The opening night of a drama course production in 1980

People are always asking me when I first started to sew and become interested in sewing. I always want to tell them that it was on my grandmother’s knee and that I was pretty much born with a needle in my hand. The truth, however, is no where near as romantic as that.

The fact is that the whole thing was a bit of an accident. I was 17 years old and on a residential drama course in Anglesey. The course was six weeks long and at the end we were to stage a production in the Gateway Theatre in Chester. The play was Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun about the conquest of Peru. The only parts left in the play for people like me involved wearing a loin cloth and little else. There was no way I was going to be wandering around a stage pretty much naked so I thought I would volunteer to work on the costumes instead.

I thought this would be an easy cop out and I intended to do just to enough not to get chucked off the course but oh, how I loved it! I found the creativity inspiring and loved to see how a picture on the wall would come alive with the help of a sewing machine. I had no experience in sewing so to begin with they only let me loose on straight lines and simple garments, but I soon got the hang of it.

Looking back on that now, I can now see that the seed had been planted in me but my 17 year old self was impervious to the potential and after the course I finished my A Levels and then went on to do a degree at English and Drama at Bretton Hall College, Yorkshire. So it wasn’t until three years later I finally decided to follow up on what I had learned in Anglesey and apply to Wimbledon School of Art.

The reason I chose Wimbledon was because our costume tutor in Anglesey, Anne, had trained there. She was a huge inspiration to me and I thought that if it was good enough for her it was definitely going to be good enough for me. The course was called Costume Interpretation and basically included everything you needed to know about costume design including wig making, millinery, period pattern cutting (anything from cave men to modern day), dyeing, printing, corsetry and more!

We really did learn everything we needed to go into theatre, tv or film and as the course drew to a close people were getting offered jobs on Cats and similar west end productions. My next move would not be quite so glamourous (yet) motivated more by the offer of relocation money I did find myself in the west end but not of London of Britain!

More on my first adventures at Theatr Clwyd Mold and the world of costume design coming soon…

Graduating from Wimbledon School of Art in 1983

First Stitches

Regional Theatre Years