Shadowing Day 8

Today while shadowing the Dance Costume Shop, since Extravagance was officially over, all the work being done was in preparation for the Christmas show. The first main event happening today was a fitting they had. This was a group of girls who were in three different dance numbers. The first was a bright colored blouse with black pants. The girls in the shop each handed out a size they think would fit the dancer the best, and then they were examined for best fit and if any alterations needed to be made. For some of the girls the size pants they were initially handed were a bit too snug and were given a different size.

Once the first fitting was done, they moved onto the next, in which the tutus Abby made were being fit to the dancers. There were only three girls from the main group who were in this number, so they were off to the size putting on the pieces. They required a little bit of assistance to put on the tutus and the top they were given.

Once they had the pieces on, they were checked for fit. An important aspect with costuming, is you want each piece of clothing to hit in the same place on each dancer. Because the shortest tutu was just below the knees and the other two girls’ were longer, that meant they had to be adjusted.

Here Abby is trimming off the outside layer of the tutu to be the correct length. It would act as a guide for where to cut the remaining layers of the tutu. It took a very steady hand to make sure the cut was even.

The third and last fitting was for a Ukrainian dance. The shirts they were given were previously used blouses that were the right style, but were originally worn under a vest. Because of this, the sleeves had been stretched out a bit and were too large on many of the girls. It took some creative work and brainstorming to figure out what they wanted to do to solve this issue. They decided to check if there was a better fitting blouse or dress they had stored in the dungeon to use instead, otherwise they would use the vest that originally went with the blouse from this fitting. That way the blouses would fit better underneath the vests.

After each of the fittings concluded, They were asked to bring their pieces up to Claire who would mark a number on the tag to then assign to the dancer who would wear that piece. The dancers would also be given a tag with their name on it, and any alterations that needed to be made to their costume would be written on that tag then draped on the hanger.

When the fitting finished, Claire and I were working on a project for the Christmas show. They had these white flowers that were going to be used as props for one of the dance numbers. They were purchased from a local store, and unfortunately were not glued together very well. Some of the petals of the flowers would fall off.

The solution to this was the project we were working on, in which we were hot glueing over the previously hot glued stem of the flower to better secure it into place and prevent more petals falling off. The glue guns we were using didn’t dispense the glue very quickly so this was a more time consuming project, but would pay off in the end when used for the dance number.