A plague on our house

I started working for Sonora Theatre Works this week. It’s a little company (a block from my house! Who knew?) that builds set pieces, props and all manner of fabric things – stage curtains, back drops, hand held pieces etc. They brought me in this week to help with a huge order of 6 black stage curtains – 12’ x 15’ – that need to get built this week.

Unlike most shops where everyone works on separate projects within the same space, in this shop we all work together on one thing. The curtains are too big and heavy to maneuver them by yourself, so while one person sews, another person is feeding the fabric to them and making sure it doesn’t fall on the floor, and yet another person is “catching” the fabric as it comes out of the machine and feeding it back to the table, taking out pins, checking for flaws and problems etc. It’s been really fun and collaborative, things I don’t usually say about a costume shop.

But yesterday we ran out of fabric for the stage curtains and had to order more on a rush that won’t get here until tomorrow. So today we moved on to another project. I don’t know what happened but somehow we went from a smooth easy week where everything was getting done to a day where everything went wrong.

This project is out of sky blue polyester so it’s imperative that it not fall on the floor. No one remembers it falling on the floor, but it’s composed of 2 panels, each 40 feet long and somehow on one of the multiple times we were lugging the 50 pounds of fabric from one side of the table to another, we noticed a dirty mark along the edge. And then another. And another! This is bad. The fabric can’t be washed or spot cleaned because of water marks, so if the dirt can’t be brushed off we have to be able to cut it off or hide it. Gina, the owner, calmly said “someone put a tag on that side and we’ll make that the hem.”

Good solution. So we pin the two panels together and start stitching and the machine keeps jamming and jamming and jamming. Thread snarls, broken threads, weird tension issues, etc. Finally we are 3 feet from the end of this 40 foot long seam and I see a big flaw in the fabric (where the threads got twisted or jammed in the weaving), which is unacceptable in this curtain. Somehow the 4 of us walked past this flaw numerous times, pinned it and didn’t notice it. So now we have to take out that long seam, reverse the panels to put the flaw at the top where it will get cut off, repin and restitch that long seam. Usually seam ripping goes quickly by clipping the thread every 6 inches on one side and just pulling it out of the other side of the seam, but the way the machine was jamming the threads are somehow twisted together and each stitch has to be taken out individually, for 40 feet. Forty!

Sigh.

This is where Bianca starts talking about the plagues of Egypt. She had just been to her first Seder dinner with her boyfriend that week and we had talked about Passover and the Jews fleeing Egypt. So as she grimly rips out each stitch she starts muttering “Locusts. I’m expecting locusts at any minute…” To this Jess, a cute little hippie with a tendency to slip into her own world, looks up, snaps out of her reverie and says “I’m thinking about getting a digital camera…” The laughter at that point was very helpful. And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that she’s blond.

We finally get the seam together, Gina stitches it and as we’re laying out the panels she says “So the dirty part is on the bottom and the flaw is on the top…” And then she just lays her head down on the table and says “I can’t believe that sentence just came out of my mouth. Locusts, indeed!”

Finally we finish the hem and are laying the stabilizing webbing at the top, webbing we’ve carefully measured, cut and marked to fit the curtain exactly, only it doesn’t. The curtain is too wide by about 6 inches. We measure from each end and from the middle and it doesn’t fit. So we abandon it, get the unmarked roll of extra webbing to recut this piece, lay it out and it’s also too short. Argh! So we go back to the marked webbing, lay it down, and for some reason now it fits.

We all look at each other and Bianca says:

Yep, you know.

“Locusts.”