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

Turkish Bowls

For "Night Over Erzinga" the director was hoping that we could have a set of Turkish bowls on a tray for a short scene. 

After doing some research I discovered that Turkish pottery is not only intricate and beautiful, but VERY expensive, and totally out of our budget.

I decided instead to make the bowls myself. Unfortunately I missed taking pictures of them before I started, when they were all solid colored plastic and ceramic bowls I purchased at thrift stores for less than $1 each.

The next few images show the bowls close up after the first coat of paint.

 Next I used a white paint pen to outline all of the designs and to add details. 

 I slowly added details by rotating each color through each bowl, so that by the time I switched colors the first bowl is dry and ready for a new one. 

 In the end they turned out very well.
The director had been imagining that the bowls would be empty,and the food would be imagined/implied as this was a memory scene. Once we got into  we discovered that the idea wasn't working and we needed to fill te bowls.

With very little budget remaining I was able to fill the tray with food at the last minute for almost no cost.

with ripped up upholstery foam

 a bag of cheap beans (less than $1 at the grocery store)

 small apples I already had in stock

 my fake raspberries and blueberries from "The Crowd You're In With" (these have appeared in at least 4 shows now)

And some puffed wheat cereal so that the actress had something to physically eat in the short scene. 

Finally filling the whole thing out with some stock plastic grapes so that the bowls didn't looks so tiny on the tray. 

Light-up Cake

This is one of the two birthday cakes created for "Night over Erzinga" at Silk Road Rising. This was the easier of the two, but was still tricky in that it needed to have candles that were blown out onstage. Chicago has very strict rules forbidding almost all instances of live flame onstage, so real candles weren't an option. 

My solution started with a very simple circular form made of two layered circles of foam. 

In individually wired seven small yellow LED bulbs , wrapped them in tape and placed them vertically around the cake, 

then ran all the wires back to a battery and switch positioned on the back of the plate. For this part I had to be very careful to be consistent about which sides of the LED I wired to which color wire. LEDs are directional, which means that, unlike incandescent bulbs, they only work if the positive and negative sides of the battery are connected in the correct way, switch the polarity and the light will not light. When wiring one LED individually this can be an easy mistake to fix, by simply flipping the battery, when wiring many bulbs together, a mistake on one bulb would be significantly trickier to track down and correct. 

Once everything was wired I made sure everything was securely taped down to the base, and then iced over the entire thing with light weight joint compound to hide my work. 

I left the battery and the switch exposed , on the back of the cake. I later covered all but the actual button on the switch with white gaff tape so that both were accessible to troubleshooting, but less visible from a distance. 

Here it is all lit up.

To hide my ugly black tape candles I purchased a box of cheap drinking straws. I slit each straw down the side, and then wrapped it around the base of the candles.

 Each straw was cut to be a bit longer than the tape segment so that the bulb was hidden a bit inside the plastic. This helped to hide the hardware of the bulbs a bit, so that the audience saw a more believable glow instead of a bare exposed bulb.