Finding the perfect costume.

Before the actor playing Trinculo arrived in Tina's cabin we searched through the clothes and tried to find things that might be good for him to wear. we decided that bright colours would be good as Trinculo is a jester type character so we started "pulling" costumes off the rails, several different britches, shirts and wasitcoats. When the actor arrived and started trying on different costumes we quickly realised that this wasn't the right way to go with the costume, then Tina emerged from the depths of the costume cupboard with an 80's style, brightly coloured velour tracksuit. at first i thought she had gone mad but as she put the actor in it and started to pin out the shape, it suddenly cliked and Trinculo's costume was found! and it was going to look perfect, after a bit of work! it became my project to transform the tracksuit into shakespearean style bloomers and a fitted top. We took her measurements and Tina began cutting out the shape of the material for the top while i started on the trousers . I needed to cut off the shiney silver trimming on the jacket and trousers and cut off all the elastic trimming on the top and trousers. Next I cut another stripe form an identical pair of trousers and pinned it to the front of the trousers. i then trimmed the bottom off the trousers and made a channel in the bottom to run the elastic through. By doing this The actor can pull the elstic up to her upper thigh and let the rest hang down, producing a bloomer style effect. This part of the costume was very easy to make, as i knew about the sewing techniques used and i was able to get on with it without using incredibly precise measurements, as long as the two legs matched each other there wasn't too much of a problem. The only difficult thing about making these trousers was sewing the stripes on the front of the trousers, it was a very awkward job to do and the thread kept snapping in the sewing machine, but with perserverance and taking the task slowly i eventually overcame the difficulties and won out over the machine!! The next part of the task was a little more difficult. I had to start by sewing together the two panels for the top, then i had to cut out the zip and attach a fastening to the front of the bodice. This required a lot of concentration because if the two parts of the fastening didn't match up then the bodice would be wonky! I had to let Tina sew on the first side of the fastening as i found it far too difficult as the poppers pushed the needle on the sewing machine which meant that the fastening wasn't getting stitched onto the jacket. The second fastening i sewed on by hand. The next task was to gather the top of the sleeves to make a pretty effect and to help the sleeves fit into the holes on the jacket. i did this by doing two rows of running stitches then pulling in the stitches to gather the sleeves. this was done on the other sleeve then both were pinned into the bodice starting with the seam to seam edge of the sleeve then working my way round to the top of the jacket. This was then sewed over using the sewing machine to secure the gathering. After this I created an edging to attatch to the jacket out of the same velvet used in the tracksuit. i did this by using bondaweb- a bonding device which is activated by ironing over the paper side, peeling it back then placing the matirel, sticky side down onto the piece you want to bond it too, then ironing over that. I used this technique to attach the velvet to a sturdier material, cut into the right shape then sewed the edging onto the bodice. after all this was done, the actor tried on the costume for the final fitting. The only adjustments that needed to be made were to let the hem donw on the sleeves to give it some extra length and to tighten the elastic in the trousers.