ought to take (if that makes sense).



[Poll #1272549]

If you've taken a short weekend or one-week hatmaking workshop, i would love to hear details on the context of the workshop (i.e., "bridal veil making at an adult ed center"), what you particularly appreciated about it and what you wished had been different. And, if you have any alternate suggestions or anything else to add, please do comment!

Thank you all SO much in advance for the feedback on this. I am very excited about potentially expanding my teaching repertoire in new ways.



Also, i wanted to post a heads-up about a (minimal) drop in price on my parasol book, Sticks In Petticoats: Parasol Manufacture for the Modern Costumer. Lulu.com sent out an email to their authors this past week concerning the restructuring of their pricing setup. The changes will shake down in such a way that prices on shorter textbooks will actually drop a few cents. The new pricing structure goes into effect October 25th, so if you've been thinking of getting a copy and you do so now, don't be shocked when the price lowers at the end of the month. (So, that's a roundabout way of saying that if you care about saving like, a DIME or whatever, wait til November to order i reckon.) :D