Little Women: Marmee blue

Hope as Marmee in her blue dress, Acts 1 & 2

We found a bolt of this blue fabric in the costume shop and decided to use it, because we were trying not to buy more fabric than we had to. This was a mistake, because the stupid stuff was practically canvas and it was horrible to work with. The crew killed their fingers making the skirt. Fortunately we got the industrial Singer (Regis) working again.

This semester I was costume mistress for our theatre department's production of Little Women, which was directed by my friend Melissa. I'm only going to upload a handful of the costumes, mostly the ones that I did most of the work on myself. I oversaw the production and did a lot of sewing myself, but I didn't do all of the work alone--Hope and Jason kept pulling all-nighters with me, Cassie and Lauren both worked, Chesna and Lara put in many volunteer hours doing things that didn't require sewing machines, and Billie did the bulk of the work on the guys' costumes.

Our costume shop has very little in the way of period clothing (unless that period is the 70s), so we ended up making most of the dresses from scratch. There were fifteen dresses in all, thirteen of them made entirely from scratch, and five men's suits and vests (the suits we pulled and altered, the vests were made from scratch). We purchased more than 100 yards of fabric, spent about $420, and we did it in a total of three weeks.