How-To Tuesday!...I mean Wednesday...

Hi! I enjoyed last weeks post and I thought it would be a cool idea if i did a sort of how-to every week!...At least for a little while...haha.
This week I am going to go with some of the more intricate/interesting costumes that we made for Tarzan. For those of you who have never seen the stage version of the old Disney classic there is this whole song/scene that Jane Porter sings about all of the very unusual plant-life in the jungle. Now, if you know us when something says interesting and unusual plants you know we have to go all out and make these plants the most interesting and unusual plants ever seen. Teara spent a bit coming up with different ideas and we would all try to figure out what was an actual feasible plan and what, well...wasn't. One day she stumbled upon this European designer who made clothes for the purpose of looking like plants! The outfits were pretty incredible; I'm not quite sure what they were actually for because they weren't meant for costumes but they took avant garde to a whole new level haha. Anyway, now we had an inspiration all we needed was to figure out how...
The problem was that the fabric had to stiff and mold-able...yeah, not happening. Teara looked up anything and everything to try to turn any regular fabric into something stiff and mold-able. Every avenue turned up empty, just one problem after the next. Until the bright idea came up of using wire! It seemed so obvious I don't know what took so long to come up with it. And the perfect source of wire? Something cheap, abundant, thick enough but not too thick....wire hangers! Yay! The idea and the know how was born, on to the building.
Building the costumes was no small feat. First we had to figure out the design of each plant. We wanted them to be sort of reminiscent of certain plants but nothing too pin-pointed. Once we had the designs we had to straighten all the hangers. It was very difficult. After the first one I was like 'oh this isn't too bad, it will be done in no time', boy, was I sadly mistaken. We figured out that using pliers was faster but still hard. We straightened too many hangers to count but the worst part was that after we straightened them we had to bend them into the shapes we wanted. And even-ness is not my thing so I had to be extra diligent unless I wanted some ugly lopsided petals. 
Here are a couple pictures of some of the costumes:

 For this one we made the vine by sewing a tube of fabric then stuffing it with cotton to make it thick. Then we attached some hangers together and stuffed them through the vine to make it able to wrap around (that was the easy part.) The leaves we made by shaping the outline out of the hangers then hot gluing the fabric on to cover them. The headpiece, (well it was originally supposed to be a headpiece, we had to change it because he couldn't do his dance with it on) was harder. The bottom ring and the outline of the top is wire but we needed a way for it to stand up. Taryn wound up stuffing fabric into the point and tacking all of the hangers to the fabric to stay in place.

 The claws for this were inspired by a Venus Fly Trap. Teara shaped the wire for the outline but she also made a little handle inside so that Olivia (the girl in the pic) could leave them on and control how they moved. The wire for the teeth was shaped and wrapped in fabric then sewn to the hand. Then also wrapped in lights, which made for a very cool effect on stage!

 This costume was very time consuming. The leaves for the skirt had to fit perfectly together and not be too bulky, the leaf for the top had to be shaped just right so that it could be attached to the fabric of the bodice underneath and not hit her in the face while also attaching to the skirt the right way; the hat had to be able to sit on her head like that just with bobby pins and not fall off while she danced also with the vines not hitting her in the face! We had to sew each piece of fabric together first, then sew in a casing for the wire so that it didn't move once it was put in, then stuff the wire through, then shape the wire. This was one of my favorite costumes because the fabric is beautiful but this picture doesn't do it justice at all:(

This was basically done the same way as the one above except that it was a hat. It was hard to figure out how to attach it because it needed to stay on and he moved his head around alot. We also sewed lights into this one.

Yay! My costume! I loved wearing this. It was kind of hard to move around in and I got stuck on stuff sometimes but those were only minor difficulties haha. For the top leaf Teara made the vest shape and put the wire all around the edges so that it would stand up by itself when I put it on. The closure is just a simple hook-and-eye. It is hard to tell what the skirt really looks like so I will try my best to explain but t might be a bit confusing. The petals are just single pieces cut out. There are multiple slits cut lengthwise on each one and there are two pieces of wire weaved through each one. Then the leaves were hot glued sandwiched between two belts; ALOT of hot glue was used. 

I wish these pictures were better so you could see all of the intricacies because they turned out pretty awesome, but maybe we will use them again and then you will just have to come see the show! :D