Well, that was disappointing. And frustrating.
The last tricksy item for the current show was to come up with yellow rainboots for the character of Tara, a six year old girl. (They seemed to get a bit younger during the rehearsal process; perhaps to be more in touch with the projected age of audiences.)
Now, I hadn’t designed her with yellow rainboots… I try to keep at least one big toe grounded in the reality of what is possible, when designing these shows. I’ve figured out about the shortness of time to pull them off, and I’ve now got a pretty good feel for what is going to be available within how many miles around our area.
Ontario, in winter, NOT in the big city, is probably not the time to look for rainboots. And verily, this was so. I found children’s rainboots. Quite a rainbow of charming children’s rainboots. I found a few pair of remaindered adult rainboots, indeed, even a wonderful yellow pair….in size eleven!!! But primarily, we’re talking snow boots. Skidoo boots. Sorrels. Winter boots.
The only adult sized rainboots were the wellie style. Dang!
The actress tried to help out with some shopping tours after rehearsal, when she got home to Toronto, but no luck.
So, I bought me a pair of nice wellies, and a tin of Krylon Fusion. (I’ve been wanting to try that ever since it was first advertised. I have a couple of projects, where, if it worked as promised, it would be just the thing!)
The instructions said 15 minutes to dry, 1 hour till touchable, and 7 days to imperviability.
Three days later it was still tacky, and came off on everything! And I’d been doing very light airbrush coats, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with gloppiness, so it could dry more efficiently. Just enough to build up a cover of yellow tone.
This wasn’t going to work.
Finally, Friday morning, the day we wanted to run with costumes, we ended up wiping the lot of with varsol. In fact, it took less time to wipe a boot clean than it had taken to lightly spray on a single coat.
Darrell tried running a test with some spray enamel he had, but even with a heat gun blowing at it, it wasn’t going to dry in any kind of useful time.
I discovered I had some leftover paint from Peter Pan that had followed me home in a box, and it was a ‘quick drying enamel’ in cream colour. Yup, sure was fast drying! Managed to take the boots from black to cream in maybe fifteen minutes.
Then I went off looking for a new yellow paint. Found a ‘craft enamel’ spray, and it, too, was fast-drying. Boots looked great.
But…. They’re rubber boots. They flex as you wear them, and put them on and off. And where they flexed, the paint wasn’t flexing at the same rate. So the paint came off in those areas. (Doesn’t help that the actress playing Tara is like a mad thing on stage, running, jumping, hurling herself around….)
So…no boots. And it did look great with the character.
The actress was going to try one more time on their day off before they head up to Sudbury. Or as an alternative, we’d go with little Chinese slippers with some sequined flowers attached… I’m waiting to hear.
Gee, I hope she found some boots.
What’s frustrating is that just a day later I was noticing that some stores were starting to put out some spring stuff…. Gardening tools and trinkets, and the like… With my luck, as soon as the show closes, there will be rainboots everywhere! No Krylon needed!
