It had to be done. We’ve known it for ages.  Our costume storage has been a disorganised mess for the past four years – random bins with random items, the occasional garbage bag of items, mismatched, mislabelled, and in far too many cases, filled with useless items we’ll never use again.  It was well and away time to go through it and get it together.

Eight intrepid RTC’ers got ready to do the dirty job today.  Denise, our Costume Director, who had got the job well underway by washing and sorting all the costumes we’d used over the past year into appropriate bins, kicked us off.  She had a ton of things at her house ready to bring back!

I had just brought a van full of things from RTC “HQ” over to the costume storage last week, to get sorted and organised.

And we had our storage space packed to the gills to go through.

Fortunately, today we had a big room we could use to bring EVERYTHING into and start evaluating every single item we had.

Next, Denise got us all to pull everything from every box and bag that might hold potential for our upcoming season and put it in the centre of the room.  The next job was sorting things into “donate,” “trash,” and bins by different plays, and by different periods, for male and female costumes.  And of course, the “animal” and fantasy bins – we have fairy tale bins, and Peter Pan bins, and the “weaponry” group (we have an astonishing number of wooden weapons!).  We were at it from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and it is DONE.  We had at least eight bags of trash, six bags that went to Value Village, and everything, EVERYTHING else is sorted into properly labelled containers.  One whole area is divided up into the three plays we’re doing this year, so that every single thing we need for next year is in one spot.

It was AMAZING.

HUGE, HUGE thanks to Denise Duckett, Denise LeBlanc, Katina Vido, Sabin Visan, Meredith Garswood, Nicole David and Julian David for coming out today!

Next job – our storage unit where we have all our prop and set pieces.  (And yes, I’m afraid a few costume pieces have snuck their way into that unit as well, but it’ll be easier to get them properly stowed now that everything is set up so nicely.

Phew!  One huge job done.