Construction paper cut-out letters

For the Winter Wonderettes at Fox Valley Rep, I needed to make lots of holiday decorations that looked homemade, but still looked high quality, like they were made with care. One of the trickiest things to figure out was the lettering on all the signs I needed. In the past I would have stenciled onto construction paper or poster-board and then cutout the letters, but in this case I wanted more of a variety of fonts and more control of the font size than I could get with the stencils I owned. 

 Instead I decided to create documents with the exact fonts I needed in the exact size.

 I glued them face down onto pieces of construction paper

 It was still easy to see the outline of the dark letters through the thin printer paper

So I was able to easily cut out the letters.

And then peel the printed letter off the back

 I was left with construction paper cutout letters that looked consistent and carefully made, but still home crafted.

Stage Hairspray

I am not sure of how many uses I will actually find for this, but I have just discovered a new product. 

 Fantasy FX canned fog.
This product has apparently been used extensively in recent years for productions of Hairspray.

I imagine this canned fog effect would have many uses, though I used it for a hairspray effect as well.

The fog inside has very little scent and hangs nicely in the air

A quick bit of spray adhesive on a recreated AquaNet Label

And we have a wonderful can of hairspray that doesn't leave any sort of sticky film on actresses, props, or the floor

Wrapped gift boxes

My apologies if this post is overly simplistic. I thought this was standard practice, but while explaining this method to a lighting designer friend and a production manager, they were both fascinated so I figured it was worth a blog post.

There are moments when gifts onstage need to be actually wrapped in paper that can be torn off, in which case, the run crew or stage management will need to do the wrapping, but please be considerate and pre-cut plenty of the correct sized pieces for them to use.

In many other cases you just need a beautiful box that can be opened easily. You can individually wrap the top and the bottom of the box, or i this case, I bought nice heavy gift boxes at Menards and added ribbon to each one. 

 First I wrapped some ribbon around the lid of the box

and glued the end on the inside

 Then carefully lined up ribbon on the bottom, while the box was assembled to match the top ribbon

I repeated the technique in the other direction

 and then glued a bow on top to finish it off

 The gift looks beautiful under the tree and the actor can quickly retrieve the prop inside.

I made each of the five boxes I needed slightly differently, and I was really pleased with how they turned out. 

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

Hostess

The other day at one of our previews I had four different people come up to me with a bit of fear in their eyes. They wanted to know if I had purchased enough of the Hostess HoHos we are supposed to give away to audience members as part of an audience participation bit.

Did I know that Hostess was going out of business and that people had buying out all of their products off of the store shelves as quickly as they could be found?

Luckily I had purchased all of the HoHos that we needed for the entire run already.

Just a good reminder that it is always best to be prepared for the entire run as soon as possible. you never know when a product will be discontinued or a company will go out of business.