Blood, Glue, and Ethafoam

Remember when I was trying to explain that my mannequin dressing class was difficult? It really is. Even if I can't convince you that putting historical clothing on a form is challenging, how about making the form itself? That was our most recent project.

Mannequins are shockingly expensive for both store and museum use. They can cost around $1800 for a whole form, and many museums don't have that kind of money to spend. To prepare us for do-it-yourself situations, our professor broke us into teams to build our own dress forms. Two groups made forms out of buckram--a material with stiffening which softens in water. Basically you can cut up strips, wet them, and mold them around a form. Then it dries and you can cut it off and add some internal supports. I tell you this because I was in one of the groups who did not get assigned the buckram route. No. We had to carve our ladies out of heavy blocks of foam.

My team was assigned to an "intersect" mount. That meant that we cut out two main shapes out of 4" ethafoam-- a front view and a side view. Then we cut notches in them, made them intersect, and added more chunks foam to fill in the four side gaps. Chances are, that didn't make any sense to you, but it isn't really important. Basically, after two full class periods of work, we had a vaguely female shaped pile of plastic. This week, the three hours were spent with giant knives taking turns trying to shape our thing into a size 2. Occasionally our professor would come over, giggle, and whisper "Spongebob Squarepants" to us--which was her way of indicating that our form was still too blocky. We started getting tired and frustrated and I even sliced into my finger at one point (one of those shallow cuts that nonetheless bleeds a lot). But finally we got the nod that she was done and we could cover her in fabric. In the picture you can see me wielding the hot glue gun with my band-aided finger strategically held out of the way.

Anyway, I guess there isn't much point to this post other than 1) This stuff is hard! and 2) My grad school projects continue to be weird (ask me about my attempt last week to make a wig out of crinkled paper).

P.S. The buckram people got their comeuppance for having an easier project. After covering the form in wet strips of buckram they shrouded it with a protective sheet of plastic. By the following week their project had blossomed with an astounding number of mold colonies.