Sewing for the 2021 Christmas Production

 Somehow, this year I've inherited the position of Costume Mistress...which  means I'm doing more administrating (making spreadsheets and lists and delegating) than actual sewing.  Not sure I'm entirely comfortable in this position...ok, I lied, I am definitely NOT comfortable in this position...I'd much rather just be handed patterns and fabric and asked to make twelve lame' shirts, lol but, well, it is what it is.  It is good for us to be drug out of the comfort zone from time to time, right? Right?

Anyway, I have squeaked in a little sewing for the production.  Part of the problem is that the sewing room is migrating from the dump nook at the end of the laundry room to a now unoccupied upstairs bedroom, and that is taking much more time and energy than I thought it would, but we had a piece that needed mending so I thought I would do it myself rather than stick someone else with it, since it was all hand sewing anyway.

There was a fur-collared camel cashmere coat that just showed up from who knows where in the costume storage at the old church building; it was clearly vintage and when we did the edition of this show two years ago, two years after moving all the costume paraphernalia,  I looked for it for one of the 1930's characters but couldn't find it anywhere.  This year, the same character shows up in the re-write and I happened to open the right box and found the coat all smunched up.  And  missing all but one of the buttons. And ripped badly at the top of one of the welt pockets  But it fits the lady playing the character and she loved it.  So I brought it home, poked around online, trying to find some 1 3/8" vintage-looking buttons.  Found them at Jo-Ann's, to my shock, and I could order them for pickup at the store across town.

So I picked up the buttons...and a few other things, since a whompin' thunderstorm hit moments after I walked into the store and I had some time to poke around, and did the mending a couple of weeks ago.  Hit it with the steamer tonight to make it presentable to return to the costume shop.

I thought I took a photo of the original state, but, alas, there was no photo on my phone of the pre-mended coat.

I do, however, have some pictures of the damaged pocket...

I tucked the welts back to the wrong side and it didn't look horrid; but, to my surprise, there was no interfacing at all supporting the pocket so I suppose it just caught on something and ripped.

And the inside and outside of the mending job; I was able to whack a triangle off of the welt pocket facing to use to reinforce the rip.  Fortunately, it won't show much from onstage...I hope, lol.

I took a pic of the labels in the coat: just to see what I could find out.

 I googled it.  Turns out Carol Brent was a house label for Montgomery Ward's back in the day.

Never, ever would I have guessed that this coat came from 'Monkey Wards'.  By the time I was shopping MW's in the early 80's it was lower on the fashion ranks than Sears.  But the coat was fairly well made, despite the lack of pocket support,.  There's a surprising amount of hand sewing; the fur collar is hand tacked on so it could be easily removed for cleaning, and the fabric is luscious, slight moth damage and all.  And it is most certainly from the early 60's.  But we're trying to pass it off as 1930's so...don't tell anyone, lol.

My steamer is pretty pitiful,  The coat still looks kind of rumpled; that's as much as I could get before it vapor locked up and quit steaming.  But...it's a LOT better than it was when I started, all the same.  It may not look too bad on an actual body.  I hope.