La Bricoleuse

I went ahead and splurged on the myPANTONE app, which seemed almost too good to be true: the entire Pantone color library accessible on my iPad, anywhere, any time? Think of what a fantastic resource that would be as a dyer!

But myPANTONE at $9.99 is fairly expensive for an app...at least it seems that way until you start looking at the pricetags on the analog versions of Pantone colorguides, and you realize that a single basic Formula Guide printed on cardstock is going to run you upwards of $125, nevermind the combined cost of all the different libraries included in the app. Suddenly that ten-dollar price starts looking like a mega-deal. So i bought it.

I can't tell you how many shows i've worked on at theatres that didn't have a Pantone book for picking dye colors out of, where a designer had to find a scrap of fabric from a remnant pile ("Like this but more punchy!" Uh, what?), or an assistant had to run to the nearest hardware store for paint chips. Imagine though if a designer could whip out her iPhone and pick a Pantone swatch right then, and later a dyer could pull out his iPad and refer to it while processing the job? You see where i'm going in terms of this being a potentially excellent tool for the theatre, where maybe a shop manager just can't justify a $150 expenditure for the Pantone formula guide, but a $10 app could be the answer to everyone's frustrations about dye-swatching.

Not an iPhone user? The Android version is $2 cheaper at $7.99.

There are also a couple of related Pantone apps that look fairly useless for the purposes of a dyer/costumer--myPANTONE Wedding ($5, only 200 colors and geared toward product sales of wedding attire/accessories) and myPANTONE X-Ref ($2, converts Pantone color numbers across system libraries, but isn't searchable/browsable across the spectrum for any of them).

So, from the perspective of a costumer, what can i tell you about myPANTONE? Overall, i find it pretty exciting.

You can fan through a deck of color swatches easily and swiftly, then maximize visibility on a specific 5-value color card or individual color chip (each of which is labeled with the Pantone number).

You can search on a swatch number and call up that chip easily. If an out-of-town designer with the app were to email me and say "Hey, dye those t-shirts Pantone 339C," i could search on the number and immediately see the swatch for the color s/he wanted the shirts dyed.

You can even take a picture of something and pick out a swatch from the image. To test this, i took a photograph of one of the costumes on the rack at work, a set of blue medical scrubs, then touched the sleeve of the shirt in the photo, and the app popped up a Pantone swatch matched to that scrub color!

There is, however, a pretty big caveat, and that is that the colors that show up on your mobile device screen DO NOT exactly match the colors of the printed Pantone colorbooks. I haven't tested it across platforms so i don't know if the colors on my iPad exactly match the ones on the Android version of the app, or the iPhone version. I have to wait i guess until someone else i know buys it to see.

The colors *are* close enough that you could probably run with a dye request from the app in most cases, since a textile's weave structure has just as much influence over how a color appears to the eye as a difference in handheld displays. Think about how different the same exact color of dress looks if the dress is acetate velvet, or silk satin, or cotton broadcloth. So while this caveat is an issue, i don't think it is nearly the same significant problem for dyers and costume designers in theatre as it is for, say, graphic designers.

In short, i'm glad i bought the app, and I'm hoping it becomes something that's fairly standard in theatrical production, in terms of a resource that designers and dyers can have easily and inexpensively for color communication.

Do you have myPANTONE? What do you think of it?

Remember my post a while back about the "new" Rit bulk dye packaging?

( I got a response today, and I'm even more displeased now. )

Today was the first full day of the USITT Costume Commission's Fabric Modification Symposium, a three-day extravaganza of classes, presentations, hands-on activities, and more hosted by UNC-Chapel Hill at our Center for Dramatic Art. I thought that i was going to be an assistant to one of the presenters, but it turns out that instead, i got to be a "floater," checking out all of the first day's worth of classes! I took a ton of behind the scenes photographs and even participated in some of the seminars.

Thirty-five costume professionals from the US and Canada are attending, and we divided up into four groups, which rotated through the series of four different classes. The classes are taught over two days, with a "break" day in the middle (tomorrow) to allow some of the projects to cure/set/etc. So, today was the first day, and we'll do a second day worth of work on these things on Saturday.

The classes are as follows (i'll list them in the order that my group went through them):

1.) Screenprinting with EZ Screen, taught by Jeff Lieder. Jeff is a costume designer, a professor at U-Wisc Milwaukee, and has served as the Costume Director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival for the past 18 years.

2.) Devore and Discharge printing, taught by Colleen Muscha. Colleen is a costume designer and head of the Costume Design MFA program at Florida State University.

3.) Rubberama (silicone caulk techniques on spandex), taught by Janet Bloor. Janet is head of the NYC-based costume studio EuroCo Costume Company and co-author of the book, Rubber: Fun, Fashion, Fetish.

4.) Arashi Shibori, taught by Lori Hartenhoff. Lori is a fiber artist and Costume Director at Northern Illinois U.

( pix and technique overviews! )

In the safety course i'm taking (Principles of Industrial Health and Safety for the Entertainment Industry), we have recently conducted formal hazard assessments for various tools and equipment commonly--or not-so-commonly!--found in our shops. We were encouraged to choose either a tool currently owned by the shop that might present particular safety issues, or a tool that we would like to purchase for the shop but not currently available.

I thought i'd share my overview here, both in terms of discussing costume craftwork applications for the tool i chose (an industrial heat press) and to present a framework you might choose to adopt or adapt, should you find yourself in a position to be documenting tool hazard assessments for your own facility.

The particular products i chose were these heat presses by Geo Knight & Co., designed for light usage. I chose the light-usage press because even with frequent use in a theatrical costuming context, they don't need to stand up to the sheer volume of usage that, say, a t-shirt manufacturing house might put them through, setting thousands of transfers per day, all day every day. They also fall into the range of being fairly affordable--$279 and $495 respectively.

The obvious use for the professional costumer is in transfer applications--it's very effective with the various "iron-on" printer papers, hobby and industrial heat-transfers, iron-on fabric applique techniques, and in quickly processing the application of a large amount of fusible interfacings and the like. It is also helpful in heat-setting textile paints and screenprinting inks, and can be used to stiffen up Fosshape thermoformable felt as well. These presses are fairly straightforward and simple to operate, and not very hazardous providing the user has been properly trained in their use.

I last worked with a heat press of this sort in the craft shop of the Los Angeles Opera, where we used it for a variety of craft and millinery applications, and boy, have i been starved for one here at my current employer! My dyeing and painting students have been heat-setting various class projects using a standard industrial iron, which allows for a much higher margin of operator error than these presses do. Instead of trying to get a uniform coverage and uniform temperature/time application by moving a hand-iron over an area, the presses allow you to accurately set the temperature of the heat surface (called the "platen") and the duration for which the press will engage.

Note: Usages above require the guarding of the platen with a presscloth or other barrier. Melting plastics and inks to the platen is hazardous and may also damage the press.

Also! I do not recommend the use of these types of presses to apply dimensional heat-transfer products such as heat-set rhinestones and nailheads. There are better tools for applying these products, such as jewel-setting irons.

So, what does an "official" tool hazard assessment of this piece of equipment look like?

( This! )

Ideally, you would create these kinds hazard assessments for all the equipment in your shop. You would keep these on file in your record library and use them to determine proper operating and training procedures.

So, i don't feel like i can call this a tutorial, because this adhesive is fairly new to the theatre industry and definitely new to me. It was first recommended in the ACTS FACTS newsletter back in 2003 as a safer substitute for the carcinogenic solvent-based shoe-rubbering adhesive, Barge, by safety expert Monona Rossol. Ms. Rossol is reknowned for her work in furthering safety education among artists and craftspeople and is the author of many reference books on the subject, including The Health & Safety Guide For Film, TV, & Theater. Our company has recently acquired 5 gallons of the 1812, and i decided to test it out and see how it works!

1812 looks like a white glue--water-based, runny--but as it dries it goes through several phases, one of which is kind of slimy and weird like the floaty egg bits in egg drop soup, and finally ends up as firm rubber. I don't know where to tell you to purchase it easily--i know that we got it wholesale straight from the manufacturer, which is UPACO, a division of Worthen Industries. I predict that this will be one of those products that, like Foss Manufacturing's group of thermoformable plastics and felts, quickly becomes purchasable from retail businesses that cater to the entertainment industry, like Manhattan Wardrobe Supply and Backstage Hardware & Theatre Supply.

So, here's my "guinea pig" pair of boots:



( ten more pictures illustrating what i discovered... )