The blog's been quiet but I've been busy! Last month's first excitement was Ghosthunter at the Old Red Lion. The brief was to create a pared down, very naturalistic set on a very low budget.

The carpet was a complete stroke of luck - I found it on the street, covered in dust in a pile of rubbish. Manhandling it into a bin bag and lugging it home on the bus was maybe not my most glamorous design-related moment, but it was worth it to have an authentic pub carpet, complete with cigarette burns and stains.

The costume needed a bit of ingenuity - the individual items are really expensive to buy, and since the show's going on tour hiring didn't make sense. The coat I thought should be an Inverness coat - text specified full Victorian dress, so a full-on cape wouldn't be right, but Inverness coats were popular throughout the Victorian era, and had a half-length cape attached front and back.

You can see an example top right - there's a wrist-length cape over the coat designed to add an extra layer of warmth, which is maybe why they were favoured by coach and cab drivers well into Edwardian times, as familiar from costume dramas. My version was a charity shop coat, supplemented with a cape made from bought wool fabric, with black braid and silver buttons sewn on.

The waistcoat needed a bit of trickery too - its surprisingly hard to come by vintage examples in dark red brocade, and I wanted it to tone with the carpet. I picked up this waistcoat for cheap, dyed it red, and replaced the buttons with silver ones to match the coat.

You can also see the toilet door signs I put on the doors onto doors to the dressing rooms, for a bit of pubby realism. Then finally, this was a lot of fun; I got to go wild copying the flyer art with chalk pens for the corridor on the way in.