Priorities

You may have noticed that up until now all the costumes I have made have been, let’s say, a little quick in the making!

I could have spent a lot longer on adding interfacings and facings or even maybe lining a costume every now and then.  The fact of the matter is that I prioritise on how many costumes I need to make and who they are for.

For example, the typical time I would spend on a princess dress could be more than ten times longer than I would spend on a female chorus dress.

I have a theory that more people are looking at the costume on a princess than on someone at the back of the stage saying nothing.  Therefore her dress must make the audience want to look at her even more!

In fact all the principal roles should have a lot more time spent on them to really please the audience.

There is another reason.

When I took over the costumes of our pantomime the only costumes were, to put it bluntly, pretty pathetic.  The cast usually hired their own costumes from a fancy dress shop and most other costumes were thrown together from things found in the actor’s wardrobe.

Now I am not saying my costumes are brilliant, just that there was a definite lack of anything kept as stock.  Since I took over the costumes completely two years ago there is a caravan full of costumes and  those are 95% made by me.  I have thrown away anything I don't think is good enough and whittled it down to those that can be reused, mostly things that can be re-worn by the chorus

In theory the more costumes I make, the more are available for future performances.  This means that a costume that was made for a principal will eventually work its way down the line until it ends up in the chorus.

So if I spend a short amount of time on a waistcoat this is just in relation to the number of times it will be worn and the number of years it will last.  The waistcoats I have made recently and the chorus dresses will probably be put in storage after the 2015 performance, pulled out for one more year and then thrown away as they are replaced with something better.

You will see later in the year that I don't always go for the quick solution but by spending my time trying to get as many chorus costumes completed as possible now, I won’t be taking up precious time later on that is needed for the more intricate principal costumes.

I imagine it would take a good few years to get enough costumes to never worry about needing whole sets of them being made and I am nowhere near that.  If you are lucky you start out with a good collection of decent costumes and do not have to make everything for everybody.  I have not got that luxury at the moment so some of those costumes I make are there to fill a hole that hopefully, one day, will be filled with something far superior.