& Eva

The invite-only, secret larp project &Eva was held last weekend in a small cabin near Hilversum. Polomeus was the evil mastermind: he'd found the manuscript and was very intrigued by the idea of a female-only larp. He contacted Anastaszia, Nina and myself to help him organise the event.
We came up with a shortlist of players, all women, and invited them. The event would be full of emotion, intrigue and intense scenes. But above all: there was no way of solving the puzzle of Women Only: all men had died and this situation would not be solved this weekend. Instead, the event mostly focused on finding suitable mothers for a ground-breaking government program to create a new generation. The roles were divided among our players, each telling us their preference and, to our great astonishment, hardly any duplicate favorites were mentioned. The roles just came together quite beautifully for the women we invited.

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The original name of the manuscript of this larp is "Mad About the Boy", written by Tor Kjetil Edland, Margrete Raaum and Trine Lise Lindahl. The manuscript can be found easily through Google.
This is also reason why our adaptation was titled "&Eva": to make sure the Big Reveal of Isak would be a big surprise for the participants.

A very moving documentary by the participants of the original event can be found on YouTube. I heard DocInge is still going to make her own documentary using footage from last weekend, but this will take her a while, no doubt.

The scene where Isak is introduced I had captured on camera and has been transcribed here as best I could. The video footage from my (SLR) camera will also be available for DocInge to use in her documentary. The photos I took can be found on Flickr.

As I mentioned before, the game was very intense and I can only hope that some of the things that happened, are not things we as people would normally do in such situations. As a game, it was certainly very interesting to see the intense scenes unfold. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. &Eva was quite unique, a lot of fun, and very, very intense.

Drape & Pattern Exam preparations

Last night I was still dead tired from &Eva but I dragged myself to school anyway. It wasn't wholly in vain despite my lack of enthusiasm because we learned something I'd wanted to learn for a while: patterns with a drape.

I had read in Detje Bosgra's book (thank you again, anemoona!) that you can fold out your darts to create a drape in your pattern, but I'd never done this before. I was very interested to lear it, but had not yet taken the time. When Hanny said last night "we'll work on an asymmetrical pattern" it caught my interest to be sure, but I'd never expected that it would include draping.

The trick to it is in part that you're allowed to move the bust point a bit. Normally this is no more than 2 cm, but when making a drape or pleated bit it can move as much as four centimeters, because the garment will not be as fitted as other garments might be. On the right half of the pattern, we created two bust points, even. One was 4 cm above the old bust point and allowed us to rotate the top dart closed so the first drape would open up. The other one was 4 cm below the old bust point and allowed us to rotate the bottom dart closed so the second drape would open up.
It sounds pretty complicated, and it is. When we had drawn all the design lines into the pattern, I had no idea how to make the pattern pieces from it, but once we got started I got the gist of it pretty soon. It certainly opens up possibilities and I haven't forgotten my promise to myself about that drape-y heavy linen at the market.

Hanny also warned us. It's seven weeks until the exam, and we're going to be working towards the exam from now on. We've pretty much covered all the basic pattern making so far, so it's just repetition, new interpretations of new line drawings of different garments and exercising to keep focus. We're supposed to make 2 pieces of homework now, each week. One coat and one gown at half scale. And we're going to be working through them every week, so we understand why certain things are done a certain way. She will only be looking at the collars and the basic block, and the rest will be discussed in the lessons.
It's a pretty rigid schedule, but it's all for the best. The exam is going to take most of the day on April 20th, and we need to be able to keep our focus.

Dress diary of a Fitted English Gown - part 2½

After the many comments I got on Part 2 of this dress diary I decided to try everything on again. The waistline seemed too wide, which caused the gown to bulge unflatteringly in stead of following the contours of my body.

Truth is: I have a modernist view of fit & ease, and as such I thought I could get away with a modern fit. You all have shown me the error of my ways.

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