The Fourth Street Festival is right around the corner. Come and see all the art from the 120
participating artists this Labor Day weekend.
The show is open on Saturday from 10-6 and Sunday from 10-5 on Fourth
Street between Grant and Indiana. If you’re
a local, that’s about from the fire station to the campus. After a few years of too-hot or too-rainy
days, I put in a special request for lovely weather and the long range forecast
looks wonderful! To prepare for the show,
in the days to come I will transition away from Sounds of South costume
production and toward finishing a couple of weavings in progress.
I have been wrapping strands of wire with
brown yarns to create tree branches for one of my new tree pieces. I created leaf clumps by crocheting strands
of green yarn into blobs that will look like bunches of leaves once
attached. I think the completed pieces
will be ready for display this weekend, so stop by and say hello!
Looking back over the past week, I spent most of my time at
South along with my costume co-conspirators Nancy Riggert, Daphne Richards and
Misti Hayes. We’ve been cranking along
on creating realistic swords and have more than half of the seventy
finished. I have been custom fitting armor
chest plates to individual students, but with an eye toward final alterations
to make the armor more resilient before handing it to students for dress
rehearsals. Fingers crossed that the armor
survives until the performance! Marauding
medieval armies had no power to destroy swords and armor as powerful as
cosplaying teenagers.
Last week I turned my attention to making hats to augment
the already funky costumes. I’m calling
my style vintage circus with a touch of steampunk and Alexander McQueen. I’m thrilled with the costumes, but the hats need
to funk-ify them and push them over top.
The first one I created was an oversized steampunk influenced top
hat. The very top circle of the hat is cut
from corrugated plastic recycled from a Cardinal Stage Company yard sign for
Les Mis.
The hatband is cut from an old High
School South Panther’s scarf, which luckily works well in my color palette. The stack and the brim I made from thick card
stock that I covered with a satin scrap I discovered at the recycle
center/Materials for the Arts program. The final touches include a feather
I plucked from the prop room at South and a jewel from an earring that was half
of a broken set that was donated by My Sister’s Closet. A big shout out to them for being so
supportive of the Pippin project!
A couple of other hats that I created were much
simpler. The “amaryllis” hat was built
from a toy and a dog bowl rescued from the recycle center. I embellished it with a Styrofoam ball and
purple jewels that are part of the collection we started when we began
preparing for the project last year.
I
attached the whole thing to a white baseball cap that one of the parents
donated. Baseball caps make perfect
bases to build form for stage hats. They
let me build freely and still be sure that the hat fits the specific
actor. The last hat was an Octoberfest headpiece
from which I removed all the decoration and re-embellished the base to look
more like a vintage clown hat using pom poms and a colorful bow from a hair
barrette.
At home it was an exciting week—there was pie! Last Sunday a fresh peach pie appeared and carried
me through about mid-week. Normally I would
be starting the drumbeat for the next pie by now, but fortunately Tommie’s 16th
birthday fell on Friday, so it was a double treat week.
Jim baked a Mary Ann cake and I made lemon
curd cream to fill in the reservoir.
Topped with fresh peaches from the farmer’s market made for an excellent
dessert and breakfast treat. I love
peach season! I wonder if we’re still in
it, and I wonder how I’ll find out?
Until next week,
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