So You Think You Can Sew: My First Adventure in Costuming.

One day I'll have a real costume blog, where I talk about real costume projects.

One day. Unfortunately, it's not today, and it's certainly not this blog post. Today I want to share my much-less-than-legit excuse for a costume project, a project that required not so much skill as creative thinking on how to make a costume I'll probably only wear once but not make break the bank and not make it look totally lame, either.

There's a dictum in manufacturing that you can have quick, cheap, or good-looking, but you can't necessarily have all of them at once -- we'll see how I did here.

The Assignment: For volunteer appreciation at one of my museums this year, their theme is "Out Of This World" and the volunteer coordinators invited everyone to come in the 'space-themed' costume of their choice. Since no one but the Browncoat, conventioneering crowd would recognize my Mal Reynolds costume from last   Halloween, and making a Jedi costume on a budget became next to impossible outside of Halloween season, I decided to make that tried and true staple of the space adventure canon -- The Starfleet Uniform.

Instantly recognizable even by people who don't call themselves sci-fi fans, comfortable enough to sit through dinner in, and low-budget enough for, well, the first season of a groundbreaking TV show, this was something even I could do. Let's face it -- I'm an English major, Jim, not a seamstress! (At least not yet. But we'll get there. Yes, we will.)

Step 1 -- Acquire shirt. Remind myself while watching several episodes of Star Trek who wears blue, yellow, and red. Went to Goodwill. Found them having a sale on red turtlenecks from Target. Make executive decision not to be a redshirt. Find really nice blue cowl-necked shirt that reminds me of Dr. Dehner from Episode 1.1 "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

Step Two -- Acquire gold braid for rank insignia on the sleeves, and something with which to make the Enterprise Insignia to cover up the logo on this shirt. Find gold metallic thread in Mom's sewing box. Score one for budget conscious projects and using what you have in the house! 

My desk. It is messy.

The fabric itself is a stretchy sports fabric, and I want to be able to roll up my sleeves. Solution -- pin braid on while fabric is stretched out over empty wine bottle.  I can keep the braid straight this way, too.

Step 2.5 -- Decide which rank to assign Starfleet-self. Since Captains can't wear blue, I go for Lieutenant. Proceed to think about Master and Commander for the rest of the braid-sewing exercise and remain amused by the British pronunciation of Lef-ten-ant.

Lots of pins gave their lives for this uniform....

Six episodes of Star Trek and two feet of braid later, Progress! But wait. We appear to be missing something, Captain!

 Ah, yes, one of those.

Step Three: Find Gold fabric, gold paper, black puffy paint, and several copies of the starfleet insignia. Have momentary debate over whether it needs to be the Command insignia or the Sciences department insignia. Father reminds me no besides me will probably notice this, and Command insignia is the one everyone recognizes. Now, which size to use?

The one on the right is the smaller (2.5 inches tall) version, made with a gold plastic paper from my scrapbooking box -- I think it was used as a gift bag filler at some time. The  larger one on the right is wide gold ribbon glued over a cardboard backing (3.5 inches tall). Both models will have the insignia done in the black fabric paint using a stencil. It's also been drawn onto the cardboard backing of the fabric one.

Voila! Semi- finished uniform shirt! (That's one of my paper copies of the insignia there.)

So, for less than ten dollars -- five for the shirt, two for the spool of gold braid, two for the puffy paint and an extra dollar to factor in the things I found around the house -- I created a costume that doesn't look half-bad. We'll factor in another  ten to fifteen dollars for some black boots I have yet to find, and for less than twenty dollars, I've created something I wouldn't mind wearing.

Not a bad week's work. 

On next week's episode of "So You Think You Can Sew?" Mercury attempts to make a six-gored skirt out of corduroy...

Putting Down Roots -- Adventures in Genealogy and other Storytelling Endeavors

This is supposed to be a writing blog, and as I look back at the last few posts, many of them don’t have a thing to do with writing. To be perfectly honest, there hasn’t been a lot of writing going on at my computer in the last few months. My time is being spent in a lot of other places, and while I may not have been writing, I am finding out a lot of different ways to tell stories.

Since graduation, I’ve started volunteering (and then working) at two different historic houses. One of them was built and inhabited by famous rich people and the other, built at about the same time about ten miles down the road, was built by non-famous, nonrich people. The purpose of both museums is to tell a story – for the famous house, it is a very specific story of a very specific person, while at the other, the story is supposed to be more general, a picture of what life would have been like for hundreds of families working on farms in Northern Illinois in the 1890s. 

But in both houses, the object of giving a tour is to tell a story – using objects in the home and facts about daily life. The tours I give for both houses are vastly different, but I believe one of my strengths as a tour guide comes from my knowledge of story-telling – having the ability to draw people in with objects or events that are of interest to them, and bringing to their attention parts of the houses’ story that they can connect with. At the big house, I had to give a tour yesterday to a group of fifth grade boys. I skipped talking about the influential women in the house’s history (and they were all characters, let me tell you!) and focused instead on the military service of the man who left us the house.

The other project I’ve been working on a lot in the past several weeks is my family genealogy. Unfortunately for me, my family (both sides) does not seem to be one who believed in saving photographs or death records or anything material that would help me learn about the kind of people my great grandcesters were. All I’ve been looking at are digitized census records, but, when read in chronological order, they form their own little black and white narrative, playing out like the best reel-to-reel melodrama. Every ten years, there is an update to their lives. What children have moved out of the house? Have they finally paid their mortgage? Has someone’s job situation changed? 

As strange as it sounds, I feel like I know these people now. I mourned for the women who listed '3 children birthed, 1 surviving' on the 1910 census return. I practically stood up in the library and cheered when I found naturalization records for my great-great grandfather and his two brothers. After twenty years of living in the United States, they were finally citizens. They owned their houses. Their children were thriving. Three young men who came from Bremen, Germany, to the port of Baltimore in 1886 and 1889 with nothing more than a piece of luggage each were making their way in the world.

In many of the stories I write, as well as the stories I read, a great deal of emphasis is placed on family trees – on where people have come from, what their parentage and connection is. I don’t have anyone famous or well-connected in my family tree – my grandcesters were carpenters and masons, seamstresses and cooks, farmers and textile mill workers, mothers and fathers. But the fact that the story is there – and that I can find it, and read it, and share it with my family – is comforting. I’m proud of my great-great grandfather the carpenter and his wife with no occupation except raising her 12 children. To me, they are famous – I want to tell everyone all about them! I come from the library and tell my parents all about these relations of ours like I just sat down for coffee and got an update from them on how the family’s doing.

Another one of my projects in the coming days is to make a new skirt and shirtwaist for my costume for the non-famous house museum. As I’m making it, I’ll be thinking a lot about the stories I’ll tell while wearing it, but I’ll also be thinking a lot about the women in my family who would have dressed similarly while going to their own jobs. And in a small way, even though they lived hundreds of miles and a hundred years away, I’ll be telling their story, too.