Fruit basket

In The Black Nativity, one of the numbers takes place in a market scene. I have baskets full of fruit, vegetables, bread, fish, and fabric. The baskets need to looks full and plentiful, have loose pieces for the actors to exchange during the scene, but be solid enough that things aren't rolling away during the dance.

Stage Hay Bale

It is a personal rule of mine that I never put real hay bales onstage. Real bales of hay are heavy, they shed, they are impossible to adequately fireproof, and inevitably lead to allergy problems with someone on the cast or crew. 

 When I can't convince the director or scene designer to use some other option (are you sure you the actors can't be sitting on these lovely wooden crates?), I have developed a method for making hay bales out of foam and raffia. 

The raffia bales don't shed nearly as much, and when they do the pieces are long and easy to quickly pick up; they are light and easy to carry, can be efficiently sprayed with fireproofing, and have yet to cause allergy problems in any of the shows I've used them in.

 I start by creating foam block the size of the bale I want. This one is made from many layers of 1" foam glued together, because that was cheapest and most accessible at the time. I glued the layers together with liquid nails, and then used more liquid nails to do the initial attaching of the raffia. 

Note: This is a messy process, and required lots of dry time. I would coat one side with glue, lay the raffia into the glue, place something on top of the raffia to hold it down, and then wait for it to dry. Once it was dry I turned the bale to the next side and repeated the process. 

After the initial round of glueing, I went back over the entire bale with a hot glue gun, pulling and pressing and gluing more specific spots, catching loose ends, tucking in wild pieces and making sure that corners were covered. 

To hold everything together even more, I wrapped the bale in this wired twine (found in the floral department of the craft store).

 Each stand was wrapped around the bale, pulled as tight as possible and then twisted together to lock it in place. 

I could then take the loose ends and press them down into the foam block so that no actors can get poked by the loose ends of the wire.

And here is the final product.

Crushed Shells

I discovered yesterday that Michael's sells bags of crushed sea shells.

 Not sure when else it will come up,

 but they look very pretty and shiny and expensive in this gourd that we use for one of the wisemen's gifts in The Black Nativity

Roman Shields

For the "re-mount" or The Black Nativitty at Congo Square Theatre (I put re-mount in quotes, because you should never believe anyone when they tell you that a show will be a re-mount and therefor less work because "we already have almost all of the props."), we had three roman soldiers who needed swords and shields.They needed to be light, so they could maneuver while dancing, and large enough to be intimidating. I was told historically they were intended to cover from the neck mid-calf, but we compromised on shoulder to knee. To create the tricky curved shape of a roman shield I decided to start with round concrete-form tubes. 

I started by slicing two tubes vertically and placing one inside the other.

To pull the tubes open to a wider curve, I placed them on Rowdy (that's the name of our beer can party cooler). I spread some liquid nails between the layers,

and then screwed in a number of small screws around the edges. The thought was that the glue and the screws would prevent the two layers from sliding back past each other, and would force the cardboard tubes to hold their shape in the wider curve.

Unfortunately that didn't work as well as planned, I believe because the cardboard is too soft and allowed for more flex and movement around the screws.

For my second attempt to spread out the curve I added chunks of 1x2 at the top and bottom.

While the 1x2 pieces did help to spread out the cardboard, they also left the cardboard looking a bit twisted and warped.

To finally straighten out the shields I ended up adding verticals to create a full frame on the back side of each shield.

I trimmed the edges and rounded the corners to finish the final shape of the shields. The flat 1x2 frame left the shields looking a little squished and messy at the tops; a uniform coat of paint helped hide this, and from the audience no one ever noticed but me. If I were to make these again, however, I would probably cut the curve I wanted from a piece of plywood and use that in place of the 1x2 to get a cleaner line. 

To give the finished pieces the look of being made of metal I used a roll of aluminum tape to cover the edge of each shield. Once they were painted I used a light piece of sandpaper to sand the color back off the edges. It made the shields look used and a bit roughed up, and the metal peeking through the scratched paint in those places tricked the eye into believing that there must be metal under the paint on the entire shield. 

for the actors to hold the shields I attached two strips of industrial 2 sided velcro (sold in hardware stores for bundling cables and tying down supplies in trucks). 

The two-sided velcro allowed each actor to custom fit the straps to fit snuggly on his arm each night, and to get in and out of the shield quickly. 

I used a coat of red spraypaint to color the shields. Here is another thing I would do differently next time. The concrete tubes have a waxy coating on them which the paint didn't stick very well to. It scratched off easily and I had to do several touch-ups as we were going through tech. Next time I would sand the surface of the shield before painting or dust it with spray adhesive first to give the paint something to adhere to.

To paint the shields I blew up a picture of the roman shield pattern and printed 1/4 of it (the design is symmetrical and printing only 1/4 allowed the design to fit on a legal size paper so I didn't have to pay for a large format printout). I then glued the printout to a piece of posterboard and cut out my stencil.

Then slowly over the course of the night, allowing each section to dry before spraying the next to avoid smearing paint, I painted each section of the three shields. 

Unfortuantely I never got around to taking a final picture of the completed pieces, but this gives a pretty good idea of how they turned out.