The Little Mermaid

   Since COVID things have been slow for costuming for me, but let's be honest I haven't exactly been looking for or trying to get jobs. But leave it to Mrs. Smith at Riverdale High School to get me to agree to make FOURTEEN skirts in 3 weeks. She asked me to make them when they announced the show but due to life and things I didn't get started on the first set of skirts until two weeks before the show opened.
   This production of The Little Mermaid was a high school production and an alumni and friends show, meaning there would be two sets of cast. I was asked to make the skirt tails for Ariel and her 6 mersisters. Now in a perfect world some of the girls in both casts would be able to share skirts but no such luck. This meant I had to make a total of 14 skirts for this show and, I'm not going to lie, it stressed me out... a lot. 
   There were things the director and I knew we wanted. 1) the tops would be sequined and the skirts would not be. 2) the feet would not be shown if at all possible. 3) I would use batik style cottons to add to the underwater feel of the set. Now, there were also many challenges with this show. 1) I needed to do was figure out the shape of the skirt and a pattern that I could use to fit a dress size 10 all the was to a size 26 and be flattering on everyone. 2) What to do to make it look like scales but not look cheap. As Mrs. Smith said "make me look good, make you look good"  3) keep to a budget. Harder than you would think. 4)find something that would match the solid colored sequin tops without me every have seen the tops in person.
   Challenges aside, I think the skirts turned out amazing. They all looked so good on all of the girls and even after skipping three nights of sleep over the course of two weeks, I am so happy with the results. All of the sisters' skirts were corseted, again because I wasn't on site and we had no fittings so i was fully basing sizes on the measurements I was given (and praying that they were taken correctly). While I love a coreset, because it means multiple body types and sizes can wear one skirt, it is not the best for quick changes (as I learned during the Beauty and the Beast making in 2016) so Ariel's skirts were both zippered.
   My favorite part of these skirts was the "patterns" I got to add. Originally the scales were all going to be the same fabric, but it very quickly became evident that I didn't get enough of the batik and it would have increased the price dramatically to get enough to finish them all in the same fabric. So with the goal of keeping the skirts under a certain cost, I found a variety of other multi-toned cottons in every color to mix in and create the bigger patterns. Some turned out better than others, but every one is unique and they all looked great.