Felting and Fiber Studio

We have costumes for two Pantomimes and one Murder Mystery Play in this post; and yes at last I’m going to tell you about the costume hair and makeup for the Wicked Queen (above).

First let’s tell you about Dig for Vengeance, the Murder Mystery Play since there isn’t much to it.  In fact the only textile “makes” involved as far as I was concerned were in makeup.  I was playing the part of the Reverend Simeon Knatchbull (we were – as usual – short of men so I was to do a bit of cross-dressing.) Sid, who spent most of his time in his allotment shed to get away from his garrulous wife, was played by my friend Fiona.  The textile parts of the makeup were our eyebrows and side burns (extra long ones for Sid) which I made out of Shetland Moorit fibres.  The Rev. was the one “who dunnit” so I‘m able to show you his mug shots and here’s a snap of Sid at his shed.

The Pantomime which was our February 2019 production was Treasure Island, and I was to be cross dressing again – not sex this time but species.  I was Polly, Long John Silver’s parrot.  As soon as I saw the script I knew that that was the part I wanted, and although there were a couple of others trying for it, I got it.  I like to think that it wasn’t just my offer to make my own costume that secured it.

The Director, Fraser Wilson (a professional actor and director) decided that he would prefer Polly to be a cartoon, rather than a realistic, parrot.  That did make things much easier.  I had had a look at fabrics that I had available – there was some scarlet and some royal blue, which might work so I delved into Google Images and decided on a Scarlet Macaw as the basis for Polly’s caricature.  I collected various reference pictures of real Macaws as well as some cartoon characters.

The fabrics that I used for the costume came from two sources.  The fabric for the body and the hood came from some old red and blue curtains, and the wings and tail were made from some off cuts of some sort of plasticky fabric that I had acquired from somewhere, blue and red (luckily almost exactly the same hue as the curtain fabric) and some small pieces of yellow.

The costume was made in four sections and consisted of feet and legs; lower body and breast; a tail coat – literally in this case; and a hood with clashing pirate tricorn hat.

Having again resorted to Mr Google I obtained some reference shots of parrot feet.

I constructed the feet with toes from sections of foam pipe insolation covered in needle felted yellowish fibres. I stuck some bent pieces of black painted, cotton covered wire in the tips for claws, which actually wasn’t a good idea as they kept coming out. In the event it didn’t matter as they weren’t visible from the audience anyway. I stitched the toes to an old pair of fabric shoes which I had painted black, and added more yellow needle felt around the openings to represent the feet. We always lay a black floor on The Exchange’s shiny wooden stage for pantos, so my black shoes would be less visible under the parrot feet. I stitched a length of cotton fabric, much the same colour as the toes, to the opening of each shoe, with snap fasteners up the back, to make Polly’s legs. These came up to just below my knees and were tied with a draw string to make sure they didn’t slide down during a performance. Since Polly was old – 70 – I added some varicose veins (known as “various veins” in our house – thanks to Terry Wogan), couching on some blueish pieces of yarn.

I caused great hilarity at the first rehearsal when I donned Polly’s feet. I wanted to get used to moving in them so that I didn’t trip over the toes, but I admit that it did look odd the way parrot feet protruded from the end of my jeans.

The body consisted of a bib-type front, attached at the top to a red tee shirt. Parrots having short legs without visible “knees”, I had decided that the costume crotch should come down to just above my knees. I attached very short pant legs which covered my knees and the tops of the costume legs. It might have been slightly more realistic if the crotch had come below my knees, but I remembered just in time that I’d got to be able to walk and climb stairs in this costume. Climbing steps on stage was still a bit difficult, but then Old Polly could be seen to stagger from time to time. The back of that part of the costume came up to my waist and was again tied with a draw string.
Next came the tail coat. A couple of years earlier I had acquired a Vogue Pattern, one of Sandra Betzina’s Today’s Fit series which gave me exactly what I needed to help me with the design of Polly’s tail.

I constructed the coat using the pattern back, but adding wings instead of just plain sleeves.  The tail feathers I boned with extra large cable ties, which gave the length and amount of rigidity I needed and I did the same with the main wing feathers.

I extended the wings/sleeves to the tips of my fingers ending on the underside in a sort of glove construction making separate sections for my thumb and first three fingers.  Then I added the feathers, attaching the first three pinion feathers to the backs of the fingers of the glove. I could then move the feathers with my fingers to simulate Polly’s cartoon hands, and co-incidentally was able to hold on to bits of scenery when climbing.

The fronts of the coat were reduced to just small “bolero” type fronts.  These were affixed to the body/bib just in front of my shoulders with Velcro. There was also a strip of Velcro attaching the coat inside-back just above the tail to the back waist of the body.  I padded out Polly’s stomach with a thinnish sheet of foam rubber to get the right parrot shape..

I do not have any progress pictures of the costume since this all took place before I found and joined the Studio. However, I did wear the costume again 2 years ago for an appearance at the Sturminster Newton Cheese Festival. SNADS were helping out with stewarding the Festival in return for a donation to our funds and I was allowed to dress up as Polly again.  That was fun, but quite warm in view of the padding.  It did mean that I had a short period in which I could take some photos of the tail coat just before I donned it.

The hood, was just plain red and tight fitting, and the hat was more of the plastic sort of fabric, with a wired brim, and skull and crossbones appliquéd to the front. The orangy-pink with pink feather edging to the brim clashed nicely Polly’s head. The tricorn was slightly too small so I had to resort to a large safety pin to attach it to the hood to avoid it falling off during performances.

The final touch, which I didn’t really want to do but I was over-ruled by the director, was to stitch feather boas to Polly’s breast.  He was right, it added that je ne sais quoi to the costume.

I found a close up image of a parrot face for makeup reference, and used a lot of red water based makeup (I went home with a pink rinse every night – very fetching!)  I made Polly’s beak from some thin EVA foam, painted yellowish orange, that was stuck onto my nose with spirit gum; and I had yellow feather eyelashes.  The beak was a mixed blessing.  We were “miked up” for the performances so I was able to tuck the end of mine under the beak so that it wasn’t obvious.  However, the theatre was very hot on the Friday night performance and just before the finalé and walkdown the beak came unstuck.  The audience didn’t seem to mind though.  It’s amazing what you can get away with in a Panto.  I made doubly sure of it for Saturday’s two performances though.

Now at last we come to the Wicked Queen.  I was asked to dress Fiona (my friend who played Sid in Dig for Vengeance) as Averice, the Wicked Queen in Snow White.  This was to include wig, makeup and Crown and two complete costumes.  I was given two existing dresses which fitted Fiona and which I could adapt and add to; one was red and black and the other silver and black.

The red and black was to be worn in the first half, it had a red bodice and under skirt with black lace sleeves and a black lace over skirt.  I altered the dress merely by lifting the over skirt up at the centre front and fixing it with some spare bits of jewellery.  At that time Fiona had a habit of stepping backwards when about to speak, so we decided that she would need a train falling behind her to help her to lose this trait and, because she learned that if she stepped back, she’d step on it, it worked.  As the  dress was not quite floor length, we decided that a long cape type cloak would be worn over the dress.  I had a small piece of red velvet which I made into a short cape covering the top of her shoulders, and added red braid around it’s edges.  We had a large piece of heavy red lace fabric with sparkles in it, which we attached to the underside of the cape starting from the front of the shoulders.  The cape was fastened with more jewellery pieces.

The second dress, silver and black, was pretty plain in design (although the skirt fabric was strongly patterned) and again had no train. So I decided that I’d try to make an overdress, which I would drape on my ancient dressmaker’s dummy. I had some mauve satin type polyester fabric which I decided could do the job. I made use of Google images for some design ideas and came up with two completely different styles that I thought could be amalgamated.

I liked the cut away front of the skirt in the picture.  This could be extended at the back into a train, and there could be full over-sleeves like those in the reference image with the cross over design at the shoulders.

Having had the design approved by the wardrobe mistress I set about draping some Vilene that I had had lying around, and making pattern pieces to be cut out of the mauve satin.  That was silly mistake No. 1.  It wasn’t until I was three quarters of the way through draping and pattern cutting that I realised that I was using lightweight iron on Vilene, not the old sew in version that I no longer used for dressmaking.

The sleeves I drafted by basing them on a normal sleeve pattern but moving the under arm seam to the top of the arm and extending each side to form the cross over at the shoulder seam, and at the same time greatly extending the sleeve length and width.  I cut 2 sleeves out of the mauve satin and 2 more out of purple organza, which I would use as lining.

Getting all the pieces for the overdress out of the mauve satin was going to be tight. In fact, in making silly mistake No. 2, I made it even tighter.  I must have put one of the cut out pieces in the wrong place on the work table, because I managed to cut another pattern piece out of it, so had to do a bit of “jigsaw” patching to get enough fabric for all the pieces I needed.  It’s a good job that theatrical costumes are rarely seen up close – the joins were not discernible from the auditorium.

When I took the overdress in for Fiona to try on I found silly mistake No. 3.  I had not allowed any ease in the patterns made with the draped Vilene so the garment was too tight.  I had to alter some of the darts I had put in for shaping, and slim down a couple of the seam allowances as well as move the front fastening.

I had a piece of black and silver furnishing fabric which was decorated with large gothic type motifs.  I cut out and applied these to the dress.  One large one was placed at the waist on the wrap over front. This helped with disguising the “jigsaw” seams and the added decoration helped co-ordinate with the under dress.  More motifs were appliquéd down the sides and end of the train to add weight to it.  I also added a short length of curtain weights to the underside of the end of the train.  This solved the problem of the train tending to flip over as Fiona moved around the stage.

All this work was obviously done at home in my workshop.  However I still attended rehearsals twice a week, and while I was waiting to rehearse my cameo part (a bear!) I was working on a wig for Fiona.

I had chosen an older synthetic wig mainly for its colour.  It had become quite tangled so I was cleaning and combing it bit by bit whilst the rehearsals were progressing.  I found that by using a light oil I could comb out the tangles in the wig without pulling too much of the hair out.  Once all this was complete, I started to plait parts of the wig and these plaits were wound around the head, leaving the long back hair to be gathered at the nape of the neck, as shown in reference image 1, but with the ends doubled back up to the nape as shown in image 2.  I made snoods to match each costume to cover the “tail”.

Next came the crown.  Again I searched for reference images to help with the design.  I wanted something strong that would add to Averice’s character, rather than a pretty tiara type crown, which would not do at all.  In the end I decided to base the design on Ravenna’s crown (Snow White and the Huntsman).

I made it from shiny, stiff card, which was actually some bobbin lace pattern pricking card that I had got from somewhere somewhen.  I painted the card with bronze acrylic paint and added some braid with marcasite-like stones attached and a bead/pendant from an old necklace, which I painted with pearlised nail varnish.  I had to stick a couple of loops on the inside of the crown, so that we could use hair grips to fix the crown onto Fiona’s wig, which was itself fixed to her “wig cap”.  That’s in quotation marks because the wig cap was in fact a holdup stocking.  The non-slip “stuff” on the inside of the stocking is just the thing to hold onto the actor’s head/hair.  With hair grips fixing the wig to the cap it will not slip off. (touch wood!)

Finally the makeup.  I looked for various types of makeup for Averice, looking at “Wicked Queen” references and also “drag” makeup (which I find great for exaggerated Panto styles). In the end I picked the image that would give Fiona permanently bad tempered eyebrows.  I’m not a speedy MUA so although it would have been good to have fantastic eye makeup, there wouldn’t be time to do it and get Fiona dressed and crowned in time for curtain up.

I’m going to have to tell you about my bear costume and  the other bits I helped with in these Pantos in another post as I’ve run out of space and time with this one, watch this space.