What to do if a costume, heavily invested in time and materials, ends up being….meh?
Back in 2018, I bought a pile of stock from a shop that was closing down. This included a big bag of grey turkey feather boa. This is important as I do not care to purchase it new, given the supply chain is far from kind.
Anyway, I used it on a costume made from a purchased gown onto which I had glued about 2kg of rhinestones – a 100 hours of work. The dress is black with grey flower and teal birds, and the grey boa looked lush and expensive and gorgeous.
In my studio.
On stage, it looked like I had repurposed the fur of a deceased English Sheep Dog.
I have worn it ‘as is’ several times, including at the Saskatoon International Burlesque Festival (seen above), but in the back of my mind I was preparing myself to unpick all 9m of it. Because there’s a difference between what people see and what we want them to see.
This costume spent a couple of years on the proverbial naughty step before I could face it, but I’ve had costuming inspo lately and this means all kinds of projects are finally getting finished.
So a few weeks ago, spurred on by my burlesque partner in crime Debbie’s instructions, I unpicked all the grey feather boas from this costume. I wet them in the sink to get a sense of how many I could fit in my 8L dye pot. The answer was, four. I have six, so I did two in the first batch, four in the second.
The dye was Jacquard acid dye in colour Turquoise. It cost about $18. Apart from some tartaric acid, that was it!
There is definitely colour variation in the batches, but it isn’t really noticeable as I used the two on the sleeves and the rest on the bottom. My earlier made pink and green version of this costume has pink boa in three different shades due to replacing them from different sources, and even I don’t notice.
And finally, I sewed them back on, which took ages with a “doll needle” and some TV time. A doll needle is about 15cm long – I thread it up with an extra long, doubled thread, wax the thread, then it’s a matter of sliding the needle inside the rolled hem for about 5cm at a time, coming up to do 2-3 overcasts that catch the centre rope of the boa.
The best moment was when a few days after Mx Burlesque Aotearoa, I got a message from a friend saying, “Hello… my brain just put 2 and 2 together… did you dye the boa on your black and blue gown?”
Perfect!