PUMPKIN BREECHES, WAISTCOAT AND A TUNIC

As promised, the project I've been working on. The costume is for "Louis" from the musical Pippin.

 

 The rendering I worked from.  The Boss designed the costumes after meeting with the director and figuring out what time frame and style the show will be in. There's a rendering for all the main characters and general ones for the chorus.

Over Christmas break, she shopped for fabric. Sad to say, there are no fabric shops here. The black fabric is for the waistcoat and outer breeches and the reddish fabric is for the poufy parts.  The spool of gold braid is for trim.

 The muslin mock up of the breeches.  We use muslin because it cheap and you can write fitting notes on it with a sharpie.  You can see the note at the waistband that say  +2", meaning 2 inches need to be added at the front of the waistband. I didn't get a photo of the waistcoat mock up, but we used a vest pattern and drew the scoop neck line on it and add the the shoulder seam lines. Because of the time frame we had, I pulled a commercial pattern that we luckily had of pumpkin breeches. I adapted it for our need.

The under breeches, AKA the  poufy part.  The fabric has puckers which are a threaded clover leaf shape drawn up by elastic on the back. I'm still tiring to figure out how that was made. I had to undo the puckers in the seem allowance so I could sew the seem together.

 My adaptation of the outer breeches. I cut all the way to the top of the pants so I could sew the gold braid on . The pieces of paper are numbered and have an arrow, so I wouldn't get the pieces out of order or upside down. Hey, it happens.

 Almost done. The peplum and detail on the waistcoat need to be added. Alas, the safety pins aren't going to be on the finished costume. #6 hook and bars will hold the waistcoat closed. After we see the costume on stage , we'll decide if it needs buttons or anything else. If you check back to the rendering, you'll notice the waistcoat has a high collar. After fitting the actor, we like  the way the turtle neck of the tunic looks, so we removed the collar.

Ethan in his costume right before 1st dress last night.

Well, it is a musical! I love it when the actor loves their costume. It makes all the hard work worth it. The show opens on Thursday and I can't wait to see how all the parts fit together. Hope you all enjoyed my photo essay. Next up for us is summer stock! We'll be building 3 musical in 6 weeks, starting around the 3 week of May. Our season this summer is: A Little Night Music, The Sound of Music, and The Marvelous Wonderettes.  I'm sure I'll have lots of photos to post. Have a wonderful rest of the week.