Of Thread, Trees, & Trumpets

Last Tuesday, about 20 women cut and sewed biblical costumes for the Nativity at the LDS church. Head costumer Nancy Morris (below, center) is a top-notch crafter, and loves costume sewing, including for Rennaissance festivals. She helped Cindy Jacobs (right) and Sonya McDonald (not shown) to sew a costume from a sheet for Tina Telford. Jocelyn Neilson is sewing a dove (below left). There was lots of finger food and and friendly chatting.

Keri Balls, with her colorful personality, picked out the brightest fabric in the 'free' pile and made her lime-green tunic and green, orange, and white braided sash in one night. Leslie Jaimes, who will play Mary in the Nativity pageant, helped sewing costumes for the wedding scene.

Sister Gonzalez is
one of our women who can embroider, and she'll be stitching Jesus' swaddling band for the pageant. She also sewed doves that night, and Hume (Ooo'-mee) Vrana started her costume and helped make tassels. We have a very low budget this year, and we are making everything that can be made.

We're sewing again for the next 2 Tuesdays (Sept 21 & 28, 2010) at 10:00 am. Nancy Morris, myself (Liz Robertson) will be there with sewing machines and some free fabric and lots of projects to work on. Call if you have questions.

One of the materials we need for our little Bethlehem is sticks: with so many palm trees and skinny slash pine, there is a shortage of straight tree branches. But Saturday our neighborhood trees got trimmed, and I collected some straight ones for awnings; curved ones for shepherd staffs; and small ones for bird cages. If you have a lot of branches hanging around, please bring them to the church for the play!

And here's the funny story: I went online and ordered some cheap plastic trumpets for our angels, which I planned on spray painting gold. The description said 'blue collapsible theatrical/medieval trumpets'. But when they arrived, my husband took one look at them and said "Those are just soccer vuvuzelas, cut in half to fit in the box." We blew one and laughed, 'cause sure enough, it sounded like the South African World Cup! (I hope I didn't ruin the angel scene in the play with that little tidbit!)