Flying Monkeys

Again, it’s been a long time since my last post. Things have just been really crazy this summer. But I promised flying monkeys and here they are!

I started working on the flying monkeys for Wicked once we got the last of Shrek sent off to previews. The draper that I was working for and the lead first hand for the team went to Chicago for the Shrek dress rehearsals so I was left in charge of flying monkey production and keeping a stitcher busy who usually had 4 people setting up work for her. Keep in mind, I had never made a flying monkey before, or any kind of monkey for that matter. Before she left, the lead first hand sat down with me a made a list of instructions.

I was surprised to learn that the monkeys start out as white fabric. Part of my job was to mark out guidelines for the painters. The monkeys are a combination of fabrics to create texture and are a base unitard with dimensional muscle pieces added on top. I didn’t make the wings, so I’m not sure how those work. The unitards and muscles were enough to keep me plenty busy. Everything had to be done in a certain order so that stitching and painting happened in the correct order and with 15 monkeys to make it was important to have everything labeled. I did eventually get some more help, other teams in the shop ran out of work and came to help me with mine. I could not have been more grateful. Since Shrek had gotten behind schedule, the monkeys had been pushed back and we were scrambling to catch up. Also, the draper and lead first hand returned partway through the process so I had people who had done this before and knew the process inside and out.

Here are the flying monkeys! The actors pictured are Angela Brydon and Clyde Alves. The male and female costumes are slightly different. The male muscles are made thicker than the female muscles.

The monkeys were the last complete thing that I worked on at Parsons-Meares. I did get to do just a little bit of work on Spiderman Turn Off the Dark because I asked to. I just couldn’t let that opportunity pass me by. Parsons-Meares did all of the villains for the Spiderman musical and watching them evolve throughout the summer was one of the coolest things that I have ever gotten to see.

A story of a dance concert and a tutu.

My last production at Auburn University was the dance concert. I was really looking forward to this because I was supposed to get to make a romantic tutu for the ballet piece. We needed several and I had been promised at least one. While I got to make several things for the dance concert, unfortunately a tutu was not one of them. But lets skip that for now and move onto what I did make for the show.

First up the tap dance. This dance needed 9 vests made. There were 3 different cotton prints and 3 vests made from each print.  Some time was taken to pattern match but overall these vests went together pretty quickly between myself and the students putting them together. Here they are.

There was also a  modern dance piece that needed some tops for the women. They were cut from a commercial pattern and the fabric is an embroidered and sequined fabric. I don’t remember how many there were but there were several. With the elastic in the high waistline, there were very few alterations needed on these and they were fairly quick to put together. An insert was added in the front to the original pattern for coverage.

And the men in the modern piece also needed some tops. Theirs were made from a stretch fabric. The tops were simple but one of my first experiences with stretch fabric.

Now, about the ballet piece. With the number of things that we were already making and the time it takes to make a tutu, when the request was made a deal was also made. In order for the ballet piece to get tutus the ballet dancers would have to come into the shop and help make them. We just didn’t have enough hands to make all of the tutus that they wanted (I think it was around 10 or so). Once we got into a groove with the assembly of the tutus and all the additional hands to make them all of the tutus were in progress before I realized that there wasn’t one left for me. I was sad and disappointed by this realization. Then I remembered the tailoring. I could do the same again. If I wanted to learn how to make a tutu, I could do it outside of the production.

Tracy told me that the instructions came from tutu.com but that I could make a copy of hers. I went to the local fabric store and bought some inexpensive tulle and some fabric for the yoke, I chose a cotton twill. For some reason I was feeling a little goth or punk or something at the time and chose black and blue for my tutu. Later I would wear it as a goth ballerina for halloween.

As with the tailored jacket, I came in during my off hours to work on the tutu and asked Tracy my questions when I ran into things that I was unsure of. Mostly making a tutu is a lot of math to figure out the pattern for the yoke and how long and full each of the layers need to be. They it’s just a matter of wrestling the tulle while you put it under the sewing machine.

And that’s how I got to make my tutu anyway and learn how one goes together. It was fun and when I was done I had a tutu of my very own!

And here’s that halloween.

I learned a lot of things at Auburn University and I’m not quite done with that portion of the story but the biggest lesson was probably that if I wanted to learn something, whatever it was, and it wasn’t being taught to me I could learn it myself or seek it out. I taught myself to tailor. I taught myself to make a tutu. And for the things I still wanted to learn, I had found a grad program that suited me. I didn’t do any of it alone but it did take my initiative to find a way to make it happen.

My first dance costume.

The dance concert that year was my next project. Usually seniors in the costume shop would be given a project that was sort of “their baby”. Since the dance concert would have several dances with different choreographers, seniors could be given a dance to design or construct themselves. I was given a ballet piece to make costumes for. This was my very first step into costumes for dance.

The choreographer for the piece had a costume that belonged to her which she wanted us to base the costumes on. In fact she wanted it exactly, though we made some changes. Here it is:

So, I needed a pattern.  I didn’t have to worry about size or anything. All three girls fit into the original dress so I just had to figure out how to get the pattern from the original. I decided to simply lay the garment onto some brown paper and use a spiky tracing wheel along the seams to copy the pattern.

I copied the bodice this way. For the sleeves I just copied them folded in half. As for the skirt, the designer wanted to do something different than the pleated skirt on the original. He wanted a triple layer circle skirt with each layer a different color. I figured out the circumference and radius for the waist and made a pattern. Each dress was constructed from different fabrics. One of them had beads (sort of, more like small balls of plastic adhered to the fabric) that were a challenge to make sure that I didn’t break too many needles. All of the skirt layers were chiffon and to get a really beautiful edge we used a “lettuce leaf” method. Basically it’s a satin stitch over the edge while pulling the fabric taut so that it gets stretched out a bit. This creates a lettuce like ripple along the edge. I don’t get to use it often but this is a favorite technique of mine!

Here are Renee Martini, Jesse Springer, and Leslie Biggs onstage in the dresses designed by Jeffery Phipps.