Mice

CATS has closed.

While I am somewhat relieved that it is done, I am also going to miss it a lot. It was over four months of working very closely with a great group of people and what we put together was amazing.  It was a lot of work and I didn’t have much time for anything else – I didn’t blog much as you may have noticed (I also didn’t see much of my family) – but I learned a lot, lost some weight, got back into shape, improved my singing, learned how to do face painting, and performed in CATS (holy crap!). 

The show sold out its entire 3-weekend run (they even added 2 shows to the last weekend – ouch) and unfortunately we were not given an extension. I don’t know why, it seemed entirely viable, and overall a really good idea – we’ve never sold out a whole run of a show. Ever. Like in the entire 80+ year history of the Iao Theater (ok, Deep Throat might have, I really don’t know). I’m kind of still recovering, but hopefully soon I’ll get back to crafting. Here are some things I’ve got to do/blog about:

Renovations
Clean/organize sewing room
Quilt for Annie
Quilt for me
Chicago (the musical – hopefully, I’m waiting to hear if I’m costuming it)

I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting, and probably more I’ll come up with out of the blue.

Something that I can talk about now is a project I did closing weekend of the show when I wasn’t at the theater. As gifts for the cast/crew I decided to make mini versions of George, the remote control mouse I made for Kitty Playtime. They aren’t really mini version since George is the extra large version. I used the same pattern, just in the original size. At first I was just planning to use the same colors as George, but then got ambitious and decided to make them more individualized.  Each cat had a main color and accent colors as part of their costume, so I used those for the body/ears/tail.  On a lot of them I also added stripes since most of the cats’ unitards had airbrushing on them. 

 

I ended up making over 30 mice and fortunately had help from my mom, my sister, and a friend.  This isn’t all of them, but it’s the entire cast (minus me) and the pit singers. I gave the crew black mice (theater tech crews wear blacks on stage so they are less noticeable), and the stage manager got the original George since she was the one controlling him every night. 

The director got a sparkly pin stripe mouse with glasses (he made the glasses out of a bobby pin, I sewed them on) and the musical director got a red satin mouse.

Overall everyone was pretty excited about their mice and everyone has promised to take their mice with them on trips and take pictures with them (a la me and Pete). I myself got this:

It’s a cocktail olive. In CATS theirs a play within a play that the cats put on about Growltiger, a pirate, who is betrayed by a woman and made to walk the plank by the Siamese. I played Genghis, the leader of the Siamese. I got a phallic hat and sword that was painted green so that it looked like a cocktail sword (the proportions were all over the place in this show). While I was making George I decided that I should also make a cocktail olive to go on my cocktail sword.  I don’t know if anyone watching the show noticed (I took it off the sword as part of my choreography) but it was there nonetheless.

The olive was made from a fabric Easter egg pattern.  I left a slit open on two sides and inserted a tube to keep the stuffing in (you can't really see the slits, but they kinda make the olive look a little inappropriate) and filled the top in with red felt to make the pimento.