Every year during the spring Bradley Walton, a librarian at HHS, writes and produces a play at this school. This year, he produced “The Coloring Book Play.” For this play, the costumes are very important.

“The play is about appearance, and within the coloring book, it’s… conventional appearance versus unconventional appearance, and so the costumes augment that,” Walton said. “It’s difficult to do a play about appearances unless the characters actually look like something, [and] the costumes do something to convey that appearance you are trying to convey.” Because of how important the costumes are to the show, Walton and his wife, Cara Walton, a history teacher at HHS, have put a great deal of time and effort into them.

“Mr. Walton has been working on them for about two weeks, I’d say he’s put 30, 40 hours into costumes… I’ve spent several evenings and parts of my weekends getting stuff dyed… He took a day off yesterday to actually try to get things finished,” Cara Walton said. There are many factors which have caused the two to dedicate much of their spare time to this project.

“The costumes have been a source of enormous stress in my life,” Bradley Walton said. “We measured everybody in the cast before we ordered costumes, but the t shirts that we ordered… a lot of them were cut insanely small… We had to get more shirts partially because we had to re-dye some things but we also had to buy more shirts because a bunch of the shirts did not fit.” There were even more obstacles after that.

“An additional challenge has been that the shirts that we purchased at Old Navy were not 100 percent cotton… We were hoping that these shirts would be okay, and they took the dye pretty well, but not exactly the same as the cotton clothing… Some of those required additional dyeing because the colors did not turn out as bright the first time around as they did on the 100 percent cotton fabric.” Bradley Walton said

The costumes of the play look like they have been colored by hand, and Cara Walton had to use a special technique to get the look.

“[You] hand dye items using a bottle as opposed to a dye bath so they have kind of an inconsistent look to them.” Cara Walton said.

Even though it has been a long, stressful process for the two, they believe that the costumes were successful.

“It’s too late to change things now!” Cara Walton said, laughing.

Gallery • 2 Photos