Tag: singing seamstress

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The Yucky Horror Seamstress Show

It being Halloween and all, I thought I’d share with you GHOULISH TALES OF TERROR. Then I figured it’d be better if I downshifted it a bit, and instead just give you my top five “ickiest” moments as a professional seamstress. What makes them totally spinechilling is that they’re ALL REAL…!

[INSERT SPOOKY MUSIC HERE]

  1. HAMMER GYM OF HORROR – This particular smelly situation has happened to me more than once. Twice, in fact; which is twice more than it should have happened. I refer, of course, to the client who has somehow misjudged his or her timing and has opted to hit the gym before an appointment with me and equally opted to not shower beforehand. Now, you may have heard that I have previous extensive experience in community and professional theatre. And let me tell you that one person’s body odor can wreck an entire production. Same with those who come to my admittedly small studio to get measured or fitted. I beg of you, please take the as-little-as-two-minutes’-time it takes to freshen up the smelly bits. We’re working in close quarters, don’t you know.
  2. SWINGING FROM THE RAFTERS – As a seamstress, ,I have to maintain as much of a detachment to the bodies of my clients as much as a gynecologist. To me, a naked body is something needed to be clothed, preferably by something I’ve created. However, that does NOT mean I encourage you to go commando, whether you’re male or female… and I’ve had both. Please trust me when I say that no seamstress on the planet wants any extra surprises when measuring inseams. However, if you feel you MUST be ‘free and unfettered,’ please refer to Number 1 above and don’t add inappropriate smells to the inappropriate sigh
  3. WHAT, WILL THESE STAINS NE’ER COME OUT? – It’s part of my job to take garments that customers have found that are frequently secondhand and used (the garments, not the customers). I actually get much joy from repurposing or altering something that’s already been created into something new and personal and tailored to the new owner. That being said, there’s been at least one misguided Santa in my life who opted to bring me a full costume that needed re-rendering that hadn’t been washed, laundered, or drycleaned. Like, EVER. The stains and the smells jockeyed for position as to which was the most overt. I actually sort of felt for the kids who might be encountering this particular Jolly (and Smelly) Old Elf at the mall or parties. So much so that I dipped into my own pocket to have the thing professionally cleaned and practically deloused so that I could work on it without gagging. Do me a favor and have your costume, clothes, or gown drycleaned before bringing it to me. If you’re in a pinch, know that I have an entire drawer filled with coupons I’m willing to share.
  4. O HOLEY NIGHT – Believe it or not, there’s something worse than a client who has opted to go commando (see Number 2 above). And that’s wearing undergarments that are – how shall we phrase this? – ‘well worn.’ Yes, yes, I’ve heard the old joke, “Of COURSE I have holes in my underwear; how else would I put my legs through?” but there’s a limit, folks. And while we’re on the topic, skidmarks are something I wish to see ONLY on the road. Not in your unmentionables. Alas, I’ve had both bride and Santa greet me with this. So, I beg of you, when prepping for an appointment with me (or any other seamstress or tailor out there), remember what your mother told you: wear clean underwear!
  5. THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK SOUL – So, most of my above examples have been pretty olfactory centered. Yes, stains are bad and smells are worse. But what is truly horrifying is some of the horrendous attitudes I’ve encountered in my professional life. And not just directed toward me. Too often I’ve come across bridezillas and Santazillas alike. On occasions that are supposed to be all love and happiness, they bare the darkest parts of themselves that are best hidden, if not exorcized. I got into this business because I wanted to use my talents to bring happiness into people’s lives on their special days and to leave the world a little cleaner than I found it. I vastly prefer it when people make it easy for me to do so.

So, those are MY tales of terror! What are YOURS?

Have a safe Halloween… and don’t eat the candy while trying on your wedding gown!

Until next time!

Heather

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Where Do I Begin…?

I’m rapidly approaching my fourth ‘official’ anniversary of being The Singing Seamstress; the journey has been longer because the shift from amateur to professional took some time leading up to the official naming. Time flies when you’re having fun, right? While I’ve been fascinated by sewing and fabrics and design and creation pretty much my whole life, there was one particular moment when I decided to turn seamstressing from a hobby to a profession. Like any superhero, I have an origin story. Not that I’m saying I’m a superhero. I’m merely saying that Wonder Woman and I have never been in the same room together at the same time, and we’ll leave it at that.

The first Santa costume photo that I posted way back in 2016!

I was actually in the medical field a few years ago, and in honesty I’d had I had no designs on getting into bridal alterations. But the fates intervened and I received a frantic call from a theatre friend saying that one of her best friends was in a pickle. She begged me for my help, and who was I to turn down a friend’s friend in distress?

It turns out the aforementioned friend was the father of a bride, the wedding was two weeks away, and the person they had originally hired to do the alterations (a biddy from their church) didn’t do a good job on the gown and – furthermore – was not returning phone calls. Sight unseen, I offered my own assistance.

The dress turned out to be a strapless mermaid; one of the most difficult fashions to alter well. To this day… well, I can’t say I HATE a particular style to alter, but I CAN say this style is near the bottom of my list. Additionally, they’re specifically designed for a particular body type, and I’ve lost track of the times I’ve tried to convince a bride of the ‘not particular body type’ to go with another style and they refuse, only to wonder why they don’t look like they thought they would in it. But that’s another blog entry.

The original, disappeared seamstress had only taken the dress in at the very top. She had not extended her seams down the entire length of the dress, which is a vital component to any alterations to it. She also hadn’t bustled it, which, again, had to be done for this fashion. No wonder the bride and her dad were ready to have father/daughter matching heart attacks.

I will admit that my hands shook the entire time I was working on it. I was convinced I had bitten off more than I could chew, and I just KNEW I was going to only further disappoint the bride. But halfway through the project – and there’s no way to say this without sounding all Kung Fu – something happened, and my hands steadied and my nerves calmed. A sort of sereneness washed over me and with each stitch I grew more confident in my abilities. In the past, I can created and altered dozens – if not hundreds – of everyday clothes and theatrical costumes. In the end, this was no different, except for the pressure I had put on myself.

In any event, I finished the dress and promptly proceeded to drink an entire bottle of wine upon its completion. It was a sort of celebration, because I had survived the ordeal unscathed. Additionally, the realtered gown looked absolutely stunning on the beautiful bride, and I can still remember the tears in her dad’s eyes when he saw his ‘little girl’ all grown up and wearing white.

I figured – and rather naively so from today’s perspective – that this was probably as bad as it could get, so I decided to ditch my corporate position and try out professional seamstressing for a living. It took the largest leap of faith I ever had to take, and those early days were filled with hit-and-miss. But word of mouth spread, and my work began to speak for itself, and I realized the pros definitely outweighed the cons. So here I am to stay.

Now… tell me YOUR origin story!

Until next time!

Heather

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Holy Halloween, Charlie Brown!

One of my earliest memories was catching a rebroadcast of the annual Halloween special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The one scene that stuck with more than any other was good ol’ Charlie Brown himself trying to make a ghost costume out of a sheet and ending up with about a dozen eye holes. Needless to say, all he got was rocks in his candy basket.

Now, I’m not saying that witnessing that led me to become a seamstress, but I certainly carried the vision into my adulthood, and am bound and determined that any Halloween-type costume I do is a grand sight better than the holey sheet. (Although, if you’re bound and determined to go retro, I’ll be more than happy to discuss my nominal fee to repurpose a sheet as a replica of Charlie’s costume.)

I’ll be honest; I make a decent living from doing bridal gowns and Santa costumes for the most part. I don’t NEED to do ‘everyday’ costumes. But I certainly do enjoy making them when time allows. I recently had the joy of replicating one of Elton John’s flamboyant costumes for a client who wanted his own Rocketman-themed party, and it really felt good to stretch the creative muscles. And God help me whenever the Texas Renaissance Festival comes to town; I can create pirate and wench costumes in my sleep (and probably actually have done so).

Gone are the days of the old five-and-dime-store purchases of a boxed Casper the Ghost costume that consisted of a flimsy white plastic onesie and a half-mask. Halloween today is a special day for children from age 1 to 101. And it seems that store-bought costumes – the only standbys of the latest superhero or cartoon character – aren’t enough for many, as no one wants to come to the same party in the same costume, not unlike two female movie stars wearing the same gown to the Academy Awards red carpet.

All this being said, I understand the need for an inexpensive, homemade costume when it comes to a pinch (even with all my experience, there’s been many an October 30th that’s rolled around that’s found me frantically digging through my closet for inspiration). As much as I’d love to be able to dedicate a month or two each year just crafting original costumes for clients, the autumn bridal calendar and the needs of the Santas worldwide don’t allow that to be in the cards. So, gentle readers, here are some ideas that might help you craft your own costume in the meantime:

Zombieland – this is one of the easiest costumes to make because there are no rules, and no two zombies are alike. Grab any clothes from your closet, the more ill-fitting the better. Squirt them with washable stage blood or – believe it or not – that concentrated fruit punch stuff you can squirt into a water bottle, which tends to wash out pretty easily. You can go full-on zombie makeup, or else just mess up your hair and snarl a lot.

Trading Places – If you’re a couple, why not go as each other? Even if one half of the couple is of a vastly different size from the other, the bad fit would add to the humor. As a last resort, hit the Goodwill store and buy something that LOOKS like the other person would wear.  You can even turn it into a game helping out the hubby with his makeup or the wife with her 5 o’clock shadow.

Cartoon Network – The nice thing about dressing up as a cartoon character is that the costume on the original character isn’t in reality, so ‘close enough’ will work. Grab jeans and a white shirt, tie a blue bandana around his neck, and bam! Fred from Scooby Doo. Or a green t-shirt and brown pants and – rut-ro! – you also have a Shaggy. Take a single-color large pillowcase, cut holes for head and arms, belt it, add a matching bow to your hair, and now you’re a PowerPuff Girl. White pants, blue polo shirt, red bandana, and a white bicycle helmet, and suddenly you’re Speed Racer. The possibilities are endless.

The Power of the Tee – If you don’t have the time or energy to craft an entire costume, get yourself a large white t-shirt, a thick black marker, and write your character on it. It can be a pun or joke, a bad superhero logo, whatever you like. Make the cheapness of it the joke.

Good Grief – Speaking of t-shirts, grab yourself a yellow one and a roll of black duct tape, tape a zigzag onto the shirt, and you can be an instant Charlie Brown. Or, REALLY get into the spirit and cut a bunch of eye holes all over an old white sheet. But be prepared to get rocks.

Well, what do YOU think, gentle readers? What’s an inexpensive Halloween costume YOU’VE worn or have thought of?

Until next time!

Heather

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It’s Gonna be All White

As a wedding gown designer, you can bet your bottom dollar that I know all about the color white. Without tooting my own horn too badly, I can assert that I am a veritable expert on whites, to the extent that I can rattle off quite a few shades of the color – yes, white has shades – including white, white smoke, snow, honeydew, mint cream, azure, Alice blue, ghost white, seashell, beige, old lace, floral white, ivory, antique white, linen, and lavender blush. And I won’t even go into the plethora of off-whites and their own shades.

(You Santas out there reading the blog, don’t worry; I’m equally well versed in the different hues of red, but that’s for another time.)

This topic came to me because – as you may or may not know – we recently had a death in the family, and for some odd reason I remembered that, for the longest time, white was the color of mourning, not celebration. You can most likely thank Queen Victoria for starting the trend when she wore a white lace and silk-satin gown when she married Prince Albert in 1840. The outrage it inspired was – according to reports – considerable, but that didn’t stop dozens, hundreds, then countless thousands brides from copying her in the following years.

I sometimes wonder what life for me as a seamstress might have been if Old Vicky had stuck with tradition and gone with a colored gown. It’s easy to envision a wedding industry turned on its ear due to the myriad of options in flowers, decorations, and even bridesmaids dresses when they’re not depending on the base, central color of white.

Actually, across the globe, colored wedding gowns are still en vogue. Chinese brides get to start off in a red gown – signifying the local color of joy and luck – then get a second ceremony in a white gown and then finally a third in a color of their choice. In Spain, they go for black gowns that signify staying with their husbands until death. Morrocan brides – for better or worse – wear bright yellow, a color that is supposed to scare away evil spirits and – presumably – traditional seamstresses. Koreans overlay their own white gowns in lime green, and in India the colors of the rainbow are fair game for a traditional wedding dress.

In closing, I also can’t help but wonder what kind of world it would be if we retained the color white as our traditional color of mourning. Step outside of real life and think of every movie that has a funeral scene with somber blacks and cloudy skies. Maybe, just maybe, the light and bright colors would instead help us through those dark times.

Until next time!

Heather

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June Bride? Be Ready to Sing a Different Tune

Everyone knows that THE month to get married in is June, right?

Right?

Not so fast, dear readers.

True, the month of June itself was named after Juno, who just happened to be the Roman goddess of marriage, so there’s tradition there. Also in generations past, June was chosen as the best wedding month because – in those days before, you know, Women’s Lib and the Pill – it was typically inevitable that the pitter-patter of tiny feet would follow around nine months exactly after the “I do’s” and they didn’t want child-birthing to get in the way of a good harvest. And it didn’t help that the early 20th century pressed the issue with a song from the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the title of a Bette Davis movie both named “June Bride.”

But – believe it or not – June isn’t the most popular month nowadays to get married. Today, that honor falls on October. June is in second place, and – amazingly – November comes in third.

Personally, I find it odd that this is the case, if for no other reason than tax breaks. I have a ‘friend of a friend’ who married, eventually divorced, and remarried a few years later. Her two anniversaries were, respectively, January 3 and January 2. Her reasoning was that she could – tax-wise – get the most out of the year. While you don’t need to go to such extremes, it IS helpful to be married for the majority of the year (any time July 1). However, I’ve known too many brides and grooms that don’t really care about the tax ramifications and delve right into an autumn wedding.

On the other hand, weddings later in the year when the temperatures aren’t quite at summer levels – particularly in tropical and desert climes – can make life so much more bearable where the makeup won’t run and the hair won’t frizz. October and November are also in that ‘sweet spot’ between the summer vacations and the holiday festivities. Even honeymoons could be cheaper if your destination is considered ‘off-season.’

Long story short, if you’re in the mood to get married but don’t want to wait until next summertime, now is the time to MOVE IT OR LOSE IT. We’re three months out and if you need any dresses created or altered, you need to act swiftly indeed.

Let’s hear from YOU: did you get married at an untraditional time? What are some pros and cons?

Until next time!

Heather