costuming and portraiture

here is some costuming work that i did recently:

for more work, see my costuming set.

and a portraiture series:

i was interested in documenting people who sew or alter their own clothes. i photographed them wearing something they had sewn in the setting that they sew in. for more portraiture work (not part of the series), click here.

'die feen' fairy costumes

i have been working as an assistant costume designer for an opera production of wagner's die feen (the fairies). the lead costumer hand-dyed a bunch of dresses, and i designed and sewed overlays for them. pictured below are the dresses in progress, and then the results on opening night:

i also helped to make the flower wreaths for their hair. for more pics of the production, see my flickr set.

tad 2010 highlights

here are my tad highlights from this year in the form of a collage, as well as a photo triptypch with 3 of my favorite photos from the month:



i concentrated mainly on felt plushes and sculpey figurines, along with some photography and other sewing projects. i didn't make as many clothing/clothing reconstructions as i normally do, nor did i do any knitting, crochet, or drawing, but it's ok---hopefully, i'll have a chance to do some of those things in the coming year. for more details/photos, see my tad, blog or flickr.

Le Sorbier sous la neige

Le Sorbier
Originally uploaded by whitecoquelicot

Les Sorbiers, also known as the rowan trees in English, were abundantly decorating our alpine neighborhood with their unusually bright red berries this season. Here, I tried to paint the tree covered with a veil of snow, from a low vantage point. I find the snow a difficult subject in general, and it turned out to be tricky to convey its form especially against the pale background. It definitely needs more experimenting with the palette.

Geneva, CH
February 2010

Cloth Simulation

Since I have no knack for sewing or knitting, I decided to give something similar a try on my computer screen:) As a quick and fun programming exercise, I wrote this simple cloth simulator based on the mass-spring model. The cloth is a simple grid of 13x13 nodes, each node connected to its neighbors by three different types of springs (structural, shear, and flexion). The cloth is initially suspended in air, and each end gets detached by a programmed keystroke. The node position is determined by the influence of the internal spring forces, the gravity and the wind. And lastly, the simulation is based on the leap-frog numerical integration method, slightly a higher order of accuracy than the Euler.
There're many features that could be added to improve the system, like adding a few more user-interaction GUI controls for the spring constants and the integration timestep size, as well as improving the lighting and rendering aspects, not to mention prettying up the scene a bit:)
Over all, it was a fun and rewarding exercise which kept me occupied for a few days.

button down shirt to mini dress

i took one of j's large, oversized shirts and made it into a mini dress. now that i look at it in the photos, it looks more like i'm wearing a large shirt than a dress. oh well. anyway, to make it, i cut a lot out of the body of the shirt on either side and reattached the sleeves, making them into puff sleeves (gathered before i resewed them on). the final product looks really simple, but i did try variations that i didn't like (elastic at the waist---made it look puffy and unflattering; a back panel to run a belt through along the back---didn't gather smoothly enough) to try to get it more fitted looking (but not too fitted). in the end, i just took in the sides even more and added 2 darts in the back. i plan to wear it with leggings and boots (as pictured) or over jeans, and i like it b/c it's cozy and comfy. i'm always on the lookout for mini dresses, long tops/tunics that i can wear over yoga clothes or just to wear out.

small blue quilt

I finally finished one of many partially completed sewing projects. It is a small quilted wall-hanging made using the method shown in this great tutorial. It was easy and quick to make the small strip log-cabin-style blocks with this method. The challenge was trying to get them to fit together in rows that were aesthetically pleasing, and then the rather laborious job of quilting each block. This was a fun way to use up a few colorful scraps, and I tried to challenge myself by using only scraps and not cutting into any large pieces. If I make another one of these quilts, I'd like to try a simpler, more freeform type of quilting (all-over wavy lines or stipple quilting) instead of the straight line quilting that I used. By the way, the size of the finished mini-quilt is about 15 x 20 inches.