Rachel E. Pollock's Blog: La Bricoleuse aggregate and more..., page 29

wire-frame projects from millinery class!

I've fallen a bit behind on sharing my students' projects from this semester, but i'm slowly getting back on track! Here are some pix of their wire-frame projects, presented a while ago.


Velvet wire-frame fascinator strung with peacock-colored silk floss
by PlayMakers Repertory Company wardrobe supervisor Ana Walton

Tulle, vintage lace, and feather headdress by continuing education student Kim Fraser


1920s beaded lace and net headpiece by first year grad Danielle Soldat


Drawn bonnet af...

Esparterie Workshop: freeform sculpting "in the hand"!

Recall, if you will, the incredible acquisition of a large quantity of vintage esparterie by our department, in what i refer to as the Madame Sheeta Legacy.

Yesterday, I conducted the first workshop with Sheeta's esparterie, with our seven costume production graduate students, two continuing-education students enrolled in my millinery class, and two costume staff members of PlayMakers Repertory Company. I'll be writing up several posts concerning the topics we covered, but i'd like...

Book review: Foam Patterning and Construction Techniques

Mary McClung's new book, Foam Patterning and Construction Techniques, is a must-have for costume production artists with an interest in mascot making, theme park walkarounds, and other large-scale creature costumes.

McClung starts out with a section on types of foam, as well as tools, adhesives, and other media for use with foam in production. This section alone will be a godsend if you have some knowledge of working with foam but only know common vocabulary terms like "couch foam&quo...

blocked felt hat projects!

Millinery class has just presented their second round of projects. Here's a photographic survey of what they created!



Hat at left by second year grad student Erin Torkelson, wool felt with felt flower spray.
Hat at center back by continuing education student Kim Fraser, wool felt with burnt ostrich spray.
Both created on the puzzle block in foreground.


Hat at center back by continuing education student Athene Wright wool felt with velvet and grosgrain trim.
Hat at right by first year grad stud...

buckram hat projects

My millinery class recently presented their first round of projects, buckram hat shapes. Here is a selection of a few representative projects...




Clockwise from top left: 1920 buckram sun hat by second year grad Robin Ankerich
Top right: spiral straw on a buckram foundation trimmed in hand-dyed sinamay by continuing education milliner Kim Fraser
Bottom right: 1880s perch topper by second year grad Michelle Bentley
Bottom left: 1940s shape by first year grad Danielle Soldat



Left: pillbox by first ye...

Book review: The First Book of Fashion (Bloomsbury, $45)

The First Book of Fashion (ed. Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward) encompasses two books, in fact: essentially 15th and 16th century "dress diaries" of a father and son, Matthaus and Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg. The two men hired a series of artists to draw miniature full-color portraits of their clothes, a project which encompassed forty years of the father's life and six years of the son's adolescence. The men were serious clothes-horses and major fashion mavens, with th...

Exhibit: Stitching History from the Holocaust, NYC

When i first heard about the story of fashion designer Hedy Strnad, I knew i had to see the exhibit featuring her designs made real. Strnad was murdered by the Nazis in WW2, but eight of her fashion design renderings survived, preserved by extended family living in Wisconsin. In conjunction with the costume shop at the Milwaukee Repertory Company, the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee created an exhibit about the Strnads which includes those designs made up in fabrics, as they would have been, had s...

Museum of Science Fiction: the Dune Stillsuit, Part One

This post is the first of more-than-one [1] concerning our final costume replica project for the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC: a Stillsuit from the 1984 film, Dune.



So, first let’s consider the costume itself. Within the context of the film (and the numerous novels by Frank Herbert which predate the movie), a Stillsuit is a standard outerwear garment for people on the desert planet of Arrakis. It basically collects a person’s sweat and bodily wastes, filters/distills...

Millinery: Esparterie Resources Cont’d

After my prior post on resources for working with esparterie [1], some helpful milliners and scholars commented or PM’d me with two other titles of books which feature chapters or sections on the material.




Madame Eva Ritcher's lovely author photo
The ABC of Millinery by Madame Eva Ritcher was published in 1950, and positions itself as an introductory handbook for “every woman” with an interest in learning millinery techniques. I absolutely adore the photography in this boo...

Madame Sheeta's Millinery Legacy - Resources for working with esparterie/spartre/willow

Esparteríe has long been a research interest of mine, pretty much ever since i heard about its existence in my very first millinery class (1992), but actively since I took the position of crafts artisan at PlayMakers Repertory Company and discovered the four sheets of it in the stock here. Now that our graduate program at UNC-Chapel Hill is the proud owner of 77 more, thanks to what i’ve begun to think of as the Madame Sheeta Legacy, I set about collecting the extant documentatio...