The Fool's Cap

In the summer of 2023, I had the pleasure of working in the costume shop at Santa Cruz Shakespeare. One of the shows that season was King Lear, and the costume designer, B Modern, asked me to create the fool's cap for the fool, played by Sophia Metcalf. 

Using Sophia's measurements and an image provided by B, I drafted the pattern for the cap and created it using fabric from upcycled fabric- some of B's old turtlenecks!

The cap originally was going to be a cowl made from a sweatshirt, but we changed the design to the jester cap, so I adapted the work I had put into the sweatshirt cowl into the jester cap.

The harlequin diamonds were hand stitched over the course of two days, and were then cut into the pattern pieces for the hat.

I also altered their multi colored jacket- removing the collar from the original piece, and using a second jacket to create the extended  panel at the bottom.

Featuring Sophia Metcalf as the Fool and Paul Whitworth as King Lear. 

Photos by Kevin Lohman, Shmuel Thaler, and RR Jones.

The Cowl

With B's design, I started constructing the cowl. An orange sweatshirt was the base, and I added on diamonds in 5 different colors. Because the hood was double layered, I had to hand-sew the diamonds onto it, which took two full work days of hand stitching. 

Once the cowl was fully constructed, it went off to rehrearsal. However, the director wanted to pare down, so I used the cowl and the remaining pieces of t-shirt and created the jester's cap from an image provided by B and Sophia's measurements.