The Busy Mama's Costume Shop

"Under the sea" costumes

May's school did The Little Mermaid for its spring play this year. There were only three mermaids, but many sea creatures. May was in the chorus, so I volunteered to do costumes for those kids.

The chorus was described in the stage directions as "acting as scenery." The seven sixth-graders in the chorus did a couple of dance scenes, and they stood in the background with some of the other sea creatures and sang and spoke lines together. I decided to go with an abstract design suggestive of a school of tropical fish or a coral reef rather than making more literal "fish" costumes. I was inspired by Julie Taymor's costumes for The Lion King, and added a bit of hip-hop flavor.

 I bought hot pink, lime green, and yellow cotton T-shirts on sale at the craft store for $2 each for the girls. For the one boy in the cast, I bought a dark forest-green shirt. After experimenting with fabric paint, I figured out a way to create an organic-looking wavy pattern on the shirts. I turned a laundry basket upside down, taped an old T-shirt over it for protection, and pulled the bottom 12 inches of each T-shirt over the top of the basket. I bunched up the bottom 8 inches or so of the shirt in loose pleats and sprayed it with black fabric spray paint. Each shirt was unique.

After each shirt had dried, I laid it flat on the floor of the garage and sprayed it with crystalline-glitter fabric spray. Then I used glitter fabric paint in a tube to put random dots of glitter over the shirt.

For a bit of hip-hop flair, I bought black costume jersey embellished with a random pattern of multicolored glitter. I made two fingerless gloves or mitts for each dancer -- a long one with fringe along the side for their right hands, which they used the most, and a wrist-length glove for their left hands. The sparkle and fringe made their hand motions more interesting. For the boy, I used a remnant of sheer forest-green novelty fabric to make wristbands that looked like seaweed.

 The kids were thrilled with their costumes. They wore black leggings and bare feet on stage. I cut strips of the black sparkly fabric for them to tie in their hair, though one girl wore hers around her ankle, which I thought looked cute. The costumes were simple and inexpensive and the kids could move easily in them, and they did make pretty good scenery. The gloves were the best part as far as they were concerned. I heard that one girl was wearing hers around school.

I didn't get many pictures of the kids in action, but here is May posing in her costume.

 

Mermaid costumes

June 2008: May was one of seven dancing mermaids in the elementary school play, Peter Pan. I was the costumer and den mother for the mermaids, and they were so sweet, thanking me for their outfits and giving me hugs. They felt beautiful in their costumes and enjoyed twirling around, and the little kids were enchanted with them.

The mermaid costumes were loosely based on McCall's pattern 5498. We chose the fabrics because they were dirt cheap ($6 for 10 yards of the pink at Goodwill, and $3 a yard for the floral print); pink wouldn't have been my first choice, but we had a limited budget.

I didn't want to make the attached top that was in the pattern, so I put elastic around the waist of the tail to make a skirt. I had to modify the sizing because the pattern didn't come in older girls' sizes. I cut the neckline and sleeve hems off some inexpensive craft-store T-shirts, shirred the center front and shoulder seams, and made a sash out of the fin fabric. I tied a strip of blue tulle to the girls' wrists and glued an orchid to a hair clip for each girl.

I spent the better part of two weeks working on these costumes, and for a while my bedroom looked like a Vegas showgirls' dressing room. Costume making is much like cooking in that the time spent preparing greatly exceeds the time spent presenting. You have to enjoy the process or it will make you crazy. This project was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. And the girls liked the results, so all the effort was worthwhile.