Every once in a while someone asks about the choir wardrobe...why do we do it and who decides it and such. Usually I just reply in the comments, figuring that it doesn't hurt to explain it every now and then so folks who are new to the story can catch up... but as I was answering the latest set of questions, it suddenly occurred to me that I should just make it a whole post, then link up that post on the sidebar so anyone can find it at any time.
D'uh.
So. Well, we go to a non-traditional, non-denominational church, The Rock Family Worship Center. We never did choir robes; we're just not that formal. In the beginning, choir attire was just expected to be neat and modest. We had a few...very few...points in the dress code. Things like no mini skirts and no sleeveless tops. Basically, within those very minor guidelines, we wore whatever we wanted.
Then we began video taping/live streaming.
We learned pretty quickly that, wow, if we all just wore whatever it looked like a trainwreck under the lights, plus it drove the shaders in the video control room crazy trying to get the lady in the light taupe sweater dress and the lady in the sequinned orange top and the lady in the cobalt blue sweater all looking like they were neither dead nor glowing in the dark.
We needed to blend.
Some choirs have gone w/ some kind of uniform (think matching polo shirts) rather than robes, but in an area with a highly mobile/fluctuating population, where folks are always moving in and moving out, it's really hard to maintain everyone in the same garments. So, we did not elect to use a uniform but to just dress more or less in the same color scheme so that we would blend. And the color scheme changes on a monthly basis.
We always have some neutral -- gray, black, tan, etc -- in the mix, so if the main color doesn't work for someone they can go with the neutral. It *has* helped a lot w/the way the choir looks on the screen.
Our choir director picks the colors; lately she's been consulting Pantone's seasonal color page so that garments and/or accessories in the specified colors ought to be easy to find.
As you can probably understand, the choir wardrobe drives a lot of my sewing choices. So a few years back I started doing weekly posts about wearing what I sewed for choir. It originally was a challenge to myself to see if I could go a year and wear something me-made every week. I don't get a lot of traffic, so it's a stretch to say that series was popular, but it was about as 'popular' as things go in these parts. So, with a hiatus here and there, I've pretty well kept the series going.
And I do throw in a disclaimer every now and then that, you know, it really ISN'T about what I'm wearing; sometimes we have incredibly moving services and to come home and write about what I wear just seems so ...shallow. But this is a sewing blog and I was deliberately writing about garments that I'd sewn. So I started a second blog, Beer Lahai Roi, so I could have a place to talk about the deeper, more significant aspects of walking out a Christian life.
And then I got a job and all my sewing and blogging time pretty much evaporated. ;-).
But I do enjoy making things, discussing making things and I do like to explore issues of faith, so, while I'm not blogging with anything like the frequency I used to display, I'm still posting now and again to both blogs and the Choir Wardrobe series pretty much insures that I drop by here at least once a week and talk about wearing clothes that I made.
So it has its purpose.
Thanks so much for asking! ;-)
Awesome!
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