For my last year of school I take 3 subjects for A Level: Textiles, Drama and Sociology. In Drama we had to come up with a devised piece, made up entirely by ourselves which is then performed. The rest of my class was marked for their performance, but I of course chose to make the costumes instead. Our group decided to use Tim Burton's 'Mummy Boy' poem as a basis for our devised piece. The actors needed a Mummy Boy costume each as they were multi-roleing, a virgin sacrifice costume, something fit for a mexican, beetle costumes and a mummy dog.
I made the 2 Mummy Boy costumes and the Virgin Sacrifice costume which I'll talk about in a later blog post. The
key factor in Mummy Boy’s costume was that it needed to be removed easily, as
the actor sheds the costume to become a beetle. Both actors needed a Mummy Boy
costume as they multi-role as Mummy Boy throughout the play. With this in mind,
I ordered 2 all in one non-woven suits that zipped up the front which could be covered in bandages. These could be
easily taken off by the actors. For the bandages, I did some researching on breaking down costumes to make them look old and worn and the answer seemed to be tea. So I dug around in the linen closet for some old white sheets and dunked them in boiling water (in a bucket) with about a dozen tea bags for a couple of hours.
My tea-stained sheets worked out pretty well, but they didn't look disgusting enough for a mummy. Remember, mummy's have to wear their bandages for thousands of years, so they must get pretty mucky. The solution to this was to paint random brown streaks all over the sheets, to liven them up a bit. I had to do quite a few sets of sheets, and it was definitely easier to paint them whole, and then rip them up into bandages.
Then, the bandage ripping commenced. I started ripping quite narrow stripes, then realised that the narrower the strips were, the more I was going to have to sew on, so I made the bandages quite a bit wider after that. After all of the bandages were ripped, it was time to sew them onto the overalls. This meant a lot, and I mean a lot of hand sewing.
Ta-da, the suit was pretty much entirely covered in bandages! Of course, I had to try it on to see how flexible it was. I found that wrapping the strips, then sewing them on made the suit tighter so for the second Mummy Boy suit I sewed each strip at a time. This took much longer, but did the job properly. After this one was finished, I had to start all over again for the second one!
The zip on the second Mummy Boy
costume broke and was replaced with adhesive Velcro. This was also done with
the first suit as the actor found it was easier to get on and off. However, the
sound of Velcro ripping is clearly heard when changing costumes. There was an
incident in rehearsal which resulted in all of the Velcro ripping off the suit
so both sides of the Velcro were better secured to ensure that it did not
happen again. My machine did not like sewing on the stick on velcro atall. The needle and underplate got all gummed up and disgusting and I had to scrape all the sticky residue off. Never again. Next time I will just buy sew-in velcro.
I kept finding gaps to fill in rehearsals, and crotches kept ripping, so I was sewing bandages on pretty much up to the day of the performance. The overalls were only a couple of pounds so the quality was rubbish and they ripped really easily. Next time I'd do for something something more stable. Another way to do things would be to sew a huge sheet of bandages to make bandage fabric, and then cut overall pieces out of that and sew them together, but I think it might have lost the 3-D effect.
To
secure the bandages I did a prick stitch on the right side and a long running
stitch on the wrong side. The issue was that the long running stitch caught
easily when the actors put the costume on, so the stitches ripped easily. If I
made the running stitches shorter on the wrong side it would just be too time
consuming. When the strips had been handsewn to the overalls, I sewed the
bandages down in key areas by machine in a matching thread, that shouldn’t be
visible to the audience to make the bandages as secure as possible. The
overalls were very tricky to manoeuvre around the sewing machine.
Mummy dog was just a puppet wrapped in bandages. For our set, we covered everything in bandages, including the audience.
I'm really proud of my Mummy Boy costumes, because they took a lot of time, effort and perserverance to make. And on the plus side at least I have something to wear for halloween next year!
Thank you to Emma and Katherine for wearing my costumes so well, and to Emma and Katie for taking pictures during the performance. I hope you enjoyed reading about something a little different than my usual floral dresses!
Lauren xx
