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Costume Design & Construction

Animal/Bird Foot Shoe Project (2D+10C)

Animal and bird feet are easy to build on top of existing shoes.  One can use heels for a cartoon sexy look, or rubber bottomed shoes for dance or movement.

Complete Book of Sewing

The Costume Designer's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Designers

The Costume Technician's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Technicians

 

Stage Costume Step-By-Step : The Complete Guide to Designing and Making Stage Costumes for All Major Drama Periods and Genres Shuz [MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION]

The Magic Garment : Principles of Costume Design

Costume Construction

Elegantly Frugal Costumes : The Poor Man's Do-It-Yourself Costume Maker's Guide

The Magic Garment : Principles of Costume Design

Cutting and Draping Special Occasion Clothes: Designs for Eveningwear and Partywear

The Foam Book : An Easy Guide to Building Polyfoam Puppets

Costume Construction

Costumes and Chemistry: A Comprehensive Guide to Materials and Applications

The Business of Theatrical Design

Elegantly Frugal Costumes : The Poor Man's Do-It-Yourself Costume Maker's Guide

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress, Medieval-1500 Jean Hunnisett, Kathryn Turner (Illustrator) Worth every penny of it's hefty price tag, this book is high on scholarship, illustrations, easy to understand text and diagrams, and is one of the best, most detailed how-to manuals for costumers ever written. I had been working as a costumer for almost 20 years when I first saw this book and still, I'd say lots of it's techniques were a revelation. It shows in essence, how to reproduce costumes in this period in such a way as to make them indistinguishable from originals.  Fiberarts : The Magazine Of Textiles [MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION]

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress 1500-1800, Jean Hunnisett, another volume like the above.

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress, 1800-1909 Jean Hunnisett, another volume like the above.

Men's Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Costume : Cut and Fashion an R.I.Davis book with a large number of useful patterns and construction tips.  Similar to Hunniset books in format and quality.

Men's Garments 1830-1900 : A Guide to Pattern Cutting and Tailoring an R.I.Davis book with a large number of useful patterns and construction tips. Similar to above, but paperback.

Halloween: The Best of Martha Stewart Living (The best Halloween how-to book ever.  This book proves once and for all that Martha is actually a closet "Goth")

The Sewing Machine Guide: Tips on Choosing, Buying, and Refurbishing

You can use the same technique to make other odd or extreme shoe styles like these as well:

What you will need: 

• A pair of shoes

• Open cell foam scraps

• Hot glue

• Fabric or fur for covering

• Needle and thread

• Other decorations or plastic claws as per your individual design

What To Do:

Render your shoe design on paper to give yourself a plan to work towards.  You may end up changing your plan slightly, but starting without a plan is definitely a mistake.

Find a pair of shoes that fits your performer, and gather together the rest of your materials.  Cut out foam shapes that mimic the animal toes and hot glue them to the shoe. 

Bird heels:  

Cat toe sneakers:  

Using either hot glue, or needle and thread, cover the foam and shoe with the fabric/fur.  If you are using fur, or if the shape of the toes is complicated, it will usually be simplest to put the covering on in small pieces with glue:

a Completed leopard claw foot.

If the shape is simple like this bird foot, you may want to sew it on as a single piece as shown:       

once the foam parts are covered, you can paint the rest of the shoe to match so you don't have to get the fabric to stick to movable parts of the shoe that may wish to peel later. 

The completed sexy bird shoes. Similar bird feet done on flat sneakers for dancing:

When your bird or animal foot shoes are finished, photograph the them as jpeg files and post them to your File folder at the class eGroup.  Post a message to the group letting everyone know you have posted these pictures so you can get feedback.

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