Softgoods & Stage Design: What we've been up to

It’s been a while since we shared an actual project, and since it’s tour prep season, and this one in particular required some tricky math, I figured I’d share.

Exhibit A. A vector we were sent, of a 20’ wide round truss that needs a ‘sock’ of sorts to wrap around it, leaving the middle of the circle empty.

Exhibit B. Our plan.

Exhibit C. Christen gets to work at chalking the world’s saddest looking rainbow, aka each of the four pieces, which will overlap one another (with velcro for easy load-in) and come together to make a circle. We had zero math issues finding the inside of each arc including seam allowance…. none whatsoever. I promise.

JK, I sat with a math indiscrepancy for about 20 minutes, not understanding why the interior arc was way longer than the exterior one. Turns out you have to chart your circumference using the diameter of the circle with seam allowance, rather than finding your finished product diameter and simply adding an inch of seam allowance. When you think about, of course it wouldn’t work the other way around, huh!?

I redid the math based on a 8’11” radius, not a 9’ radius, which made about a 7” difference in arc length and then we were off to the (chalking) races. It’s crazy what an inch will do to your sanity.

Once we had our arcs and our interior rectangle, we chalked and cut straps that will be sewn to the outside edge of the arc, wrapped around the backside of the truss, and velcro’d to the backside of the circle interior.

By separating the circle into 4 workable pieces with a 2 inch overlap, we allow ease… What no one thinks about is, if you’re cutting any type of arc out of fabric, part of that arc is going to be on the bias (a 45-degree angle halfway between horizontal and vertical) which means, it’ll have more stretch than the rest. Seams reinforce the circle’s structure and make it stagehand-proof.

We cut it into 8 pieces… 4 for the arc itself and then 4 rectangles to fit into the inner ring of the truss.

We then added velcro straps to the outside edge every 1.5 feet and female velcro to the interior rectangle, which was one inch wider than the actual truss (12”) so that extra inch would wrap around the backside upstage facing side of the truss, and the straps would reach around the back and stick to it.

We’re really glad we could help out the band, and glad it made it to the Apollo in time for load in.