Rachel E. Pollock's Blog: La Bricoleuse aggregate and more..., page 35

Update regarding the OOP Dryden dye textbook

This is a topic which comes up over and over on the email lists and discussion groups frequented by professional costumers--what single textbook could replace the out-of-print "industry bible" of Deborah Dryden's Painting and Dyeing for the Theatre?

And, yes, there are a lot of dye books out there to consider--comprehensive ones that cover a lot of different aspects of surface design, working with various classes of dye, etc. That might even be part of the problem: the fact that...

The Ninety-Three Books of 2014

ETA: 96 as of 12/29/14!

Thanks to the Goodreads Reading Challenge widget, it's easy for me to take a survey of my year in books. Before i joined Goodreads, i kept a reading journal of what i had read and what i thought of the books, so this is an end-of-year tradition going back maybe ten years or more. And, really, I'll probably finish at least two more books before the end of 2014 but i'll add those into the post later if i do finish them and decide i want to do so.

For now though, my top five books that i read this year (alphabetically by author, since i cannot possibly rate them in relation to one another) with my text-message summaries:

Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye (1845: criminal mayhem among Irish immigrants in New York)
The Revolution of Every Day, by Cari Luna (1994: squatters on the Lower East Side fight the city for their right to residency)
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (a theatre troupe navigates the postapocalypse after a pandemic decimates the Earth's population)
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, by Sarah Marcus (yeah, see subtitle)
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin (a rare book goes missing and a foundling baby appears in a New England bookstore)


If you want to read my thoughts on them as to why they're my top five, my reviews are here on Goodreads. The short version though is, every one of these books reached deep into my heart and my thoughts, and changed me for the better.

And, because i read far and away more books this year than in prior years, i thought it would be interesting to take a statistical look at what those books are. By the numbers--I read:

47 fiction books, mostly novels, but two collections of short stories
5 graphic novels, which i split out into a separate category from fiction
23 works of nonfiction, split largely between biographies and writing craft/career books, with a few costume history thrown in
4 plays, all ones which were programmed into the theatre season at work
3 books of poetry


In addition, i took a look at some other statistics.

Eight of those 93 books were free digital books in the public domain, classics like Age of Innocence and Vanity Fair
40 were books I checked out of my local library or received through Interlibrary Loan
Six were paper copies provided to me for free by the publisher through either Goodreads giveaways or other offers, sent with the hope that i would review the book online, which I did
21 were e-books i purchased, either through the Apple store or Kindle store
15 were paper books i purchased in actual physical bookstores (largely Flyleaf, my local indie)
Three were paper books i purchased online to be delivered


So basically, 54 of the books i read this year were books I did not spend money for, and the vast majority of those came from library use; 39 were books i paid for.

I read 29 e-books and 64 print books. So at least in my reading world, print is far from dead. I like e-books for their convenience--when traveling, or laying in bed at night--though i did buy one paper book in an airport bookstore this year (The Yard, by Alex Grecian). I would have thought that i read a higher percentage of digital books, but nope, it works out (this year, at least) to about two print books to every one e-book.

And, of the 93 total, i gotta admit that nine were books i did not finish, largely novels that i just couldn't get into. I'm not counting in that number free e-book samples that i downloaded and decided not to buy--i'm only counting books that i purchased or checked out of the library or whatever and read far enough into them to make a considered choice of "I am abandoning this book without finishing it," not just "Enh, didn't grab me in the first couple chapters."

Also, these figures don't even begin to take into account the number of times i reread my own damn novel, revising the manuscript in preparation for finding a literary agent and moving toward hopeful publication. Because i would upload an epub of the most recent version of it to my iPad once i got a substantial rewrite done in order to reread it, i can guesstimate based on that practice--my iPad registers 21 different versions of The Decadence Papers. So, given that i also reread it start-to-finish on my laptop probably half as many times during revisions, let's just say that i read my own novel 30 times this year. Did i mention that i read a LOT?

And that, my friends, is what comes of last year's resolution to reduce my Facebook consumption by reading actual books instead.

Millinery class - final projects!

The semester has ended and my millinery students presented their final projects last week. Fun stuff, including sinamay, goddesses of doom, and roadkill. (Really!)






This taffeta Christmas Carol bonnet was made by first-year Max Hilsabeck


First-year Emily Plonski used Wonderflex, silk leaves, knitted "moss" and antlers salvaged from a roadkill deer to create this huntress headdress. (The Carolina Tiger Rescue collects deer killed in highway accidents as part of their tigers' feeding...

Period pattern class: Utility dresses and New Look!

I have slacked off bigtime on here, so first off, i apologize for the lack of content lately. I have all these posts backburnered, so hopefully i can catch up over the holiday break and post them all.

So, without further ado, here's the final two sets of period pattern projects which were presented in Judy Adamson's 20th Century Women's Wear class. (Judy is the head of the Costume Production MFA program here at UNC-Chapel Hill, and though i am not involved in this class, i always l...

Millinery class goes out there.

My millinery class has presented a couple of projects since i last shared photos, so this'll be a mishmash of excellent zaniness. They do a project involving wire-frame structures, and they do a project in which they create a hat/headdress with a historical or fantastical hairstyle for inspiration (basically, solving hair design issues with hatmaking techniques). So, here we go:



PRC Costume Technician Sam Kate Toney made this fantastic drag-inspired wig from foam and silk flowers.
And then...

Period pattern class does 1930s eveningwear

Costume Director Judy Adamson's 20th Century Period Pattern class has recently presented their projects for 1930s bias-cut evening gowns. This is probably my favorite era, so i always love seeing these.




Left: red charmeuse gown by second year grad Erin Abbenante
Right: Navy and orange Vionnet reproduction by third year grad Colleen Dobson



Left: Navy and orange Vionnet reproduction by third year grad Colleen Dobson
Center: Navy rayon crepe gown by third year grad Corinne Hodges
Left: Mulberry a...

I won a First Reads Giveaway!

I'm super excited to have won my first First Reads Giveaway here on Goodreads!




Jodi Lew-Smith's The Clever Mill Horse

I've entered lots of these but have never won one. And, as an author, i've run two of them myself, so i'm familiar with the process from that end.

I've got to admit, i'm pretty excited to see how the process goes from the winner's side. Can't wait for Jodi's book to arrive in the mail!

(For the record, i don't know the author and have no affiliation with the publisher. I entered the giveaway solely because i thought the book sounded interesting. Now i'll find out!)

Mottle-dyed embossed velvet for Into the Woods

For the second of the Witch's costumes in our production of Into the Woods at Playmakers Repertory Company, designer Bill Brewer had a truly fantastic vision for a sort of wizardy robe made of ornately-dyed and embossed velvet.

Draper Denise Chukhina came up with the process for how this fabric would be created, from which she would then make the costume.



Costume Designer Bill Brewer's rendering of the Witch's second look. Note how unusual that fabric is.


First, Denise spread out the...

Witch vegetables, part two: fiddleheads and magic beans

Today i'm talking about vegetation, part two! Recall from my last post that we're working on Into the Woods, and that our Witch's first look is quite vegetable-covered, which has meant a lot of fascinating craft projects for me and my two colleagues on Team Witch, Denise Chukhina and Sam Kate Toney.





For reference, the design rendering by designer Bill Brewer. Note the beans and the fiddleheads on her!



Here's a close-up research image of the type of fern we're trying to repli...

Vegetation creation for the Witch in Into the Woods

We're currently in production on our repertory shows this year, Into the Woods and Midsummer Night's Dream. Today, I've got a behind-the-scene peek into one of the many cool special effects we're doing in the costume crafts world to create these two huge, magical shows.

Our costume designer for Into the Woods is Bill Brewer, of UNC-School of the Arts. I've been aware of Bill's work for years and met him many times at conferences and symposia, but we'd never worked t...