As I plow in to the final few weeks of recital sewing for the year I face down the largest challenge of the season. Because apparently making ten firebirds and ten gnomes and ten rabbits wasn't enough...
Dragons. I'm suppose to be making dragons. Mostly what I am supposed to be making is miracles. "Here, take this 30 year old leotard that looks like someone ran over it with a car and make it in to something fabulous. But not TOO fabulous, because we have to be fair to all the kids. Have fun with that!" Sigh...
My task is to make dragon costumes from around the world. Dragons for many cultures and countries. Which is commendable enough, but for cryin' out loud.
My "Egyptian" dragon was given to me as one extremely ugly nude unitard and a picture printed out from Google image search. It is a nice enough drawing, very pretty, but I am pretty sure that it has very little to do with actual mythology. Egyptian history is divided in to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, right? I think of this dragon as coming from the DeviantArt Kingdom.
Anyhow. The dragon has no feathers, no scales, no demonstrably "dragon" characteristics. It has wings but I didn't really want all of the dragons to have wings because so many of the dancers are also going to be firebirds. But the only other really distinct features of this drawing are it's collar and cuffs (which I did) and it's long pointed tail.
Now, let me tell you something about tails on stage. I learned this while working on a professional production of CATS! several years back: from stage there is a REALLY fine line between what looks like a tail and what looks like a great big novelty wang. On a nude bodysuit it was just... not a good look. I do not want the little boy wearing this costume to be mercilessly taunted about it for the rest of his life. I mean, it's bad enough he has to be the only little boy on a stage full of girly girls anyway, right? So, the tail was vetoed. Wings it is. Of course, Egyptian wings are awesome and amazing, but also super annoyingly intricate. This whole costume has been a lesson for me about not biting off more than I can chew and simplifying everything because no one but me will notice the difference anyway.
I will present this costume to the gal in charge today, here's hoping it is met with a round of hearty "oh you are just so creative"s rather than shocked and slack-jawed disapproval.
PS: I have reached the point in the recital season where my sewing studio looks like this and all I want in the whole world is to be able to vacuum the bloody floor:
not that I can FIND the floor...
