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National Sewing Month: Sewing Costumes for ‘The Help’ (Part 3): Mae Mobley and More

September 8, 2011 by AllFreeSewing

Dear Readers,

It’s National Sewing Month! To celebrate, AllFreeSewing.com is hosting a special blog series throughout the entire month. Check back daily for posts featuring our favorite projects, new sewing videos and tutorials, guest blogs from talented designers and more. We’re also giving away a HUGE sewing prize at the end of the month. You won’t believe how EASY it is to WIN!

Leave a comment on any of the blog posts with the headline “National Sewing Month”. Your comment will count as an entry into the giveaway. You are free to comment as often as once per blog post (for a total of 30 chances to win!). At the end of the month, we’ll pool all of the comments together and pick one lucky winner to win the mystery grand prize. And trust us; you want to win this one!

Whether you’re already a sewing enthusiast or new to the craft, our hope is that this September will encourage you to create wonderful sewn projects.


Here’s today’s post:

Kathleen Farris is a costumer from Memphis, Tennessee who has made costumes for hundreds of theater performances, concerts, ballets, operas, and films over the past two decades. I recently talked to her about her latest work sewing for the film The Help as part of costume designer Sharen Davis’ team. This week, I’ll show you a behind-the-scenes look at her work sewing costumes for several of the characters, including Mae Mobley Leefolt, Celia Foote, and Hilly Holbrook.

 

A copy of The Help signed by author Kathryn
Stockett with a scrap from Mae Mobley’s
dress as a bookmark

Over the past two weeks, I’ve given you an insider’s glance at film costumer Kathleen Farris’ work making costumes for the characters Elaine Stein and Elizabeth Leefolt. This week, I’ll talk about some of her other work for the film, as well as her impressions of working on a film set.

Kathleen sewed and altered the costumes for the character Mae Mobley Leefolt, Elizabeth’s daughter who is raised primarily by Elizabeth’s maid Aibileen. The toddler was played by three-year-old twins Emma and Eleanor “Ella” Henry. Kathleen loved working with them and still speaks of them fondly, calling them “cute little precocious girls.”

Aibileen holding Mae Mobley, who is wearing
a purchased dress that Kathleen
altered for the film

(image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios)

Costume designer Sharen Davis wanted Mae Mobley’s clothes to look as though she is growing out of them throughout the film, so Kathleen made her pajamas and dresses a little bit snug. One of the dresses she sewed for Mae Mobley was made of a pink and green checked fabric with miniature rick-rack.

 
Aibileen with Mae Mobley, who is putting
on one of the green checked dresses
that Kathleen made

(image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios)

Kathleen actually made four copies of this dress because each twin needed two dresses for different scenes. She also sewed chiffon nightgowns and changed purchased children’s clothing for the girls, altering them and making them unique. The final cut of the movie did not include several scenes in which Mae Mobley is shown growing over the course of one year; for those scenes, Kathleen made dresses that suggested the child was aging.

Kathleen also made a skirt for Jessica Chastain’s character, Celia Foote, a woman who is new to Jackson, Miss., and is ostracized by Hilly, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. The pencil skirt, made of pink, blue, and purple wool tweed, is meant to reflect Celia’s bright and ostentatious wardrobe style. In the film, Celia wears it with a purple-maroon sweater and a wide black belt belt when she attempts to bring a pie to one of Hilly’s social events.

 Celia Foote’s pink pencil skirt that
Kathleen made for the movie

In another scene, Celia accidentally tears the sleeve from Hilly’s green dress at a large charity auction. Kathleen was one of the costumers responsible for ensuring that the sleeve ripped properly. First, she lightly stitched the seam and clipped the stitches, which tore just fine in testing, but when it came to actually shooting the scene, the seam would not rip.

For the final scene, they lightly attached the sleeve with spray glue used for scrapbooking. Bryce Dallas Howard had to hold very still so that the seem would not fall apart too soon, and the sound editors had to add a more dramatic ripping noise afterward. The scene required about eight takes to shoot, so the costume team made one dress with twelve different bodices.

 

Hilly’s green dress:
Kathleen helped ensure that the sleeve
tore properly during the auction scene
(image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios)

Overall, Kathleen says working with the costume team was a great experience. “[Sharen Davis] was the glue that held our department together. She was respectful of everyone, and kind and compassionate toward everyone,” Kathleen says. She also enjoyed working with fellow costumer Julie Yrjanson, who made many dresses for Aibileen, played by Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis. Kathleen tells me that the entire cast was pleasant to work with, especially Allison Janney, who played Skeeter’s mother, and Leslie Jordan, who played Skeeter’s editor in Jackson and kept the costume studio entertained while they altered his costumes to make them more characteristic of the 1960s.

 Aibileen and Minnie, two of the film’s leading ladies;
costumer Julie Yrjanson made many of Aibileen’s costumes
(image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios)

Of course, this costume team is highly experienced. Sharen Davis won acclaim as the Costume Designer for the films Ray, Dreamgirls, and The Great Debaters, among others. Kathleen, the stitcher for The Help, has also made and altered costumes for The Notebook, Castaway, and A Painted House, among others. The costumes in The Help are unique because, instead of one overall costume theme, each character has her own unique style and color palette. I, for one, will be surprised and disappointed if Sharen Davis does not win the Academy Award for Best Costumes this coming awards season.

 

Thanks to Sharen Davis’ creative vision, each character in
The Help has a unique style and color palette
(image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios)

What do you think of these costumes? Do you think they will win awards this year? Would you enjoy working on films like Kathleen does? Have you designed or made any clothing based on those in films before?

If you like these costumes, try one of these great vintage sewing patterns from AllFreeSewing.com!

  1. Ruffled Collar Tutorial
  2. Vintage Embellished Bolero
  3. Petticoat Tutorial
  4. Retro Pincushion
  5. Vitnage Sewn Notecard

Filed Under: Sewing Tagged With: costumes, fabric, help, kathleen farris, kathryn stockett, movies, National Sewing Month, Sewing, sharen davis, The Help, vintage clothing patterns, viola davis, wearable crafts

National Sewing Month: Sewing Costumes for ‘The Help’ (Part 2): Elizabeth Leefolt

September 2, 2011 by AllFreeSewing

Dear Readers,

It’s National Sewing Month! To celebrate, AllFreeSewing.com is hosting a special blog series throughout the entire month. Check back daily for posts featuring our favorite projects, new sewing videos and tutorials, guest blogs from talented designers and more. We’re also giving away a HUGE sewing prize at the end of the month. You won’t believe how EASY it is to WIN!

Leave a comment on any of the blog posts with the headline “National Sewing Month”. Your comment will count as an entry into the giveaway. You are free to comment as often as once per blog post (for a total of 30 chances to win!). At the end of the month, we’ll pool all of the comments together and pick one lucky winner to win the mystery grand prize. And trust us; you want to win this one!

Whether you’re already a sewing enthusiast or new to the craft, our hope is that this September will encourage you to create wonderful sewn projects.


Here’s today’s post:

Kathleen Farris is a costumer from Memphis, Tennessee who has made costumes for hundreds of theater performances, concerts, ballets, operas, and films over the past two decades. I recently talked to her about her latest work sewing for the film
The Help as part of costume designer Sharen Davis’ team. This week, I’ll show you a behind-the-scenes look at her work making costumes for the character Elizabeth Leefolt, played by Ahna O’Reilley.

 

Last week, I gave you an insider’s look at Kathleen Farris’ handiwork in The Help making costumes for the character Elaine Stein. Kathleen also made dresses for the character of Elizabeth Leefolt, one of the white residents of Jackson, Mississippi and a childhood friend of Skeeter and Hilly. Elizabeth’s daughter, a little girl named Mae Mobley, has been primarily raised by her black maid, Aibileen, while Elizabeth attends social functions.

In the movie and the book, Elizabeth desperately wants to be included in Jackson’s high class social circle, but she is not wealthy enough to buy the expensive, fashionable dresses of her peers. She compensates by making her own dresses, with limited success.

Kathleen sewed or altered most of Elizabeth’s costumes. In accordance with Elizabeth’s character in the book, Kathleen needed to make everything Elizabeth wore look homemade. The lavender dress pictured below was made using a 1950s Butterick pattern. Kathleen used a shiny, floral polyester and included a raw neckline, unfinished hems, and untrimmed threads hanging out at the seams.

 

Elizabeth’s lavender dress,
hanging in the studio

 


The less-finished version of the dress
in the film (image courtesy of
DreamWorks Studios)

Kathleen actually made two versions of this dress; the one pictured above is less completed than the one in the scene below, during which Elizabeth’s character is attending a bridge party.



The more finished version of the dress
in the film (image courtesy of
DreamWorks Studios)

The following photo shows Kathleen posing with another of Elizabeth’s dresses, a cotton cowl-collar dress with chenille dots and 3/4 pleats. The costume team dyed the fabric blue because white clothing often appears overly bright on camera.

Kathleen posing behind Elizabeth’s
blue dress on a mannequin

Some of Elizabeth’s clothes were pulled from a stock of vintage 1960s clothes ordered from a costume warehouse in Los Angeles. Kathleen altered and embellished many of them to fit Ahna O’Reilley and to complement her performance.

 ~*~

One of our readers, Pam Thompson, posed a couple of questions for Kathleen on last week’s post. Check out Kathleen’s answers below!

Pam: How much research did the costumers do to make the clothes seem authentic to the time period?

Kathleen: The costume designer [Sharen Davis] had a 1962 Montgomery Ward catalog that we referenced for design ideas, and we had a number of vintage patterns from that time period. Some of us were old enough to remember that era, and there are plenty of TV shows from then that we could access on YouTube.

Pam: How much influence did the descriptions from the book have on the choices of costumes (color etc.)?

Kathleen: There was an effort to stay true to the book; however, the costume designer gets hired for her interpretation of the story. For example, the maids’ uniforms are white in the book, but the designer chose gray for the movie. A few of the costumes on screen were actual vintage clothing from that era, so the colors and styles are true to that time.

 ~*~

So, have you seen the movie? What did you think? Which costume was your favorite? Post your questions and comments below, and Kathleen will answer them next week when I write about her work on Mae Mobley’s costumes and her contributions with the rest of the costume team!

In the meantime, look at these amazing vintage clothing patterns from AllFreeSewing.com!

  1. Dirndl Skirt
  2. Bow Belt
  3. Roxanne Retro Headband

Filed Under: Sewing Tagged With: costumes, fabric, help, kathleen farris, kathryn stockett, movies, National Sewing Month, Sewing, sharen davis, The Help, vintage clothing patterns, wearable crafts

Sewing for the Movies: Costumes in ‘The Help’

August 25, 2011 by AllFreeSewing

Kathleen FarrisKathleen Farris is a costumer from Memphis, Tennessee who has created countless costumes for theater productions, concerts, ballets, operas, and films over the past three decades. I recently talked to her about her latest work on the set of the recent film The Help, which was released in August 2011. This week, I’ll show you a behind-the-scenes look at the costumes she made  for the character Elaine Stein, played by Academy Award-winning actress Mary Steenburgen.

Based on the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, The Help  tells the story of three women striving to change the rigid social restrictions and racial discrimination that gripped Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s. On set in Greenwood, Mississippi, Kathleen sewed as part of Academy Award-nominated costume designer Sharen Davis’ creative team, whose primary objective was to create a diverse collection of historically accurate and stylistically unique costumes for Stockett’s distinctive cast of characters.

Image courtesy of DreamWorks Studios

Over three and a half months of filming, Kathleen created, sewed, repaired and altered over 400 costumes for the entire cast. She primarily worked on the costumes for the characters Elaine Stein, Elizabeth Leefolt and Mae Mobley Leefolt.

Kathleen takes particular pride in her work sewing costumes for Elaine Stein, played by Academy Award-winning actress Mary Steenburgen. In the film and the book, Elaine speaks to and publishes a novel for Skeeter, one of the three leading ladies. A female editor working in New York in the 1960s, Elaine is a seasoned professional and a woman before her time.

Professional costumers like Kathleen create costume patterns to match the personality of each character. “Everything [Elaine Stein] wore had to be on the cutting edge of fashion,” Kathleen explains. “She is smart and professional, a woman who would shop in Paris, a woman of high income and title.”

Mary Steenburgen as Elaine Stein

This production photo shows Steenburgen dressed in one of Kathleen’s creations, a checked green business suit made of a tweed-like wool. The design and material for this suit pattern are befitting of a 1960s progressive businesswoman.

Mary Steenburgen as Elaine Stein
Kathleen also made the skirt and finished the blouse for the costume above. The knot of pearls complements the pearly buttons on her blouse, suggesting high status and wealth. The pencil skirt pattern is made of navy blue wool.

Kathleen says her favorite costume she made for the movie was a set of pajamas for Steenburgen’s character, made of a two-ply, buff-colored silk with pink trim. “They were just so completely luxurious,” Kathleen gushes. Steenburgen liked the pajamas so much that she actually kept them after filming ended!

If you see the movie, look for Kathleen in the credits! She’s listed as the Stitcher. Next time, I’ll feature Kathleen’s work sewing costumes for the character of Elizabeth Leefolt, played by Ahna O’Reilley.

What do you think of Kathleen’s artistry? Have you read the book or seen the movie? I will be in touch with Kathleen, so post any comments or questions for her below, and I’ll answer them in the next post.

If you like the dress and skirt pictured above, check out these great vintage sewing patterns from AllFreeSewing.com!

  1. The Pinwheel Skirt
  2. 50’s Headband
  3. Waistband Bow Skirt
  4. Retro Orange Flowered Apron
  5. Vintage Sheet to Maxi Dress

Filed Under: Sewing Tagged With: costumer, costumes, films, kathleen farris, kathryn stockett, mary steenburgen, movies, professional costumer, Sewing, sewing professionally, sharen davis, The Help, theater

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Project of the Day & Giveaway: Eye on the Clock Scrapbook Layout

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