Accessories
Book & Gift Store
Classes
Corsets & Underwear
Computers
Costumes 4 Sale
Costume e-Lists
Dance Costumes
Designs & Designers
Dolls
"Ethnic" Dress
Fashion Theory
Free eGroup
Free Stuff
Halloween
(Costume) History
How-To
Kinky Clothing
Major Sites
Military Uniforms
Movie Costumes
Museums
New Pages
Occupational & Occasion- Specific
Patterns
Questions?
Religious Dress
Theatre History
Travel for Costumers
Unite!
Vintage Clothing
Weddings
Weird Clothing

Costume Sites on the WWW #7: Teaching about Costumes

By Tara Maginnis

These sites are useful places to send costume students to learn about design, construction and other job skills. This listing can only scratch the surface, but gives a good idea of the sort of thing to be found out there that can assist teachers and students alike. This article is mirrored online at the page http://www.costumes.org/pages/crj.htm

Costume Design

Celluloid Wrappers: Costume in the Movies http://www.electroephemera.com/cellwrap/ includes intelligent critical analysis of costume design in recent popular films, with links to websites on the films reviewed.

The Costume Designer's World broken link by BAFTA nominated designer Deirdre Clancy, is stuffed with sensible advice on design, working with directors, negotiating for pay, and other important lessons for costuming in the real world.

“The Costumer’s Manifesto” Book of Advice http://www.costumes.org/pages/indexm.htm is a lesser-known part of my own site that has self-help advice for costumers on topics ranging from taking photos for your portfolio, to how to find ideas for show concepts.

How to Design a Show With No Money [this site no longer online] has some handy tips for doing what students will be doing on their first shows: conjuring costumes from air.

Kathleen Gossman’s Homepage http://www.furman.edu/~kgossman/index.htm for her Costume Design class and others has tutorials that explain clearly the process used to arrive at a given costume design, along with a number of possible class projects to do once you understand the process. Projects for costume crafts, a makeup morgue, useful links and more are also provided.

The Costume Book: The Non-Professional's Guide to Professional Results Averatec AV3250HX-01 12.1" Notebook PC (AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Drive)
Funny Face


Fashion Footwear: 1800-1970

Costume Technology

Kristina Tollefson’s Teaching Projects [this site no longer online] Include a garment bag that teaches basic sewing skills, and a shopping handbook for student designers, which she developed for her work teaching costume design at the University of Central Florida.

Duct Tape Method of making A Renaissance Bodice Pattern http://www.100megspop3.com/waistedminds/aris.html is exactly what it sounds like. My costume shop manager Lorraine Pettit tested this out on a stout and unusually shaped student, and found that the method was excellent for quickly patterning a 16^th Century boned bodice for her highly unusual figure. Further experimentation showed the method was also adaptable to a Victorian corset pattern simply by cutting the pieces out differently.

Drawing

Skills Canada BC Competition broken link has printouts for their High School level competition in Fashion Design. These PDF documents include two printable croquis sheet designs.

Links for Learning about Rendering http://www.costumes.org/pages/renderinglinks.htm another one of my pages also has 4 croquis sheet designs, in addition to links on drawing figures.

The Figure Drawing LAB http://www2.evansville.edu/drawinglab one of the links listed at the above has pretty much a whole online course in figure drawing techniques.

Sewing

Threads Magazine http://www.taunton.com/threads/index.asp has many of their articles on sewing online at their site, including “Clone Yourself A Fitting Assistant” a great page of instructions for making a body-double dress form.

How to Sew on Vinyl dead link gives detailed tips on sewing with various stretch vinyl cloth types.

Antimony & Lace ~ Gothic Fashion [this site no longer online] I’ve found that teaching sewing with projects that students would actually like to have in their wardrobe, like capes and such, makes sewing an easier “sell”. This site has quite a few useful how-to articles for sewing Goth fashions like circle capes and bondage pants.

TechnoSystem Strange Girl: Garb broken link another page with sewing projects/patterns students can download, this one with nice simple to follow Medieval patterns for the SCA folks in the class.

How to Make a Tutu [this site no longer online] Has pictures and text on that difficult to describe process that so many dread.

Sewing at About.com http://sewing.about.com has many small free project patterns and instructions useful for teaching basic sewing, plus links, articles on sewing machine maintenance, how to make your own thread rack, and much more. Make sure especially to check out the “Instructional and Informational Articles” at this page in the site http://sewing.about.com/topicsubinstruct.htm

If you have good web links for any topic related to costume, please e-mail me at Tara@costumes.org

Back to Costume Sites on the WWW articles from CRJ